No meek mom, 7th Heaven's Catherine Hicks heartily preaches family values
For six years on The WB's 7th Heaven, Catherine Hicks has played kindly minister's wife Annie Camden. This season, chafing at her role as a dutiful homemaker and mother of seven, Annie started snapping at her loved ones - and Hicks couldn't be happier. "Personally I love to get the anger out," she says. She's more cautious about criticizing TV daughter Jessica Biel, 20, who in 2000 posed topless for a men's magazine in an attempt to break away from 7th Heaven's wholesome image. Still, says Hicks, "being taken seriously is not about getting more naked. It's about [using] your brain, caring about other people and staying close to God." A lifelong Catholic and regular churchgoer, Hicks practices what she preaches. Stephen Collins, who plays her TV husband, recalls that when his father was undergoing heart bypass surgery a few years ago, "all day long Catherine would keep things buoyant on the set, but after all the kidding around, she'd say, 'Tell your dad I hope he's okay.' If something is up in your life, she always checks in about it." She also checks in by phone - sometimes as much as 10 times a day - with her mother, Jackie, 87, who lives near San Diego (her father, Walter, an electronics salesman, died of a heart attack at 71). Every week she sends flowers to Yagher's grandmother, who lives in Kansas. "She' s nurturing and caretaking," he says. But it's daughter Catie, 10, who Hicks "makes sure is the focus" of their lives, Yagher says. With a touch of shame, Hicks admits she got a jolt of pleasure when the mother of one of Catie's friends phoned recently to ask for a play date. "It was a primal moment of 'Yes! She' s popular!'" Hicks thinks that reaction stems from her insecurities as an only child growing up in Scottsdale, Ariz. "I would imitate the girls who were popular," she says. "I always had the desire to be famous." In her freshman year at St. Mary's College in 1970 she fell short by one vote of making the cheerleading squad at affiliated school Notre Dame. Crushed, "I didn't know what to do with myself," says Hicks. Her dorm room overlooked the school's theater building and, curious watching scenery being unloaded, she decided to take an acting class. A year after graduating in 1973 with a B.A. in English literature, she won an M.F.A. acting scholarship to Cornell. Moving to New York City in 1976, she immediately landed an 18-month stint on the soap Ryan's Hope, followed by a costarringrole opposite Jack Lemmon in the 1978 Broadway play Tribute. "Jack was very humble," she says. "Everyone was in awe of him, but one night I said, 'Jack, would you like to join us for dinner?' and his face lit up. He said, 'Yeah!'" Lemmon encouraged Hicks, then 26, to move to L.A., where she won an Emmy nomination playing Marilyn Monroe in the 1980 TV movie Marilyn: The Untold Story and found steady work in films like 1985's Peggy Sue Got Married and 1986's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. While she was making 1988's cult horror hit Child's Play - playing opposite a killer doll named Chucky - Hicks was smitten by Yagher, the doll's creator. Both were involved withothers, but at the film's wrap party, Yagher took Hicks behind a backdrop for what she recalls was "a princely kiss." A month and a half later the couple had their first date; they wed in 1990. A year later, at 39, Hicks was pregnant with Catie. The 11-yearage gap between them was never a factor, says Yagher: "I was attracted to her youthfulness, her playfulness." With the three now settled into a five-bedroom house in Bel Air, Hicks makes sure she gets home in time from the Heaven set to cook dinner. Sometimes she and Yagher check into a Beverly Hills hotel for a romantic night alone. Not every day is a honeymoon, of course. "Marriage is hard work," says Hicks. "But I always go back to that first kiss and think, 'There's a lot of good here.'"
She's not lacking for inspiration. Take the rising divorce rate. "People need to be aware it's an epidemic, and the damage to kids is irreparable," says the actress, married for 11 years to movie special effects and makeup artist Kevin Yagher, 39. Hicks, 50, also skewers super-wealthy celebs who don't give enough to charity ("If you have hundreds of millions, giving a million is nothing") and says she's "disappointed" in Britney Spears, whose "I'm a Slave 4 U" video she calls "pornography."
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