ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, September 27, 1996 TAG: 9609270020
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: FRAZIER MOORE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Football. Leaves turning. Someone new in the ``Law & Order'' cast. All sure signs of fall.
Carey Lowell should be grateful for such autumn signposts, at least that last one: She is the most recent in the ``Law & Order'' of succession.
``Law & Order,'' of course, is the splendid cops-and-lawyers drama that launched its seventh season last week, and - with the passing of ``Murder, She Wrote'' - won bragging rights as prime time's longest-running drama, all the more so after NBC recently renewed the show through 1997-98. It airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m.
Meanwhile, making ``Law & Order's'' fall tradition tenable is a corresponding springtime custom: the departure of a cast member.
Last spring, it was Jill Hennessy who left the show - which meant the demise of her character, Assistant District Attorney Claire Kincaid, after a car crash in the season finale.
Now Jamie Ross, played by Lowell, has become the new partner for Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston). The series' six-member ensemble thus has its 14th inductee.
Jamie had been a criminal defense lawyer, Lowell explains between scenes at the show's Manhattan studio, ``but she became very disillusioned representing scumbags and getting them off, and getting rich doing it.''
She also became disillusioned with her marriage to another defense lawyer. Now a single mother working the other side of the courtroom, this seasoned, tough-as-nails lawyer isn't subject to ``that mentor-protege thing that Sam's and Jill's characters had,'' Lowell says.
``Sam and I are more on equal footing. We have a bit of a contentious relationship, along with mutual respect.''
Fine. But of no less importance to the ``Law & Order'' faithful is what measure of attraction might crackle between them. The series' gritty stories don't leave much time for romance but, still, during three seasons working together McCoy and Kincaid clearly had shared more than a counsel table.
Moreover, it should not go unnoted that Lowell, like her predecessor, happens to be lovely. She bears a certain resemblance to Princess Diana. And she's very tall.
How tall? ``I'm 5-feet-10,'' she says.
``No, she's not,'' objects Waterston, zipping past at that moment. ``She's about 6-feet-5!''
Well, then: Will history repeat itself with McCoy and Ross?
``Right now, they're barely on speaking terms,'' Lowell says approvingly. ``But we'll see how it plays out.
``It's a great character, a great show, and I couldn't ask for a better situation,'' says the actress, herself a single mother set on raising her daughter in Manhattan. ``It's the perfect thing to do.''
But, curiously, as ``Law & Order's'' producers were looking around for Hennessy's successor, 35-year-old Carey Lowell was filling out a college application.
``I had decided that I was going to study documentary filmmaking at NYU,'' she explains. ``Classes were meant to start July 1, and I got this job on June 29'' - just two weeks after first auditioning.
The almost-film-student-``L&O''-initiate was the same Carey Lowell who, seven years ago, carried a gun in a thigh garter in the James Bond thriller ``Licence to Kill.'' But despite her global visibility as a Bond Girl, she upstaged her own career.
``I got pregnant. I actually conceived the night of the film's premiere in Los Angeles. Then I became a mother and I stopped acting for two years.''
She played the Geena Davis role (``I wore a wig'') on the 1993 sitcom ``A League of Their Own,'' but it didn't last long and Lowell was glad: ``I would have had to move to Los Angeles and wear that wig for the next I-don't-know-how-many years.''
She appeared in ``Leaving Las Vegas'' as the bank teller put upon by a very shaky Nicolas Cage.
But by last summer, she says, ``It had been a year since I did a film. I just thought, it's time to find something else. It wasn't that I was giving up acting. I just needed to be doing something to occupy myself, and I wanted to go to film school.''
Which was all it took to get her acting in ``Order.''
She laughs knowingly. ``The minute you decide to do something else and plop down the tuition ....''
LENGTH: Medium: 84 linesby CNB