Bess Armstrong

Sometimes, people I’ve known about for years turn out, on further investigation, to have had astounding careers. Even the briefest examination of their career reveals an impressive array of former costars. Okay, sure, Bess Armstrong’s picture on her Wikipedia page is almost as old as I am, from the short-lived CBS sitcom On Our Own—but her costar in it was the original Emma Goldman in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, and a regular on the show was Delta Burke. And that’s even before we get into what she’s doing on the schedule in the first place, much less the entire rest of her career.

Her career had started Off-Off Broadway just two years earlier. No, that wasn’t exactly hurtling toward stardom, given that On Our Own only lasted a season, but it was a solid career, anyway. Armstrong has done a lot of made-for-TV movies, but she’s done a lot of made-for-TV movies that turn out to have absolutely bonkers casts. Her first, Getting Married, costarred Richard Thomas just as his John Boy era was wrapping up but also featured Fabian, Mark Harmon, Mark Lenard, Katherine Helmond, and more. Granted it’s not exactly shocking when a Love Boat episode features people you’ve heard of, but alphabetical billing of guest stars puts her above Sonny Bono on hers.

Of course, I would be remiss, though she might thank me, if I didn’t bring up Jaws 3. Or, if you’d rather, Jaws 3-D. Which adds Dennis Quaid, Louis Gossett Jr., and Lea Thompson. And, of course, Bruce the Shark. It’s kind of amazing. You click on a random project of hers, and it turns out to feature, say, Ossie Davis and Gilbert Gottfried. She was nominated for a Saturn Award for a Tom Selleck movie I’ve never heard of. Which also featured Wilford Brimley and BRIAN BLESSED! It’s not terribly surprising at this point that she’s also done a couple of John Waters films.

And, yes, let us talk about Patty Chase. As established, the show developed room for her because Claire Danes was so young that she was limited as to how much time she was allowed to spend on camera. But it became one of the show’s greatest strengths. Patty was a rich, complicated character. She was adopted by parents who, reading between the lines, never really seemed to love her the way children deserved to be loved. Her husband was inclined to stray. She was handling her daughter’s adolescence, with another on the way to it. She had a heart large enough to overcome her fear and support the friends of her daughter that she was not initially inclined to trust. She’s a wonderful character, and Armstrong is wonderful in the role.

She is also one of twenty-five people whose stories were published in a book called The Choices We Made: Twenty-Five Men and Women Speak Out About Abortion. Armstrong had not had one; if she ever has, I don’t know. What she did have was a daughter born with severe disabilities who died at the age of five-and-a-half months, gasping for breath in her mother’s arms. The book is out of print, but it is available on the Internet Archive, where you can read Armstrong’s insistence that she should have the right to make a choice if a subsequent pregnancy would have the same result. She doesn’t know, she says, how she would choose, but the choice should be hers. It is her tribute to her beloved Lucy.