Photo: Michael Tran/FilmMagic
Ever think those big-screen sex scenes are hot, hot, hot?
Sharon Glessis here to tell you, from experience, that you don’t know the half of it.
“Michael would wait offset until I was already under the covers. That’s what a gentleman he was. Then, when he got in the bed, I lifted myself on top of him,” Gless describes.
She recalls that they were filming in the summer on a Los Angeles soundstage, where the air-conditioning had to be turned off so that the sound of it blowing would not be heard on camera.
“It was so, so hot,” she says. “I was perspiring all over his chest and sticking to him because my breasts were substantial. There were many takes done of that scene, and every time I’d have to extricate myself there was an audible suction sound.”
Michael Douglas and Sharon Gless in The Star Chamber, 1983.Alamy
If Douglas heard it, he never let on — and he never sneaked a peek, she says. “He was lovely. His eyes never went anywhere.”
On the set of Showtime’sQueer as Folkseries, which ran five seasons from 2000 to 2005, things were intimate in an even warmer way.
WhenRosie O’Donnelljoined the cast for the final season, Gless said her character’s kiss with O’Donell’s character was the first time she shared a romantic kiss with a woman. And soon enough, Gless was in love in real life.
“I just loved [Rosie] so much and I think it was probably the first lesbian I was really getting close to,” says Gless, who lives in Florida with her husband of 30 years, the formerCagney & Laceyexecutive producerBarney Rosenzweig.
Sharon Gless and Rosie O’Donnell on the set of Queer as Folk, 2005.L. Pief Weyman / © SHOWTIME / Courtesy: Everett Collection
“I was embarrassed and never pursued it. I was happily married, so I didn’t think of myself as gay. I just knew I loved this woman so much,” says Gless.
Years before she briefly questioned her feelings for one woman, Gless says people regularly assumed she was a lesbian during herCagney & Laceydays with co-starTyne Daly: “I had interviewers ask me all the time, ‘You’re gay, aren’t you?'”
Gless spent eight years digging through her personal Hollywood memorabilia in “boxes and boxes and boxes in storage” to writeApparently There Were Complaints, whose title was drawn from her experience getting sober in 2015 at age 70.
Holed up at home with Rosenzweig for so many pandemic months — “We followed the rules. We did everything we were supposed to,” she says of quarantining — Gless “got reintroduced to television” and excited about possibilities ahead.
“I’ve fallen in love with how older women are finally getting back into television series.Jean SmartinHacksis just brilliant. There were years and years where older women were just discarded on television, but this seems to be a new interest.”
“I’m hopeful about that because I want to continue working,” says the actress.
“Someone said to me about a month ago, ‘Do you know you have nine series? OnlyBetty Whitehas you beat out at 10.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll take care of that!’ I know I’ve got another one in me.”
For more of PEOPLE’s interview with Sharon Gless, pick up the new issue on newsstands Friday.
source: people.com
