Candice Bergen on New Film 'Book Club,' 'Murphy Brown'

With 21 Emmy, Oscar and Golden Globe honors, does Candice Bergen, 72, once TV’s top-paid talent, feel a burning need to leave her Architectural Digest-featured New York home and homebody husband to be a Hollywood workaholic again? “Not at all. No,” she tells AARP. “I don't like to work a lot, just every so often.” Yet she’s back big time, unable to resist the fun of reviving her smash 1988-98 hit Murphy Brown this fall and having a blast with a fantastic cast (Jane Fonda, 80, Diane Keaton, 72, and Mary Steenburgen, 65) in the new film Book Club, the AARP set’s answer to Sex and the City.

“My character is a trial judge and very no-nonsense, very focused, very rigid in her outlook,” Bergen says. “In their book club for women, they read Fifty Shades of Grey, protesting that it has no literary merit — and then the book ends up throwing all their lives into a sort of pleasant chaos.”

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Like the CBS president who tried to replace Bergen with younger Heather Locklear in Murphy Brown, executives were leery about the grownup cast of Book Club. “The studio didn’t want to go with older actresses,” she told the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “They wanted younger, vibrant actresses, but there’s nobody more vibrant than us. My age now is the best I’ve ever felt, aside from the fact that I have fake hips. …

“Some friends of mine are very protective about keeping their age a secret, but I don’t understand why, frankly. It’s very out of date. We should feel privileged to grow older. I’m 72, so what’s the big deal?”

Candice Bergen and Diane Keaton in "Book Club."

Melinda Sue Gordon/PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Book Club raises serious issues about aging in a funny, upbeat, empowering way, and it points out the cultural impact of grownups in book clubs. “Middle-aged women are the mainstay of literary culture in America,” says Bergen, whose memoirs won raves from literary critics, “and I mean, books are hanging by a thread, no question. Women, older women especially, will like the movie because it reflects their lives.” She loves the movie’s message. “What the movie encourages is, life doesn’t end as soon as we’re programmed to think it does,” Bergen told the Inquirer. “First of all, value your female friendships. Leave yourself open to possibilities.”