Sharon Gless WHAT I KNOW NOW

AFTER 50 YEARS STARRING ON STAGE AND SCREEN, THE ACTRESS IS MAKING PEACE WITH HER INSECURE YOUNGER SELF

Sharon Gless is well aware that if people today know anything about her almost 50-year career (which includes nine hit TV series, three starring roles on London’s West End, two Emmys and one steamy turn on the big screen with Michael Douglas), it’s that she starred in the 1980s TV police drama Cagney & Lacey alongside Tyne Daly. “I was the blonde,” Gless, now 78, says dryly.

She’s a woman who’s used to labels. A child of Hollywood – “Grandpa” Neil S McCarthy was attorney to the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant – she heard “darling, boring, fat … too sexy, too unsuitable, too angry, too dykey” and more as she worked her way up from a $186-a-week contract player for Universal Studios to trailblazing roles (feminist Christine Cagney and the brassy and fierce gay rights activist Debbie Novotny in Queer as Folk).

Now, with her revealing memoir Apparently There Were Complaints, Gless, who lives in Florida with her husband of 30 years, Barney Rosenzweig (who was married to another woman when he was executive producer of Cagney & Lacey), looks back on the cruelty and the acclaim, the affairs and the alcoholism. “There was plenty of material,” she quips before diving into what she learned along the way.

SIZE DOES MATTER.