CRIME shows used to provide male actors with a fast track to stardom. Twenty years ago, “Magnum P.I” and “Miami Vice” made Tom Selleck and Don Johnson household names. In our own time, Michael Chiklis went from a dullard on “The Commish” to the cool badass of “The Shield.”
In recent seasons, actresses have found that crime can pay for them, too. Jill Hennessy, the buttoned-up Jackie-O wannabe from “Law & Order,” took a fashion cue from Sheryl Crow and came back to NBC as the funky, nosy medical examiner of “Crossing Jor-dan.” The “CSI” franchise on CBS portrays women (Marg Helgenberger, Jor-ja Fox, Khandi Alexander and Emily Procter) as vital members of the forensics teams. Among this new breed of female investigators, the most glamorous is Lilly Rush, the willowy blonde with who solves forgotten homicides on CBS’ “Cold Case.”
As played by the nearly translucent Kathryn Morris (“I’m one of the whitest people on the planet,” she says), Rush is reliably flinty and fearless, but has a tender side not often seen among her procedure-bound peers. The only female homicide detective on the Philadelphia force, she opens up cases that have long been closed when a new piece of evidence appears. This gimmick sets “Cold Case” apart from the other Jerry Bruckheimer-produced shows, “CSI” and “Without a Trace.”
“The show’s more about playing with time and human emotions,” says executive producer Jonathan Littman. “A cold case detective said the best thing about time is that somebody’s always willing to talk.”
And when Rush solves her crimes, she brings the relatives of crime victims a rare sense of closure.
“That makes Lilly feel needed,” says Morris, 35, in a salon at New York’s Ritz-Carlton hotel.
In one particularly effective episode, Rush brought together the mother of a murdered gay man with the closeted lover she never knew he had.
“They were living near each other,” says Morris. “And the times had changed enough that his mother finally thought, OK, so my son was gay and I missed out on his life, and what was important to him and who he fell in love with.” The role has proved enormously gratifying to Morris, because, she says, “I wanted to play someone who was feminine, but didn’t have to flaunt it to get ahead.”
Exec producer Jonathan Littman reveals that Morris had to be persuaded to postpone film projects to take the part.
“Lilly’s a woman’s woman in a man’s world,” Littman says. “Men and women can both relate to her. Women can certainly relate to her as the only woman in a man’s world. And Kathryn is so credible in the role.”
In person, Morris has a lively, self-deprecating sense of humor that one wouldn’t expect in her TV character. The youngest of three children born to Stanley, a Bible scholar, and Joyce Morris, an insurance salesperson, she was born in Cincinnati, and raised in the Dallas, Tex. area and Wind-sor Locks, Connecticut. As a child, she remembers being in awe of her sister Mary Beth, the first performer in the family. “Mary Beth was a hot girl from the ’70s, a down-home Farrah Fawcett-type,” Morris says. “She always did great plays, things that were bold.”
As if on cue, Mary Beth Lamelin, Morris’s sister, strolls by. The elder Morris, who is now a homemaker and mother of three living in Bristol, Ct., is visiting Kathryn. When asked about their childhood, she acknowledges Kathryn’s hero-worship. “I’m sure I used that to my advantage. It makes me laugh when she talks that way,” she says.
But seeing her sister on stage inspired Morris to study theater at Temple University. Out in Hollywood, Morris did several years of journeyman roles in film and television, and lucked out with a breakthrough part as Tom Cruise’s wife in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 futuristic police thriller “Minority Report.” “Spielberg told me, ‘You know, Kat, everything’s crazy in this movie,'” Norris says. “You represent what [Cruise] lost so I want you to be very simple.”
She has another film, a psychological drama called “Mindhunters,” costarring Christian Slater and Val Kilmer, slated for release this fall, but future films will have to wait until she completes next season’s “Cold Case.”
Morris also has to plan her wedding – to rock-star financial analyst Randy Hamilton. “I thought it was more important to get the show off the ground than to be Bridezilla for a year,” she says. About her fiance, Morris deadpans, somewhat unconvincingly, “Randy’s very gorgeous and everyone thinks I’m his dumpy girlfriend.”
But the relationship has the one thing missing from Lilly Rush’s life – romance. “We met through a mutual friend,” says Morris. “At my friend’s parties, he was always the guy who was working on the speakers. I never thought the guy who was putting together the perfect compilation CD would be the man I would marry.”
COLD CASE
Sunday, 8 p.m., CBS