Stardom Is Still Alien Territory

Winning the Emmy as best supporting actress in a comedy series is more thrilling than snaring your league bowling trophy. But it doesn’t ensure that you won’t end up as “the Horshack of the ‘90s.”

Tall, blond and now forever enshrined in the TV record books, Kristen Johnston is most comfortable throwing her long legs over the arm of a chair and making fun of herself. A few weeks after walking on stage at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, mouth agape, to collect her Emmy, the 6-foot co-star of NBC’s hit sitcom “3rd Rock From the Sun” still pinches herself and gasps, “Wow.”

And then she wonders whatever happened to the actor (Ron Palillo) who played the dorky classmate of John Travolta’s Vinnie Barbarino in the ‘70s sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter.”

“Certainly the Emmy makes for a nice conversation piece to meet studio heads and stuff, but in terms of actual rewards or opportunities, how many best supporting actresses can you actually name?” said Johnston, who plays one of the show’s four extraterrestrials inhabiting human form, a former military warrior now trapped in the body of a voluptuous woman.

“It’s a nice thing, but I’m not running around going, ‘Oh, my life is so set and I’m now going to be handed all the parts that Sharon Stone doesn’t want to do.’ ”

Those who work with her every day, however, are far less reluctant to brag on her behalf.

“There are so few people who can do what she can do: handle the entire spectrum, from ridiculously wacky to very contained and sincere, and turn from one to the other on a dime,” said John Lithgow, who, as ultra-emotive high commander of the show’s alien brood, has grabbed his own Emmys the last two years.

“She has a fantastic sense of humor and she’s also beautiful to look at,” he said. “You’d be hard pressed to name 10 actresses in the 20th century who have that particular combination. Lucille Ball, Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn. It’s so rare. People who have that wild, spin-out sense of humor but can turn right around and be completely naturalistic and are incredibly attractive. Kristen just has it.”

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Terry Turner, who along with his wife, Bonnie Turner, created and executive-produces “3rd Rock,” listed another group of luminaries that Johnston stacks up against, the tough, sexy dames from the ‘40s and ‘50s: Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, Lizabeth Scott and Barbara Stanwyck.

“The reason people like Kristen is she can toe the line between this assertive, aggressive, traditionally masculine attitude but at no point turn anyone off of her as a sexual and very feminine woman,” he said. “One of the things that separates her from most people on television is that she is an actor, as opposed to most people who are either a comedian or a model.”

Johnston insists that the only reason she won the Emmy over “Seinfeld’s” Julia Louis-Dreyfus, “Cybill’s” Christine Baranski, Janeane Garofalo of “The Larry Sanders Show” and Lisa Kudrow of “Friends” is that her character--part military killing machine, part sex goddess--is so distinctive and bizarre.

“It’s just a character that I don’t think anyone has seen for a long, long time,” Johnston said. “Everything is so exaggerated, and I have to embrace the maleness of her and then go back right away to this really, really girly side. And she literally is a drag queen.

“When she dresses sexy, she has no idea what her impact is on others. It’s this great combination of innocence and her absolutely knowing the truth and how to take action in all situations that make her so much fun to do and I think fun to watch.”

Accolades aside, the part has been heaven for Johnston, who believed that her size--she’d tower over many leading men--and smoky voice would never allow her to become a Hollywood-style ingenue-star.

“I thought maybe I’d be one of those actresses who in their late 30s and 40s could play the dry, sort of gin-soaked broad, and that would be my career track,” Johnston said. “So the fact that I just turned 30 and I’ve been able to find something like this, it’s just incredible.”

Johnston grew up in Milwaukee, gawky, a misfit, more comfortable on year-abroad programs in Cali, Colombia, and Sweden than back in her hometown. She knew as a grade-school student that she would become an actress because it was the only thing at which she excelled. But she kept it her “dark, dirty secret” from everyone, she said, until she told her parents she was applying to college at NYU to study acting.

She graduated and started working as a waitress. And getting fat and depressed because she could not even land a nonpaying theater job. After five years of failure, she finally found work in a series of off-Broadway shows with David Mamet’s Atlantic Theater Company, eventually making her mark in a Lincoln Center production of “the lights.”

The New York stage was her life, but all the cash, she found out, lives on makeshift sound stages in Studio City.

So she moved to Los Angeles and read dozens of what she called “lame, terrible, really humiliating” sitcom scripts, and then one afternoon on her porch, while poring through a stack of scripts, stumbled upon “3rd Rock.” Screaming with laughter, she vowed to get the part. No one, she said, could do Sally Solomon the way she could. And then they made her audition at least nine times.

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“She was the second actress who came in to read with me as Sally, and I knew immediately she was it,” Lithgow said. “But I must have read with 30 more actresses after that, because there was pressure from the network to find a star for that part--because I couldn’t, they didn’t think, carry a show alone.

“So I kept reading with other people, and I would say, ‘Why are we still at this? We hit on Kristen in the first 10 minutes. She’s our Sally. Of course we want that character to be a star, but let’s have it be our star.’ That was what was so wonderful about her winning the Emmy. She was our star.”

Eventually, the Turners added a human female foil who wasn’t in their original script and cast Jane Curtain, a well-known actress whose hiring opened the spaceship hatch for Johnston.

But whether the role, the recognition and the Emmy will open doors for her into meaty movie parts is far from certain. Although George Clooney went off to star in “The Peacemaker,” and “Friends’ ” Jennifer Aniston scored the lead in the romantic comedy “Picture Perfect,” Johnston for her last summer hiatus was offered roles either as a butch lesbian or a space alien. She turned them all down, went to New York and performed on stage as an evil, unsympathetic, sobbing mother in “Baby Anger.”

“I have no idea if the Emmy will get me better roles next hiatus,” Johnston said. “I don’t know if suddenly now they’ll be willing to take a shot at me doing something really different. Obviously there is a height thing. There’s a voice thing. I’m not going to be the young darling. I’m not going to play Laura in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ or the mousy librarian any time soon. Those leading lady roles may not come my way, but seeing what’s out there anyway, that’s fine. There are a handful of people, and they get those roles every time.

“But there is a world where Joan Cusak and Janeane Garofalo and, hopefully some day, me get interesting parts, varied parts, character parts that are fun to play and sort of set you apart from the pack. That’s really what I’m hoping for.”

* “3rd Rock From the Sun” airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on NBC (Channel 4), although it is preempted tonight by the World Series.