From 1982 to 1988, viewers watched Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly hunt for bad guys as detectives Christine Cagney and Mary Beth Lacey on the crime series Cagney & Lacey. Each episode saw Cagney and Lacey solving crimes, but the series also explored their personal lives, with Cagney being single and Lacey a married mother. Cagney & Lacey was a great success during its time on air; Daly won four Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, and Gless won two, meaning that they dominated the category for six years.
These days, Gless and Daly are still both working actors, and they're still close friends, too. Read on to learn more about their lives today.
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Daly and Gless have a tight bond.
Michael Putland/Getty ImagesGless and Daly have stayed very close since their time working together. In 2021, Gless was interviewed by CBS Sunday Morning and shared that she had plans to go to dinner with Daly the next week. Gless' husband, Barney Rosenzweig, who was a producer on Cagney & Lacey, said, "There's hardly a morning that goes by that Tyne Daly doesn't call my wife."
The two also recently came together in 2021 for a Cagney & Lacey reunion on the webseries Stars in the House, which benefitted The Actors Fund.
Gless has been in some big TV dramas since.
CBS Sunday Morning / YouTubeSince her detective days, some of Gless' biggest roles have been in the TV shows Queer as Folk from 1999 to 2005 and Burn Notice from 2007 to 2013. The 78-year-old's most recent on-screen part was in the long-running BBC series Casualty. She's also acted on the stage over the years.
She wrote a memoir.
Rodin Eckenroth/Getty ImagesIn 2021, Gless' memoir, Apparently There Were Complaints, hit shelves. In it, she writes about her personal life, experience in Hollywood, and struggles with alcohol that led her to get sober. Speaking about the title in an interview with Today, Gless explained that it was something she jokingly said when an acquaintance asked why she had been in rehab. “I was trying to make light of it, so I said, 'Apparently, there were complaints,'" Gless said.
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Daly hasn't slowed down either.
Kathy Hutchins / ShutterstockOutside of Cagney & Lacey, Daly, 76, is known for the series Christy and Judging Amy—she landed two more Emmys for the roles. More recently, she appeared in the Murphy Brown revival, on Grey's Anatomy, and in the movies Spider-Man: Homecoming and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. She has also continued acting in theater. In 1990, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for Gypsy, and she was nominated for Tonys again in 2006 for Rabbit Hole and 2014 for Mothers and Sons.
"I will say that a lot of American films being made today are not made for actors," Daly told RogerEbert.com in 2018. "And beyond that, being in a film, any film, is like being frozen in time. I like being on the stage better."
She is a mother and grandmother.
Craig Barritt/Getty Images for AudibleDaly was married to her husband, actor Georg Stanford Brown, from 1966 to 1990, and they have three daughters together. "We have three children and four grandchildren, and he quit me like a fool when he was 50," Daly toldThe New York Times in 2014. "But something happens to men when they’re 50. They get horribly scared. Even my brother [the actor Tim Daly] turns out to be a man. It’s so disappointing."
They both recognize how groundbreaking their show was.
Earl Gibson III/WireImage via Getty ImagesDuring her interview with Today, Gless talked about how Cagney & Lacey changed TV through the then-taboo topics it discussed, such as child abuse, breast cancer, and alcoholism. "I think at the time when we were doing it, we did not know the power that we had or the impact we were having on the women of Los Angeles," she said. "It was the first drama ever to star two women."
As for Daly, she spoke about the show during an interview with Katie Couric in 2014 and shared how much it meant. "We had a rocky road," she said. "We were up and down a lot, but it became clear very soon that there were two really good jobs on television for women and one was Cagney and the other was Lacey."
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