Bergen Tries New Character For TV Movie

Mary Horton is a fortysomething widow with a gentle heart. She works in the local animal shelter and runs a bookstore.

Looking to have some landscape work done, she hires Tim Melville, a handsome, sweet-natured gardener who is mentally slow. When she notices he has trouble reading her list of instructions, she realizes perhaps he can’t read, and sets about teaching him.

In the process, he grows attached to her - particularly after the sudden death of his mother - and a rather unusual relationship develops between them.

It is Mary’s friend Forbsie who gets one of the story’s key lines: “I wish I’d let my gut navigate my life’s journey, more than all the ‘shoulds’ I heard from everyone around me,” she says.

Candice Bergen and newcomer Thomas McCarthy star in “Mary & Tim” (tonight at 9 on CBS), based on Colleen McCullough’s first novel. The story became an Australian film, “Tim,” in 1979, starring Piper Laurie and Mel Gibson.

To play Mary, Bergen said she had to struggle to put aside assertive television newswoman Murphy Brown, the flinty character she has played for more than eight years, and for which she won five Emmy Awards, two Golden Globes and three People’s Choice Awards.

“I was really nervous,” she said. “It took a lot just to avoid slipping into the volume of Murphy. I was restraining myself at first. It took me a few days.”

And, she worried if she and director Glenn Jordan did not find the right actor, the movie would lose its credibility.

“I read with a few men, and I started to get really nervous and I got a knot in my stomach. I knew it depended on the guy, to be played with the right tone so that it’s believable and touching and not offensive and not smarmy. “And then Tom came, and he had barely started speaking when I said, ‘Bingo!’ He brought such innocence, such a sense of lightness and humor, and he’s so touching and so natural; I just knew immediately.”

McCarthy, in his television debut as Tim, studied at Yale School of Drama and appeared in plays at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab in New York.

Bergen said “Mary & Tim” is the only movie project she has accepted since she started doing “Murphy Brown.”

“The things that predominantly women like to watch on these TV movies-of-the-week are so appalling and so abysmal - women with heart conditions, women with cancer, one life threat after another. This was so unlike anything I’ve seen on television. It’s a difficult, very delicate piece, so odd, so quirky and so touching; a very tricky piece. Glenn found a tone way beyond what I expected.”

That Mary Horton is a widow is a change from McCullough’s novel (her heroine had never been married), and one that Bergen - whose husband, film director Louis Malle, died last year - found “had more of a resonance than I had bargained for.”

Despite her awards, Bergen is tired of being newscaster Brown, and wants out.

“I’ve been in every scene for nine years now, and I’ve sort of hit the wall,” she said. “My daughter is 10, almost 11, and really I haven’t had a chance to do nothing and take in a lot of what’s going on in my life. I’d like to maybe not work for a while.”

But she wouldn’t rule out films.