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Crazy Swoosie

Um, no, "normal" isn't the word that comes to mind.

"I get life fright, I don't get stage fright," Kurtz says. "I can get up in front of 2,000 people without a nerve in my body and feel just great, but, when I set out to drive to Santa Monica, I start shaking in the car."

Her new television role is typically nutty: the cynical, eye-patch-wearing Aunt Lily on ABC's "Pushing Daisies." The witty, colorful new comedy series, which melds fantasy, romance and mystery, is about a pie-shop owner (Lee Pace) with the macabre gift of bringing the dead back to life with a single touch. With a second touch, however, he kills them for good. The show also stars Kristin Chenoweth, Anna Friel and Chi McBride.

Kurtz's darkly comic character is half of a famed synchronised swimming duo, Darling Mermaid Darlings, an act which was deep-sixed when Lily lost an eye after a mishap involving flying cat litter. Their careers sadly washed up, Lily and sister Vivian (Ellen Greene) developed agoraphobia and won't leave home.

"Lily is the most eccentric character I've ever played," the actress says by telephone from her home in suburban Los Angeles. "When I read the script, I went bananas."

The multiphobic, one-eyed Lily is bitter and shut-down, but Kurtz insists that there's more to her than that.

"Lily is very isolated but very passionate, lusty and sexual," she says, "but she has no way to release that in the life she's living. She's definitely a little dark, because she's harboring a lot of unresolved mental baggage. But I know a couple of big secrets about her that will be revealed later."

Viewers know Kurtz best as the divorced Alex on "Sisters" (1991-96) and as dying mom Madeleine on Showtime's "Huff" (2004-06), both straightforward characters. Her specialty, however, is wild, off-centre parts, like the so-called laziest woman in the world, who refuses to leave her bed, in the cult film "True Stories" (1986).

"I'm usually the one they call when they need somebody that's had shock treatments," she says with a laugh. "'Oh, let's get Swoosie!"'

That has added up to a long list of credits for Kurtz, who has portrayed a host of comic and dramatic characters on both stage and screen. On Broadway she won Tonys as the flamboyant Gwen in "The Fifth of July" (1979) and as the schizophrenic wife Bananas in "The House of Blue Leaves" (1986). Last year she earned a Tony nomination as a British upper-class seductress in George Bernard Shaw's "Heartbreak House," as she also had for playing the mother of an abducted child in "Frozen" (2004).

Kurtz also has received nine Emmy nominations for her extensive television work, winning one award for a 1990 appearance on Carol Burnett's "Carol & Company." She is less known for her feature films, which include "Bright Lights, Big City" (1988), "Reality Bites" (1994), "Citizen Ruth" (1996), "Liar, Liar" (1997) and "Cruel Intentions" (1999).

The bicoastal actress, who also maintains an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, is trying hard to get her life in balance. In other words, Kurtz explains, after years of neglect she's devoting more attention to the personal side of things.

"When I was younger, it was all about work," she says. "I've taken off my blinders and am looking at real life, appreciating it more and, hopefully, living it more. I've tested the waters and had blind dates with a couple of guys out here, but I'd rather be alone than with somebody I'm not totally comfortable with."

Never married, the 63-year-old Kurtz hasn't given up hope.

"I would love to find a guy that I could be with for the rest of my life," she says. "I'm not giving up."

In her experience, Kurtz adds, romances with fellow actors aren't likely to work out.

"When you're working, he's not," she says. "When he's working, you're not. If someone's doing better than you, it's extremely tough - I'm very competitive!"

Ironically, she says, it is when she's playing a character on stage or screen that she feels most authentic and alive.

"It's such a high, slipping into someone else's psyche," Kurtz says. "It's like a drug, an addiction. You become this other person that was inside you all along but that you didn't know was there."

Which is why she thinks her distinctive name is a perfect fit. An only child born while her father, Air Force pilot Col. Frank Kurtz, was overseas in World War II, she was named in honour of the B-17 he flew, which had been nicknamed "The Swoose" after the popular Kay Kyser song, "Alexander the Swoose," about a character who was half-swan and half-goose.

"When I grew up, it finally hit me how apropos that name truly is," Kurtz says, "because I am a hybrid. Sometimes I'm a swan, sometimes I'm a goose. I've got all these different characters inside me."

Under the heading "strange coincidences," in his final years Col. Kurtz, also formerly a diving champion who won a bronze medal at the 1932 Olympics, underwent a botched surgery that cost him the sight in one eye and left him with an eye patch.

"That's why I see Lily as not so comedic," Kurtz says. "I know what my dad went through. It was so tragic, because this guy's life had been flying planes and diving from 30-foot platforms. My mom and I helped him through. It was a very rough time."

After studying at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Kurtz moved to New York and built a formidable career for herself. She originated stage roles in memorable plays such as Wendy Wasserstein's "Uncommon Women ... and Others" (1977) and, on television, co-starred with Tony Randall in the almost-landmark situation comedy "Love, Sidney" (1981-83).

Kurtz has made numerous television movies, including HBO's "And the Band Played On" (1993), in which she played a woman dying of AIDS. Perhaps the most memorable, however, was "One Christmas" (1994), an adaptation of a Truman Capote story that starred Katharine Hepburn in what proved to be the legendary actress's final screen appearance.

She found Hepburn "prickly," Kurtz admits, "but she was very generous to me. You really knew where you stood with her. I was over the moon the last day, when we finished shooting. She turned to me and said, 'You did good.' Coming from her, that was huge."