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A tailor-made role

While many female actors can find the going tough once they hit 50, Mimi Rogers found someone who wrote a part specifically for her.

LOS ANGELES - However glamorous a female actor looks at 50, finding a role that suits her can be a challenge. For Mimi Rogers, though, her latest job came ready-made.

The creators of Fox's new comedy The Loop wrote the part of Meryl with Rogers, who turned 50 in January, in mind.

A high-powered executive for an airline, Meryl has more than professional interest in the company's young new hire, Sam (Bret Harrison). He, though, is busy struggling to balance the demands of his first real job with the still party-heavy lifestyle of his friends and roommates.

Meryl's constant come-ons to Sam are clearly not politically correct, but then, not much is in this anarchistic look at the conflict between work and play that debuts tonight on Fox.

"There's a fine line between tasteless and crass, and just out-there, offbeat sensibility," Rogers says. "This is sophisticated lunacy. . . . If you are looking for a very broad, silly comedy, it works on that level, but if you are looking for something intellectually subversive, that's really there, too."

Co-creator Pam Brady, also a writer and producer on Comedy Central's South Park, says Rogers was right for the part.

"She has this amazing ability to be someone who's in control, very serious, who could be very intimidating, but then could be incredibly playful and weird," Brady says. "She has these dual qualities, both in her life and in her work, which she can kind of slap on and off, and that's just hilarious."

Rogers believes that a character's outer appearance is key to the inner sensibility.

"I usually try to get very involved in the look," she says, describing the suit Meryl wears in the first episode.

"On the surface it looks like a business-appropriate suit, but it's a kind of poisonous green with little bits of leather and metal hardware, and it's very, very fitted, so it's kind of vamped up," she says.

Rogers is married to producer Chris Ciaffa, and they have two children. But she's still inundated with questions about her previous husband, Tom Cruise.

She handles them with aplomb.

"Any time anything happens with him, I get a call: "What do you think of Katie? What do think about this?' . . . "Yeah, he's having a kid. Of course I think it's great. What do you want me to say?' "Do you think he'll be a good father?' How do I know any more than I would know what kind of parent you would be," she says, explaining her responses to such media prying.

She supposes that Nicole Kidman, Cruise's second ex-wife, gets similar questions. She gently reminds people that, "I'm one ex-wife removed" and that her brief marriage to Cruise ended in 1990.

"I've had two kids since then," she says. "I can barely remember my own name let alone be remembering something almost 17 years ago."

But she's resigned to the curiosity. "Will it ever stop? I don't know. I guess not."

Rogers has worked almost continuously in film and television since 1981 when she nabbed a recurring role as a night-school teacher at the end of the first season of Hill Street Blues.

She seems untroubled by the ageism than can limit female actors' careers.

"There is a certain awareness on my part that when it comes to leads, I'm not the actress they are going to look at because I'm way too old . . . but I guess having family - that kind of kills your ambition," she says. "I don't really care about being a big movie star."

[Last modified March 15, 2006, 01:42:36]