Tyne Daly makes working women persuasive without waiting for the script to give them a crisis. Her partnership with Sharon Gless in Cagney & Lacey makes even routine police work worth an evening.
Fi1m perspective
Tyne Daly can hold our attention while a police investigation offers few surprises. In Cagney & Lacey (1982), her Mary Beth Lacey has an everyday solidity that makes the character matter before anything exceptional happens to her. We grew fond of her because Daly makes the ordinary business of getting on with the job worth watching. The performance gives a long-running programme something to rely on when a particular story does not deliver. We recommend the series chiefly for her and Sharon Gless.
Gless is the essential collaborator here: the friendship between their contrasting detectives is the programme's strongest attraction. Mary Beth belongs to the working mothers who recur in Daly's work, with a job and a family both making demands. Daly lets that everyday responsibility count, rather than treating it as something to get past before the important police business starts. The cases can be routine and the presentation plain. The partnership makes those shortcomings worth tolerating.
The Enforcer (1976) had already cast her as Inspector Kate Moore, the first female partner to Dirty Harry. Cagney & Lacey was the breakthrough, followed by Mama Rose in the stage revival of Gypsy (1989). That part made use of her intensity, though reservations about her singing qualify the praise for her acting.
As Maxine in Judging Amy (1999–2005), she returned to a substantial, sustained television role. These long parts make sense for an actor so good at making women with daily responsibilities seem worth our time. Her later film work includes The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), though our starting point remains the television partnership. Daly and Gless give us enough reason to spend the hours a series asks for, even when its investigations are less rewarding. Allow for some ordinary police work; the friendship deserves the patience.
Biography
Tyne Daly is an American actress. Born Ellen Tyne Daly on 21 February 1946 in Madison, Wisconsin, she trained at Brandeis University and the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. She began her career in summer stock and made her Broadway debut in 1967 in That Summer – That Fall.
Daly is best known for playing Detective Mary Beth Lacey in the CBS series Cagney & Lacey (1982–88), for which she won four Primetime Emmy Awards. She has won two further Emmys, for roles in Christy (1996) and Judging Amy (2003). On stage she won the 1990 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for the Broadway revival of Gypsy; she received Tony nominations for Rabbit Hole (2006) and Mothers and Sons (2014). She is a 2011 inductee into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Other screen credits include The Enforcer (1976), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018).
