Markie Post is the first to admit she was a producer “in name only” of “Beyond Suspicion,” the movie that airs at 8 p.m. Monday on NBC-Ch. 5.
But the “Hearts Afire” star says she insisted on the producer’s credit because of the changes she wanted to make in the way her character was portrayed in the original script, taken from the reality-based Susan Bukos novel “Appointment for Murder.”
“What you see now is a woman going from very flawed and ordinary to someone capable of doing something very brave and extraordinary,” says Post, 43. “The way it was originally written, my character, Joyce Benderman, was too capable all the way through. If we’d left it that way, there wouldn’t be any point to the movie. The change is both truer to life and better drama.”
There are no such script problems with “Hearts Afire,” the CBS-Ch. 2 sitcom in which she plays a journalist who worked for awhile in a senator’s Washington office before she and co-star John Ritter took over a small newspaper in rural Missouri.
“There’s nothing more instantly gratifying than the kind of laughs you get when you’re doing Linda Bloodworth-Thomason’s words,” Post says with a smile.
She’s also more comfortable playing Georgie Anne Lahti in “Hearts Afire” than she ever could be as Joyce, whose real-life counterpart is now hidden away in a federal witness-protection program after fingering her multiple-murderer husband.
“Joyce is just not like anyone I know,” Post says. “She defined herself completely by the man she was with. As long as she could live in a nice house and get her nails done every week, she felt like she was doing just great.”
Georgie Anne, brash and outspoken, also doesn’t reflect the real-life Markie, daughter of a nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco, but she comes a bunch closer.
“It’s so much fun to play Georgie Anne because she has absolutely no stress about repressing things,” Post says. “And she’s self-possessed. I wasn’t always. I defined myself by the men I was with. I can remember when I was courted by a celebrity while I was in my 20s, I was thinking, `Wow, I’ve arrived!’
“But now I know I really arrived when I stopped thinking like that.”
Post actually arrived soon after she impulsively quit her job as a quiz-show researcher and decided to risk a try at acting, even though she had no job offers in hand.
“I quit cold,” she recalls, 15 years later. “Something just told me it was time.”
Within two weeks she was working on a series pilot and soon started work as a regular on “Simon and Simon.” Lengthy gigs followed on “Fall Guy,” “The Gangster Chronicles,” “Night Court” and then “Hearts Afire.”
Post was similarly impulsive about having babies, she says.
“I just felt one day I had to have a baby and a month later I was pregnant,” she recalls. “Three years later, I felt it again and I was pregnant again within a month. When I got the feeling again, my husband said, `Wait a minute, let’s think about this.’ “
The couple has two daughters, 3 and 6.
Married 11 years, Post insists it’s no harder for Hollywood’s movie stars to stay hitched than for anyone else in America, even though their divorces are far better publicized.
“Sure, it’s hard to keep a marriage going anywhere in America,” she says. “But here in Hollywood or anywhere else, if you want to keep it together, you’ll find a way to do it. I see a lot of strong marriages around me, like Linda and Harry Thomason and five or six other couples we’re friends with who are very tight and devoted to each other. There are no divorces in the group I’m around. The couples all support each other.”
By coincidence, husband Michael Ross walks into the MTM studio commissary just as his wife is discoursing on matrimony. A writer and producer for “Evening Shade,” another Bloodworth-Thomason show, whose stage is next door to “Hearts Afire” on the MTM lot, Ross agrees with his wife.
“There’s nothing worse about Hollywood than anywhere else,” he says. “You can make things work out here just as easily as anywhere else. You just have to want to.”
Part of the reason Post wants to, she believes, is that stardom came relatively late for her. No Shannen Doherty with a show of her own at 18, Post graduated from Oregon’s Lewis and Clark College before moving to Southern California.
“I’m glad I didn’t get success so early,” she says. “If that had happened, I wouldn’t have the equilibrium I have now.”
That equilibrium is what allows her to accept the fact that her list of credits includes not a single feature movie role among all her starring TV parts.
“I followed the road most open to me 15 years ago,” she says. “I had hoped I might make the leap from `Night Court’ to features, but it didn’t happen and now I just love what I do. Me playing Georgie Anne is the perfect mesh of actor and character.
“And I have kids now, so I can’t go off on location to the south of France for months at a time anyway. I want to be doing this-if not this series, then another comedy-for at least 10 more years.”
