Cybill Shepherd: At 59, the actress is still sassy, sexy and smart. And moonlighting.

June 2, 4:55 PMPittsburgh Stage and Screen ExaminerAlan Petrucelli

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It would be easy to say that Cybill Shepherd resembles a cat with nine lives, except that at this point it’s got to be closer to 10 or 11 . . . lives that is.  She’s been a beauty queen, a model, a film starlet, a TV leading lady, a wife, a mother, a divorcee, a Martha Stewart impersonator and, most recently, an outspoken advocate of gay rights.

Now she’s taken to wearing yet another hat: Comeback Queen. After enduring a modest dry spell, the ever-colorful Shepherd is all over the map in an eclectic array of projects, including a star turn as a middle-aged college kid in the enchanting Hallmark Channel original movie Mrs. Washington Goes to Smith, premiering Saturday, August 1.

We call it a journey from The Last Picture Show to the getting the last laugh.

Hers is a career and a life lived very much on her own terms. Shepherd doesn’t have anything left to prove to anybody; this is clear from the first minute of chatting with her.

There are no star trips, no airs, no haughtiness, no overbearing ego. The mischievous, self-assured voice on the other end of the line reveals instead a 59-year-old woman who has seen it all and done it all, yet is plenty excited about doing a whole lot more before heading off to that great Panavision camera in the sky.

She’s endured the best jabs and uppercuts that Hollywood can dish out and continually, consistently, plowed forward.  In many ways, she’s a great showbiz survivor story, but she’s also much more than that. As she winds up her fourth decade as an actress and all-around celebrity, the lady has earned the industry’s enduring respect–and then some.

“Yep, I’m still here!” Shepherd announces with certain finality. “And you know what? I don’t feel old yet. I still feel like I’m right in my prime. I’ve been around long enough that this is, like, my fifth comeback or something. Whatever they want to call it is fine by me. All I know is I’ve suddenly got a bunch of interesting projects lined up again.”

One might trace this latest of Shepherd’s comebacks to 2003 and 2005, when she starred in a pair of made-for-TV movies that cast her as Martha Stewart. Three seasons as the bisexual wife and mother Phyllis Kroll on Showtime’s The L Word followed.

But now suddenly all hell has broken loose for the actress who nominated four times for Emmy Awards and six times for the Golden Globe (she won three). She’s got a sitcom pilot at Lifetime called Alligator Point that just might get picked up for a series. She stars in a forthcoming indie feature that has the mesmerizing title of Desdemona Goes Shopping for the Fountain of Youth.

And then there’s Shepherd’s starring role in the lighthearted and poignant new Hallmark Channel original movie Mrs. Washington Goes to Smith in which Shepherd portrays a middle-aged divorcee who returns to college to finish the degree she never earned, disrupting stately Smith College in the process. It’s a role that she calls “just a huge boost to me as an artist and a person. It was just amazing on so many levels.”

Which levels would those be?

“Well, first off, it was just thrilling to get to play the lead in something that wasn’t just another ensemble,” Shepherd explains.

“This was truly one of the most wonderful stories I’d ever read. It was just such a cool part I couldn’t believe they’d even offer it to me. Really.”

This admission might be a tad hard to believe considering this is the same Cybill Shepherd who burst on the scene in 1971 at age 21 with an enchanting role in The Last Picture Show (and for which she earned all of $5,000). She followed that with a memorable performance as the homewrecker goddess in 1972’s The Heartbreak Kid, starred as Daisy Miller (1974)., lent dynamic support in Taxi Driver (1976)  before, or course, creating a pair of iconic characters for television: Maddie Hayes in ABC’s wildly clever Moonlighting (opposite newcomer Bruce Willis) and Cybill Sheridan in her namesake sitcom Cybill.

Yes. It’s that Cybill Shepherd. And she’s legitimately surprised to land a leading part in a Hallmark Channel flick.

“I don’t get thrown this kind of stuff every day anymore,” reveals the Memphis-born actress, “though I do have to say it probably helped my image to have done what I was able to in The L Word. I got to do love scenes again, even as a mom playing my real age. I was proud of that because I was permitted to bust some of society’s rules and show that women my age can still be really interesting sexually.”

Mrs. Washington Goes to Smith finds Shepherd involved in physical activity of a different sort: basketball. Her character Alice Washington makes the Smith College team, which meant the actress had to get in game-shape and sink actual baskets for the camera.

“I’d played a lot of basketball in high school, so it wasn’t entirely foreign to me,” says the 5-foot-8 Shepherd. “It was a huge amount of fun. But beyond that, this role kind of fulfilled a dream in a way. As actors, one of the great things is to be able to live your life sideways and experience something through playing it. That happened for me in pretending to be a college basketball player---and finishing college.”

Shepherd took a lot of college classes part-time during her modeling and early years as an actress, but like Alice, she never got that degree.

“It was a major vicarious thrill to finally get it,” she coos, “even just as make-believe.”

The other thrill was reuniting with Jeffrey Nordling, with whom Shepherd had co-starred in a made-for-TV movie entitled Baby Brokers some 15 years before. In Mrs. Washington, Nordling portrays a poetry professor upon whom both Alice and her pink-haired rebel roommate (played by Corri English) have a crush. “Jeffrey and I have great chemistry, so working with him again was a real treat,” Shepherd says.

Being a mid-life college girl dovetailed nicely with Shepherd’s real life in that 21-year-old twins Zach and Ariel Oppenheim, her kids with second husband, chiropractor Bruce Oppenheim, are both still in college themselves. (We visited Cybill at her Encino, California, when the babies were teeny tiny and watched in wonder as she breastfed them, one on each spigot.)

Shepherd’s daughter Clementine Ford, 30 (her dad is Shepherd’s first husband David Ford), is a successful actress who played Shepherd’s daughter on The L Word and is currently is starring on the daytime soap The Young and the Restless. Clementine (below with Cybill) recently confirmed she was a lesbian. That's where mom's gay rights acitivism comes into play.

So while Shepherd is coming up on 20 years since her second and last divorce, and some 40 years in the limelight, she is wanting for neither work nor male companionship.

Oh yeah. The men thing.

Shepherd has never been shy about making it clear she has a healthy libido. Come to think of it, she’s really never been shy about much of anything, and isn’t inclined to start now. However, that doesn’t mean being in the dating world is a breeze, either, as she pushes 60.

“I’m getting dates; that’s the miracle,” she says. “The fantasy is there are men lined up around the block for me. Not so. Where is somebody like me going to go to meet guys? Being who I am, I can’t exactly just go in bars and pick them up.”