On an unusually cold day for Southern California, even in late December, the mission-style fireplaces at the Ojai Valley Inn are blazing, and Courtney Thorne-Smith is sitting by the picture window in the main dining room, overlooking the golf course that has lured her here again and again. She's at the end of a three-day getaway with two of her oldest girlfriends during a two-week hiatus from Ally McBeal. Having lingered over breakfast (an omelet with salsa), she is just about to hit the gift shop for some last-minute Christmas presents before checking out and making the hour-and-a-half drive home to L.A. Three days of golf, treadmill workouts and spa treatments seem to have done her good.
"I love spa vacations," she says. "Spas don't kill my fitness routine. I've learned that I hate going somewhere where the food is really rich and there's nowhere to exercise and you go home feeling worse than when you left."
In person, Thorne-Smith is extremely attractive, but not in a movie-star way - although her cornflower-blue ski jacket does seem to match her cornflower-blue eyes in a way that suggests Technicolor enhancement. She looks more like the high-powered attorney she plays on Ally McBeal than an actress on a hit TV show. She cops to being an exercise junkie, but she insists she's a healthy one.
"I do all those things that sound trite: I exercise, I meditate, I do yoga," she says. "I try to focus on being strong. I'm very athletic. When you focus on athletics, the food takes care of itself. If I don't eat, I can't get through my run."
It wasn't always that way. "When I was 19 or 20, I put on that freshman 15," she says. "It was a horrible thing that happens to all women that age. Only, I was doing it on camera [on the NBC sitcom Day by Day]." She tried a series of different diets, and her weight bounced up and down. But contrary to prior reports, she claims she was never anorexic.
"I wanted to be one of those people with thin arms," she says. "The reality is I'm never going to have Grace Kelly arms. I'd have to eat every two weeks. I'm sturdy Irish stock. I can lift things. I'm naturally thin-hipped, and I have big breasts, though my friends are saying to me, 'Courtney they're not as big as you think they are.'" She laughs. "But I would like them to be smaller. Meanwhile, everyone I know has gotten implants. The grass is always greener."
That may be, but now that she works with Calista Flockhart, TV's most notoriously thin actress, Thorne-Smith isn't envious but defensive. "Calista is a small woman," she says. "I just feel so bad that she's gotten so much flak. She exercises, she eats - that's just her body. She's tiny. You should see her wrists. I think it's a backlash, that it took so long for bigger women to be accepted. Now there's Emme - and she's beautiful - but we also need to accept the other end of the scale."
After more than a decade in television, Thome-Smith seems to have found peace with her body and her life. She and her older sister, Jennifer, grew up in Mill Valley, Calif., a suburb of San Francisco, the children of a computer market researcher and a therapist. Thorne-Smith got her start in acting in the mid-'80s when 20th Century Fox held a casting call at her school, Tamalpais High, for the film Lucas, starring Charlie Sheen. After landing the role of his girlfriend, she canceled plans to attend Allegheny College in Pennsylvania that fall and moved to L.A. The next year, she won the role of a day-care provider on Day by Day. And at 23, she began working on Melrose Place, where she had a five-year run as Alison, the girl-next-door type whose life always seemed to be falling apart. In 1997, after deciding to leave that show Thorne-Smith began playing Ally McBeal's Georgia, the wife of McBeal's ex-boyfriend Billy. It's a role she relishes. "Each of us is so different that there's no competition, which is rare,"she says. "Melrose Place was an ensemble, but on Ally McBeal, Calista has always been the leader. It's easy on the rest of us."
Thorne-Smith's personal life has been just as sweet and easy recently. In November, she got engaged to Andrew Conrad, whom she'll identify only as "a scientist." "It's funny," she says, "but it feels too personal to talk about what he does." She does say however, that she met him a year and a half ago through her brother-in-law, a friend of Conrad's from high school, and that they're thinking of next June for the wedding date. "Hopefully you only get engaged once," she says, "and I want to enjoy it."
Though she has dated actors in the past, notably her former Melrose Place co-star Andrew Shue, she says that most of her life and friends are outside the business: "With my close friends, we talk about reading, therapy yoga, chick stuff. It isn't about work." And she sees nothing odd in marrying someone who doesn't work in Hollywood. She is amused by how surprising some of her colleagues find it, however. "When we started dating, I'd bring him to events, and people would say, 'You know he doesn't seem threatened at all!'" she recalls. "And I'd say, 'Well, we're not actually saving lives here, so,
no, it's not threatening to him.'"
