Charles Shaughnessy

Father Knows Best

by Rachel Lincoln

Q: You seem to be cast often as a father -- in a one-week period last year, you played a devoted father on Sunday, a philandering father on Monday, and were back as Maxwell Sheffield in "The Nanny" on Wednesday. Are you ever worried about being typecast as the all-around dad?

A: No, I don't think so. When you get to a certain age you're either going to be a guy who's afraid of commitment in his middle years, or you're going to be a dad. There's so many different kinds of dads it needn't be limiting at all. It's up to the imagination of the writers, actors and directors to make the dad as interesting and complex as he can be.

Q: As executive producer, Fran Drescher is really a driving force behind the show. Yet you seem to have more personal experience with the issues that the show deals with; for example, as well as being a parent, you were raised by nannies as a child. Do the two of you ever disagree about the way the characters are portrayed on the show?

A: Not really, no, because she's not your average nanny. She's nothing like the nannies that I knew. If ever I was to say, "Well, Fran, nannies don't really do that," she'd say, "Well this one does." But certainly there were cases where they gave Max something to say, and I would say, 'That doesn't work." But this always happens with a show, you know, you start with a blank piece of paper and the writers write some characters but they don't know how they're going to come to life, and then they put actors in them, and the actors have to kind of make it fit. But I was very keen not to have Maxwell be a kind of one-dimensional, British stuck-up booby that he was right at the beginning, completely clueless, completely repressed~~a sort of English caricature. That was very quickly changed. They saw that he needed to progress and be a more attractive person. There was never any argument about it, I think everyone pretty much agreed that that was the direction it needed to go.

Q: Maxwell Sheffield seems to have loosened up over the past five years. You've gone from playing a man who has very little informal interaction with his kids to one who is very involved with them. Which type of father are you?

A: Much more the latter. I consider myself very fortunate because the nature of my job gives me a huge amount of time at home, far more than other dads. In fact, the other dads at school hate me because their wives are always saying, "Well, Jenny's dad was there reading in class the other day" or "Jenny's dad drives the carpool," "Jenny's dad was at Indian Princesses." And the dads are all like, "Could you give me a break here?"

I'm home a lot so I'm able to be very involved in their lives. I coach Jenny's soccer team and I drive the carpool and I go off and read in school. Maddy's actually going to be starting a new school in September that encourages a lot of parent involvement, so I'm looking forward to getting involved there. And I really enjoy it. I think it's a wonderful thing that the modern father, the father of the 90s, is encouraged to be very much a hands-on dad. I think it's terrific.

I think the dads of the past, where it was culturally not as expected, missed out a lot. There was always a slightly stilted relationship between dads and children in a way because they were absent a lot of time. They'd come home in the evening and sort of say, "I've had a hard day at the office," and go in to relax and maybe play with their kids for a half an hour before dinner. And that was about it. And although that half an hour may have been quality time, neither the child nor the dad really got to know each other in the way that we're privileged to get to know our children nowadays. So yes, I'm very hands-on and glad to do it.

Q: You yourself were partially raised by nannies. Do you think that your "hands-on" parenting style is a reaction to that?

A: No I don't think so at all. It has more to do with this culture. The American culture is more progressive, more daring in a way, more encouraging. And my wife is very much that way. But I'm not really sure why it happened this way. You know, when we were having kids it was very much the thing, the beginning of this "cult of children." I think it's gone way over the top. I think that this "cult of child" is really absurd and is actually doing a real disservice to children. Children believe what they're told and they believe what they're demonstrated-when they're treated a certain way, they believe it. So they grow up believing that they're the center of the universe and that what's important is that they are kept amused 24 hours a day. They come back from school and they have art classes, karate classes, piano classes, dance classes-anything to be amused, to be occupied, to fill them up with something to do. They're never allowed to just be. To just find their own imagination and their own way of playing and just to be still and quiet.

