Desperate, yet Strong
Brenda's a dead but critical housewife

Sister Mary Alice will explain it all for you.

She had to explain it to me. Though I am a confirmed Desperate
Housewives addict — one of 30 million in the U.S. and Canada —
circumstances prevented me from watching (or even taping) the
pivotal, much-anticipated "One Will Die!" episode of two weeks past.

Last Sunday, ABC pre-empted the show for that gooey Mitch Albom
Heaven movie — CTV ran a Wives repeat. So by the time (9 p.m.) last
night's episode aired, I was going through withdrawal and feeling
altogether out of the loop.

But who better to catch me up with the latest dirty doings on
mysterioso Wisteria Lane than Mary Alice herself, the suicidal
suburbanite portrayed by Brenda Strong, whose posthumous narration
observes and analyzes the characters and their secret motivations —
excluding her own reasons for taking her own life in the opening
scenes of the series pilot.

It all, she says, comes down to "the note."

"You knew (going in) that one of the desperate housewives was going
to die," Strong recaps, easing me up to speed. "The one that they
were pointing to, the one that they thought had written `the note,'
was Edie Britt (Nicollette Sheridan's slutty divorcée). But it
wasn't. It was Martha Hubert (the blackmailing Gladys Kravitz
character played by Christine Estabrook). The note was written on
Martha Hubert's stationery. Martha Hubert wrote the note.

"Turns out she was very desperate. Her husband had left her without
much of a pension, and she was hoping to glean a little money from
me. She hadn't realized, in writing the note, that it would drive me
to suicide. Not that she felt too particularly bad about that.

"So my husband went over to find out how she could do such a thing.
And in a rage of temper he hit her with the very blender that she
had borrowed from me, and then kept after I died.

"What goes around comes around. You've got to love the irony in
that."

And we do, all 30 million of us. The show's delicious, demented
sense of irony is what got us all hooked in the first place.

"Isn't it great?" Strong enthuses. "And all those little details
just make you even love it more. Because if you're paying attention,
all those layers are in there. It's a brilliant mix of humour and
humanity.

"It's really the darkest part of all of us, and the lightest part of
all of us," she continues. "We can all relate to everything that
each one of these characters is going through. We may not take it to
the heightened degree of the entertainment value, but it's
relatable. It's grounded in reality."

Which makes it that much more fun to play for the actresses
involved — in addition to those mentioned elsewhere, there is the
former TV Lois Lane, movie Bond girl and Radio Shack pitchwoman,
Teri Hatcher, and Felicity Huffman, the actress wife of William H.
Macy, and Strong's old rival for the fictional affections of Peter
Krause (Six Feet Under) on Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night.

"That's the thing that stands out for me," says Strong. "On most
shows, you'll get one storyline, and that'll be the primary
storyline, and that character gets most of the `juice' that week.
Every single week, each one of these women makes an emotional
journey. They're being written for, and the complexity of their
characters is coming out.

"And Mary Alice is the one that frames the contextual viewpoint for
the audience to really receive these characters on multi-faceted
levels, and not just a superficial one. And exposes their flaws and
their longings. Which is kind of a delicate position to be in.

"The beauty of it is that Mary Alice's character gets to be the
moral and emotional voice, and ultimately the heart of the show. I
get to be the through-line between all of these characters, and the
glue that kind of holds them together. So, in a weird way, I'm in a
position to be the most intimate, and yet the most withdrawn.

"Because, at the same time, there is that distance ... I'm not
involved on a day-to-day basis, interacting with the characters. And
as an actress you want to be."

But on the rare occasions she does get on set with the others, "It's
like a party," Strong says, "because we're so happy to see each
other.

"The way the show is often shot, it'll be Eva (Longoria)'s day, or
Marcia (Cross)'s day, where the focus is all on that one character.
So they don't get to interact much either, unless I'm around.
Because whenever I am on set, it's all of us, because it's a
flashback about all of us. So they're always happy to see me."

Though the ghost of Mary Alice has been popping up more lately, in
dreams and the occasional flashback sequence, the character was
initially intended to be seen much less than heard. Indeed, that's
how Strong won the mostly off-camera role — as opposed to her
actual, practical experience playing the ghost of a dead wife, on
Everwood (which, as it happens, also featured Marcia Cross).

In the original Desperate Housewives pilot, the Mary Alice role was
played by Twin Peaks' Sheryl Lee.

"Originally, we sort of saw Mary Alice as this very ethereal
creature," producer Michael Edelstein had explained at the series'
press launch last summer. "We cast Sheryl Lee, and she was perfect
for the part. But when we laid in the voice-over narration ... (we
realized) it needed more of a comic life. It needed more of a
persona. It needed somebody more present and less ethereal.

"We brought in many different actresses, recorded five or six of
them and then just played it back and listened to their voices. And
Brenda's voice, among all the people we interviewed, really `popped'
the most. Brenda was just the best person for the part, and we feel
really blessed to have her with us."

And, for all her apparent isolation, Strong says the feeling is
mutual. "I kind of have my own family, all alone there in post-
production," the actress laughs. "In a way, I'm kind of the star of
my own show."