Julianna Margulies

The script mistake that saved a career

Julianna Margulies was supposed to die within the first ten minutes of the pilot episode of ER. That nurse character with suicidal tendencies was not meant to last past the introduction, but the test-audience reaction was unexpectedly strong. Steven Spielberg saw something in her and asked the producers to keep her alive.

In 1994, the actress went from a supporting player on a one-day contract to earning astronomical sums per season. That Carol Hathaway earned her first Emmy and put her at the center of a television phenomenon that drew millions of viewers every Thursday night. But Margulies didn't want to be just another cog in NBC's endless machine.

She turned down a check for $27 million to renew her contract in 2000. She preferred the risk of theater and independent film over the cushy, million-dollar rut of a fictional hospital. Many in Hollywood thought her career would end right there.

And they were completely wrong.

The weight of carrying a series on her back

After a few years of minor projects and horror films like Ghost Ship in 2002, the industry came knocking again with a script nobody wanted to touch. In 2009, she accepted the role of Alicia Florrick in The Good Wife. It wasn't just a legal drama but a study of public humiliation and power behind the scenes.

For seven years, she worked fourteen-hour days and carried the weight of 156 episodes in which her face appeared in nearly every shot. Margulies learned to act with her eyes because her character was a woman who had to hold back her emotions in front of the press cameras. As a result, her performance became minimalist and precise.

In 2011, she won her second Emmy as a lead actress for this role. But the production was not free of technical and personal friction that led to the departure of other cast members. She always maintained an iron discipline on set, which some colleagues described as excessively strict.

Discipline was her way of surviving.

The years of technical maturity

In 2021, she published her memoir Sunshine Girl, revealing a nomadic, chaotic childhood spent between New York, England and France. That early instability explains her obsession with control on set and her ability to dissect scripts with surgical precision. For her, work was never about fame but about structure.

That same year, she joined the cast of The Morning Show to play Laura Peterson. In this Apple TV+ production, she once again showed that her strength lies in verbal sparring in confined spaces. But in 2024, it was confirmed that she would not return for the show's fourth season after several controversies over comments she made on a podcast.

Prestige doesn't always guarantee staying power in the streaming era.

Despite its ups and downs, her name remains linked to excellence in serialized television over the past three decades. Margulies has earned a total of ten individual Golden Globe nominations and has won the Screen Actors Guild Award eight times. Her contract for the final season of The Good Wife included a production clause that let her supervise the final cut of every episode.