PASADENA, Calif. — There’s something to be said about having nothing. According to actress Melissa Leo, growing up without made her the woman she is today. Leo, who earned the Academy Award for her role as the fight manager-mother in “The Fighter,” says, “I had a great blessing in that I grew up in a family with very little means. So when as a young actor I got hungry, it was not unfamiliar.

“That willingness to do without, that willingness (to know) it wasn’t about having whatever I wanted to eat in a day, it was what I NEEDED to eat in a day. That’s how I was brought up. That is absolutely what gets me sitting here today.”

Actually what gets her sitting here today is another mouth-gaping performance by Leo. She plays the tough comedy-club owner and impresaria in Showtime’s “I’m Dying Up Here,” premiering June 4.

Executive produced by Jim Carrey, the series is about the burgeoning comics of the ‘70s – many of whom are the top rib-ticklers of today. Though loosely disguised, many of them are recognizable. And while the legendary Mitzi Shore ran Hollywood’s famous Comedy Club in those days, Leo insists she’s not playing Shore.

“I have to say my first response when I was invited into the show and saw the script and read it, I was delighted. But I was SO surprised they were asking me to play Goldie. So I was a little daunted. And there’s a pilot episode scene where I’m having cocaine and am quite riled, I thought, ‘Ewwww, I don’t know …”

But Leo insists it’s the roles that frighten her the most that she relishes. “When we feel that fear that we can’t do something it needs to be done, I think,” says Leo who’s wearing a tweedy jacket with black stripes, a black lace top, draped by four necklaces.

“Because we wouldn’t be afraid if it weren’t so important. And so then you just screw your courage to the sticking post and march forward. I reference my upbringing of not having much. You cannot have anything if you keep skirting around the fire. When you go through that blaze that’s when the gifts arrive. When you skirt round it that’s all you’ll ever have,” she nods.

“They think, ‘Oh, such confidence!’ No, it’s acting. That’s acting. So every day I work it’s that process of surmounting what’s terrifying. It’s a blessing to me.”

Before she was 10 her parents divorced and her father drifted out of the picture. Her mother, who was working on her graduate degree in early childhood education, moved Melissa and her brother to Vermont on a property owned by several people.

It was not a commune, she laughs. “We found ways to live there together and in later years when many of us moved away, we found a way to still share the property together and use it. Like any group, it was a complicated thing, but not a commune in the sense of a common ideology or anything like that, more in the sense of a social way of living; what makes sense.”

Her father’s departure had a long-term effect on her, she thinks. “When my dad left was confusing to me, that set up some difficulty later in life of how that gets dealt with,” she says.

“A couple of parents in the house is a really good thing for a child growing up, two different people. Then when I had my own son, we had some pretty tough years.”

The tough years were precipitated when she and her son’s father split up. “I was not going to continue residing with his father,” she says. “And finding out how our family would get shaped those were pretty tough years. A lot of it was the five years I was on ‘Homicide: Life on the Street,’” she sighs. Her son is 29 and doing graduate work in fine art in Frankfurt, Germany.

She says she’d love to engage another sweetheart, but doubts that will happen. “It’s quite a mess out there and I’m not a man, never been a man, but it feels like it’s a bit harder. A woman partners when she’s younger, or she doesn’t. I would love to find somebody who’s a big, strong, strapping man who would let me also be whoever the heck I might be.”

CHEF COOKS ON ‘AMERICAN MASTERS’

Jacques Pepin, the puckish French chef, will be the subject of a documentary on PBS’ “American Masters” Friday. Pepin, who left home as a teenager to become a chef has hosted 14 television shows and written scores of cookbooks. The biggest mistake Americans make when they’re toiling away over their KitchenAids is they forget to sample their wares, says Pepin.

“There is a paradox, because you write down the recipe, and when it’s written, you say, ‘This is the way it has to be done.’ When, in fact, it’s never the way it has to be done in order for that dish to taste the same each time, which is what a recipe is. And you have to change it each time because you never have the same chicken, the same stove.

“You cook on gas, electric, with copper, aluminum, it’s humid, it’s dry. You’re in a good mood. You’re in a bad mood. So things change along the way, so you do have to taste as you go along the way, eventually, so that the dish tastes the right way at the end. If you were to take note as you go along the way, it would be different, slightly different each time. This is the type of adjustment that you have to do. Tasting is very important, yes.”

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER ACT

Mother Tish and daughter Brandi Cyrus will be sporting a new design TV show premiering on Bravo Thursday. The mother and half-sister of Miley Cyrus, insist there was no mention of the more famous Miley when they pitched the idea of “Cyrus vs. Cyrus” to the network.

“As a matter of fact, they pretty much, behind the scenes, said, ‘We don’t need that. We are looking for you two doing your show, your interior design. This has nothing to do with your family,’” says Tish Cyrus, who’s had an on-again-off-again relationship with husband Billy Ray.

“I think they were shocked when we came and organically throughout these episodes, every member of the family somehow trickled in,” she says.

COMEDY SKEWERS SACRED COWS

Evelyn Waugh’s first comic novel, “Decline and Fall,” stumbles its way onto the Acorn TV streaming service this month to fab effect.

The satirical three-parter deals with an ineffectual divinity student who’s transported to an unpronounceable school in Wales where he must apply the wisdom he’s accrued at Oxford, which – it turns out – is mostly nil.

Spiking such sacred cows as education, religion, German architecture, the nouveau riche, and the British class system, “Decline and Fall,” offers plain, old-fashioned belly laughs along with some high-brow philosophy. It stars Jack Whitehall, David Suchet, and our own Eva Longoria as the gorgeously rich mother of one of the students.

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(Luaine Lee is a California-based correspondent who covers entertainment for Tribune News Service.)

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©2017 Luaine Lee

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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