Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 9, 1994 TAG: 9407130009
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By SCOTT MOORE THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By day, Richardson portrays Jill Taylor, family anchor to Tim Allen's macho "Tool Time" TV host. Off the set, she splits the duties of a two-income household with actor Ray Baker.
Career and home life merged for Richardson's most recent role, as her 9-year-old son, Henry, and 3-year-old twins, Roxanne and Joseph, sat through bedtime readings of Keiko Kasza's "A Mother for Choco."
Richardson reads that book to a young girl in a segment of PBS's "Storytime," airing Monday (at 6 p.m. on WBRA-Channel 15).
"I had never seen it before, and I thought it was a great book, especially for kids who are adopted," Richardson said in a phone interview. "My kids love the book. I read it with them a couple of times before I did the show, and of course we've read it many times since. I'm probably better at reading it now than I was when I did the show."
Richardson's children have always been involved with her work. Henry has appeared as an extra on "Home Improvement," and the newborn twins accompanied her on her first week of work for the pilot in 1991.
"They provided a driver and cribs in the dressing room," she said of the producers. "I just took my breast pump with me and went and worked for the five days."
The week of work soon turned into a new career - but Richardson's maternal instincts remained intact, especially when she found out about plans to eliminate a play area used by the show's young actors.
"I try not to interfere with the kids, because they have their own parents there," she said, "but when I found out what was going on, I [took an activist role]. All of us have noticed that this year the kids are so much easier to deal with" since they have an outlet for their excess energy.
Although Richardson has an appreciation for the talents and hard work of the actors who play her three sons on the show, she is trying to keep her children out of show business.
"I don't know what I'll do if one of the kids comes to me and says, `I really want to do this.' But I really feel, from my experience with acting, that in general you make a better actor if you work on the instrument, and the instrument is the person, and the instrument is the person's wealth of information and what they get from having a normal life. If you grow up in the business, there's a very limited experience of what a normal person's life is like."
Richardson, 42, was born at Bethesda (Md.) Naval Hospital and grew up in a Navy family. Her father was a test pilot and later an aerospace executive.
She said that while going to school in Texas, she "got most of the theater training that propelled me into being an actress."
Instead of the typical high-school productions, she soon was involved in plays by Becket, Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, Shakespeare and O'Neill.
Richardson went on to Southern Methodist University. She then polished her acting in Southwestern dinner theaters and in New York, where she met Baker. They've been married 12 years.
Richardson, coming off the failed NBC sitcom "FM," was not initially impressed by "Home Improvement," thinking it just "another situation comedy with a standup."
She said, "It's very difficult figuring out which TV show to do, because all you get is 22 minutes of the script of the pilot - and sometimes you don't even get that - and you have to figure out where they're going to go with the show, and where they're going to go with the character.
"Ray and I have a joke, which is actually half-serious, where we open the script to any page and read one page. ... You can tell if they're writing from character or if they're writing from jokes. If they're writing from character, there's hope there might be something."
Though the show's focus remains on Allen, the role of Jill Taylor has evolved.
"I have gotten to, gradually, try to define her in a way that doesn't depend on the relationship with him," Richardson said.
The mostly unseen neighbor, Wilson, helps each show make a point, without being preachy.
The formula obviously works. "Home Improvement" is the top-rated show for the season.
by CNB