Instead, they're given this kind of frenetic "Type A" kind of environment where they've got to achieve at school and they've got to achieve in their classes and they've got to do this and do that. And I just don't think that will get them anywhere at all. They're not given time to just stop. Kids need time to stop~just stop the world, be quiet, play with a stick, play with a paper bag. I mean the shelves in our house are just filled with the stuff they have! They never get to play with it, half of it's in its box! It's insane. I think it's symptomatic of baby boomer's guilt. Both parents work so they feel guilty-they shower their kids with gifts. It's like, "If I can't be there to take care of them, then I'll make sure that they have everything."

Q: How do you combat that in your house?

A: It's hard because you can't help it. I remember when I first became a parent it was like, "My children aren't going to watch television, maybe they'll watch a video or something, but they're not going to watch tv." You can't stop it! It's the culture. They go out to their friends houses and they watch tv. I said to Susan, 'On Jenny's birthday, we'll say, "no gifts."' And she said, "She goes to birthday parties and she brings gifts for her friends. You can't expect her to understand why they're not bringing gifts for her." And I had to [agree].

But we try. We try to minimize the stuff. Jenny doesn't have a lot of extra-curricular stuff going on. She plays soccer, and she has piano once a week, and that's it. She loves art, and other things, but it just gets to be too much. So she just does her soccer and her piano and at weekends she rides her horse. She loves riding. But those are the only things that she does. And the rest of the time it's just homework and time to just chill out. You know, some kids may need all that stimulation. But I think it needs to be carefully looked at, first.

Q: Do your own experiences as a parent shape your on-screen portrayal of a father?

A: Oh I think so. I think that there's a way that I would have my character relate to children that I've learned through being a dad. I realize that children have an awareness and a sense of humor and an ability to communicate, on a very adult level. They're very sophisticated and they don't appreciate being talked down to. The thing that I see in dads of old who don't have that kind of relationship with their kids is that they kind of assume that children are children and they don't understand adult things. They think that they need to be spoken to slowly and loudly, like you might talk to someone who speaks a foreign language. And it's just not the case. Children will see right through that in a second.

Q: Who is your inspiration for the character of Maxwell Sheffield?

A: My dad, really. We actually had a very close family. We grew up, the four of us--my brother, myself, my mum and my dad--very close, very loud, [in a] very rambunctious kind of existence. Because my dad was a writer, he was always a little bit "head-in-the-clouds." He would be slightly out of touch with what was going on. And there would be times when the household was kind of whirling around him in a kind of an out-of-control chaos. And he would stand there a bit like a stunned beast--like Maxwell--and go, "Ho hum, well, I'm just going to step in the office for a few minutes" and disappear.

Q: In a recent episode of "The Nanny," Maxwell Sheffield describes his father as someone I will always know as 'sir.'" Your own father grew up in Windsor Castle, the stepson to the personal assistant of King Edward VIII and King George VI. How did his background affect your family dynamic?

A: It was very interesting because he grew up in this very ratified atmosphere of the court, but my dad still had a lot of relatives on his mother's side and a lot of his early experience had nothing to do with that at all, it was actually American-Canadian. So he always had this kind of schizophrenic upbringing, really. And it stayed with him all through his later years. He had his friends from his school days and his parents' friends who were frightfully aristocratic, but then he'd have all his showbiz friends who were the absolute opposite.

Our house was always filled with that mixture. I remember as a kid they'd have these dinner parties and there would be the Duke of Wellington, and somebody so-and-so and lord this and lord that--in fact my godfather is the Duke of Rutlands. And then they'd have parties where you'd have all the British movie stars and tv actors and out-of-work costume designers floating around the house. It was very exciting. It was this extraordinary foot in two very different worlds that he had, that I grew up in, and that I have, to some extent.

Q: Your father wrote for the BBC series "Upstairs, Downstairs" and your mother was a stage actress. With all this theater in your blood, why did you initially decide to study law at Cambridge?

