Taking Wing
Once too tall for Hollywood, Allison Janney now flies high on ‘The West Wing’
Each morning, as Allison Janney drives from her L.A. apartment to The West Wing's set, she passes a notice on her street that warns "No Access to the Hollywood Sign." Janney might have once regarded the sign as a bad omen, a warning that she would never be allowed to climb the showbiz ladder. "Years ago, one casting agent told me that the only roles I could play were lesbians and aliens," says Janney, whose 6-ft. frame was rarely, if ever, an asset. "When I said that Sigourney Weaver was tall, [the agent] replied, 'Well, she is drop-dead gorgeous.' I could feel the tears brimming in my eyes."
That was then. Now, as feisty White House Press Secretary C.J. Cregg on the NBC White House drama The West Wing,Janney, 40, is finally able to stand tall in her size 11 pumps. "It's hard to find someone that funny, that sexy, that skilled who has those chops," says West Wingcostar Bradley Whitford, who plays deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman. "She never hits a false note."
She did hit one terrible, completely unfunny obstacle along the way. As Janney was dancing outdoors at a Dayton house party in 1977, someone accidentally stepped on the back of her strapless white gown and it began to slip down. "I grabbed it and made a dash for the house," she recalls. Sprinting with her head down, she crashed through a sliding glass door she thought was open, cutting tendons and arteries on the broken shards. "I saw this small cut on my finger, so I turned around and said, 'I'm fine, it's just a cut,'" she says. "Then I looked down and saw that my leg was spouting blood. It was just like a horror film."
After losing more than half of her blood and spending eight weeks in the hospital, Janney pulled through. Twenty-three years later, the accident still resonates. "Whenever I'm onstage and I need to be vulnerable, I touch the scar on my leg," she says, lifting up her right jean leg and running her fingers over a patch of discolored skin. "There's a lot of trauma here. I use that."
Resilience has long been her ally. As a 6-year-old growing up in Dayton, Janney was determined to succeed as a figure skater. "She kept falling down, and I told her, 'We could go home and try it again some other day,'" says Janney's mother, Macy, 65, a homemaker who has been married to Jervis Janney, 65, president of a real estate firm, for 43 years. (Allison's siblings include Jay, 41, a professional bass player, and Hal, 38, a freelance computer programmer.) "She said no, gritted her teeth and persevered." By age 13, Allison was having Olympic dreams.
Any hope of that ended with her accident. But when Janney enrolled at Ohio's Kenyon College in 1978, she auditioned for a play directed by alum Paul Newman -- and stumbled on a new dream. "We had five minutes to talk about anything we wanted," she says. "I talked about how quickly I drove, to impress him." The racing enthusiast gave her a part, and Janney also impressed Newman's wife, Joanne Woodward, who directed her in Off-Off-Broadway plays during the '80s. Woodward, a huge fan, calls Janney "one of the great talents of her generation.
After a lengthy dry spell in which she supported herself waitressing and scooping ice cream in New York City, Janney began accumulating raves both on Broadway, with a Tony-nominated role in 1998's A View from the Bridge, and in Hollywood, with memorable roles in Big Night, Primary Colors and American Beauty(she played the benumbed wife of the redneck ex-Marine). "When Allison fell down the stairs in Primary Colors, she really captured my heart,"says West Wing creator and executive producer Aaron Sorkin, who hired her for his hit show in February 1999. "There's nothing she's not great at."
Nothing, that is, except mustering up the courage to walk down the aisle. Janney's boyfriend of six years, computer programmer Dennis Gagomiros, 48, still lives in New York City, and as far as marriage goes, "we're in negotiations," she says. "I'm afraid of commitment, and so is Dennis." She's much more at ease with her long-awaited good fortune. "You know what I love about having success as you get older?" she says. "You appreciate it so much! It means so much more to me than to a kid who gets it right away." If you want perspective, she says, "give me a group of actors who got success later in life any day."
People Magazine - April 3, 2000