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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

For Jennifer Beals these days, the ‘L’ word is longevity


Jennifer Beals
 (The Spokesman-Review)
Frazier Moore Associated Press

Ask Jennifer Beals what she’s learned playing a gay gal on “The L Word,” Showtime’s sexy melodrama about lesbian life in L.A., and she sizes up the human condition: “There are more similarities among us than differences.”

Back for its second season starting tonight at 10, the series finds Beals’ character, Bette, in a real stew.

This season Bette will face fearsome funding problems at the art museum she runs. Worse, it looks like her relationship with Tina (Laurel Holloman), her longtime partner now pregnant with the child they had dreamed of parenting, is on the rocks.

“What a brutal year! It’s awful!” Beals chuckles. “There’s this moment in the eighth episode where Bette has one little moment of victory and joy. I burst into tears when I read it: ‘Something good happens to Bette, everyone!’ I was so excited.”

At 41, Beals appears barely older than she did as the welder/would-be ballerina in 1983’s “Flashdance.”

She says she originally came to “The L Word” far less focused on playing a lesbian than on the challenge of depicting an art museum boss.

A lesbian relationship “is about love and it’s about attraction,” Beals reasons. “I understood love and attraction. I didn’t know anything about art.

“I’m always shocked that gay marriage is such a big deal,” she adds. “You have to realize how precious human life is, when there are tsunamis and mudslides, when there are armies and terrorists – at any moment, you could be gone, and potentially in the most brutal fashion.

“And then you have to realize that love is truly one of the most extraordinary things you can experience in your life. To begrudge someone else their love of another person because of gender seems to me absolutely absurd.”

Beals, herself of mixed-race parentage, requested that the show’s creators make Bette biracial. That gave the series another useful twist, allowing Kit, a straight friend played by Pam Grier (“Foxy Brown”), to become Bette’s half-sister.

“A biracial character is something I would have liked to have seen on TV when I was a child,” Beals says.

Since she took a break from Yale to film “Flashdance,” Beals has logged dozens of films. Among those for which she feels special pride: “Devil in a Blue Dress,” “Roger Dodger,” “Twilight of the Golds” (a 1996 Showtime movie) and “In the Soup,” a 1992 independent feature.

Also “Flashdance,” which she made, then – refusing to bank on its success – followed up by heading back to Yale.

“I never wanted to be a superstar,” says Beals, flinching. “My heart just did an ‘uhhhhhhhhhh’ at the thought of it.”

She’s happy with her career, she says, “and I hope I’ll be acting till the day I die. It’s something you can never finish, never get to the center of.”

The birthday bunch

Director Robert Altman is 80. Actor Sidney Poitier is 78. Singer Nancy Wilson is 68. Actress Sandy Duncan is 59. Actor Peter Strauss is 58. Actor Anthony Stewart Head (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) is 51. Actor French Stewart (“Third Rock From the Sun”) is 41. Model Cindy Crawford is 39. Actor Andrew Shue (“Melrose Place”) is 38. Actress Lauren Ambrose (“Six Feet Under”) is 27. Actor Jay Hernandez (“Crazy/Beautiful”) is 27. Actress Majandra Delfino (“Roswell”) is 24.