A: For that very reason. I thought, "Someone has to do something practical!" My dad was always relying on the next job to be able to pay the bills and I saw that it wasn't that glamorous, you know, that it was a hard life. So with my brother going into it as well I thought, "The hell with that, as much as I love acting, someone has got to bail the family out. Someone's got to be responsible here." I always had a responsibility complex anyway, I'm Mr. Responsible. So I thought, "I'll be a lawyer." I went to Cambridge and read law and then realized that it was the last thing that I wanted to be!

Q: What made you change your mind and return to the stage--and then the screen?

A: It was kind of extraordinary. What happened was I left Cambridge and went to work for a year in a film company while I tried to figure out what it was that I really wanted to do. Towards the end of the year, I got very sick. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, I knew I didn't want to be doing what I was doing, I was having a very dysfunctional love affair at the time, and I just got this strange lung disease which nobody really knew what it was.

I left my apartment and went to live at my parents house in the country. And my mother came into my bedroom one morning, looked at me, shut the door, went downstairs, and called this drama school in London, and [booked a space for me to audition]. She came back upstairs and woke me up and said, "Okay, you're going to do two things. You're going to go see this special diet man in London and you're going to audition for drama school." In a strange parental way, the way that some parents have this kind of innate understanding of their children, she knew what was going on. And she knew I wasn't going to do anything about it because I felt that I couldn't do anything about it -- I had to be responsible and couldn't be an actor. As a result I went on this strange diet -- I ate nothing but boiled onions for a week -- and started getting better, my illness sort of receded. I auditioned and got accepted and that was the beginning of the rest of my life. Everything kind of took a turn from there.

Q: How did you end up in Los Angeles?

A: In my second year at drama school, this American girl arrived as a foreign student to study, a very glamorous and exotic creature. She was an ex-ballet dancer and lived in Hollywood. Her address was Studio City, which I thought was just hysterical -- I thought it would be like this place where the houses were only the facades. And we got together for the next two years, and then I had to leave for work and she went back to Los Angeles to work. So we kept in touch on the telephone, we kept the relationship going over the Atlantic, really. And then after about four or five months of that we both realized that this was just not working, that we really wanted to be with each other, that we had really gotten underneath each other's skin to a place where we were not whole without each other. So I called her up and proposed on the telephone at one o'clock in the morning in the pouring rain. And she said yes and I sold everything and left England in April of '83. We got married here [a month later].

Q: Is most of your family still in England?

A: My mum and dad are still in England. My brother came out to visit me about two or three years later and very quickly realized that this was the place to be, it was much more pleasant environment than London. We introduced him to this girl that we knew, and within a couple of weeks, they were dating and within a year they were married. So he's now living out here and he's actually a producer on "The Young and the Restless." He's got three girls and lives in Tarzana.

Q: Do you now consider yourself a LA. native?

A: I turned native very quickly, it was very strange. I never thought I'd live anywhere but England. But after a very short, violent reaction-I hated Los Angeles for about a week-I did a 180-degree turn and within the second week I just felt, "This is home." I went back to England quite soon after and felt like I was in a foreign country. I couldn't wait to get back here, I got so homesick for Los Angeles. I really surprised myself, flying back into L.A.X. and thinking, "Oh thank God I'm home." And I remember feeling that and thinking, "This is very strange. After living in England for 25 years of my life, after a few months, I feel like a stranger there." Whenever I go to England, I enjoy visiting, but I feel very foreign.

Q: Is Susan a full-time, at-home mom?

A: More or less, both of us are here, kind of 50-50. She's writing, and she's an actress, too, so she's going out on auditions and working with her writing partner and doing stuff outside the house.

Q: Do you and she plan to have more children?

A: I don't know. That's the million dollar question. You know, I'm nervous about being outnumbered. No matter how hard they might be, when they're fighting like cats and dogs, at least I can take one and do something with her, and Susan can take the other with her. If we have a third, we're kind of outnumbered, you're always going to have a two and a one. So I don't know. It's possible.

We figure there's maybe a two-year window, possibly, where we might, might, but I somehow doubt it. They're a handful, you know? Bless their darling little hearts, they're a workout.

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