“We just never seem to quit the kibitzing,” she told the Kentucky New Era in a 1986 interview. “Ever since John won his Emmy, we've really busted his chops. Every time the poor guy flubs a word, Harry shouts out, 'Is the Emmy-rescinding committee here?'”
One episode featured Markie's husband, actor Michael Ross, as a drugged out rock singer who wound up in court.
“I was making a bit of a nuisance trying to make sure everything went just right for him,” Markie said. “Naturally, Harry and John started giving Michael the gears, trying to throw him off his stride. Now I knew that that was just their way of accepting him. But still I started whining, 'Harry,don't do that.'
“Harry took me aside, I calmed down and got my own sense of humor back and realized that my dear husband could take care of himself very well."
Classic TV Beauties 1980s Countdown
MARKIE POST as Christine Sullivan in "Night Court"
Markie was Christine, the good-natured, perky blonde who played the straight man on the quirky comedy while downplaying her sexiness by wearing buttoned-up suits in the courtroom.
Although she was one of the hottest women on TV and her swimsuit posters made her one of the biggest pinup girls of the 1980s, Markie underestimated her beauty, telling People magazine in 1986, “I'm no sexual siren, I see prettier girls than me in the grocery store every day.”
“Night Court” featured a zany cast of characters. The courtroom was headed by Judge Harry Stone (Harry Anderson), an eccentric hipster jurist who wore a fedora and jeans under his robe, and performed magic tricks. Anderson was a comedian/magician who got the role based on his appearances on “Cheers” as con man “Harry the Hat.”
Markie joined the show as public defender Christine in the third season, replacing Ellen Foley. Christine stayed busy fending off the advances of womanizer Dan Fielding (John Larroquette), the prosecutor who relentlessly pursued her.
Christine didn't have a permanent love interest on the show. Most viewers believed that she should've hooked up with Harry, and Markie later admitted that she was disappointed that the writers didn't pair the two characters.
Anderson said she brought happiness to the set, and Markie enjoyed the camaraderie and the clowning around of the cast members.
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Born in Palo Alto to a physicist father and poet mother, Markie was a self-described good girl. “I couldn't be as charming as my mother or as smart as my father. So I decided to be bad. I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t drink, couldn’t smoke and didn’t have sex. I flunked at being a rebel.”
She earned a BA degree from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon and got her start in the entertainment field working on production crews for game shows such as “The Price is Right,” Split Second,” and “Family Feud.”
Markie appeared in episodes of “The A-Team,” “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” and “Cheers,” before she became a regular as bail bondsman Teri Michaels on “The Fall Guy.” Her three-year stint on the series starring Lee Majors and Heather Thomas, wasn't her most challenging acting gig.
"I felt like a typewriter more than an actor because my role basically called for doing most of the exposition,” she told the Kentucky New Era in a 1986 interview “I'd hang around the set 15 hours a day just to spend a few minutes saying things like, 'Well, Colt, he's coming out on the three o'clock flight from Phoenix and he's skipped on a $100,000 bail bond.' You could say it was a trifle unrewarding."
“Then they get us married and they send us to a small town because CBS wanted it that way and Linda [Bloodworth-Thomason] wanted to keep the show on the air. That’s what they had to do and she kept it as pure as she could but it was just never the same."
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Markie's most memorable film role was playing the mother of Cameron Diaz's character in “There's Something About Mary.”
Markie described her approach to her career in the www.patch.com interview:
“I was not a big visualizer. I was sort of a leap in and see what happens kind of person,” she said.
“I used to characterize myself in terms of my career as being like Wile E. Coyote, running out on a cliff and everything’s groovy until you look down and then you fall. So I just was not going to look down and just keep working, trying to take things as they came.”
She vented to People magazine that on “The Fall Guy” she felt like an outsider. “I didn't even know about Heather Thomas' drug problem until a few months before it came out. I felt like I was nothing, a zero.”
“Night Court” aired from 1984-92, and was No. 7 in the Nielsen ratings for two seasons. The show was nominated three times for best comedy series but never won.
After “Night Court,” Markie signed on for “Hearts Afire,” (1992-96) a comedy in which she co-starred with John Ritter. Markie played Georgie Ann Lahti, a chain-smoking, sassy loudmouth journalist who breaks all the rules. Ritter was a conservative, well-behaved senator's aide.
“It was the best thing I had ever done, the best scripts I had ever gotten to do, the best star. I loved John Ritter” Markie told www.patch.com “I loved that I was a chain smoker. I loved that I was a world traveling journalist who was down on her luck and had to live in his guestroom and fall in love with him in the most beautiful, romantic way.
