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" &amp;quot;I have to dye my hair,&amp;quot; Amy Brenneman says, laughing. &amp;quot;Here, you want to see?&amp;quot; She pulls off the scarf circling her long brown curls, revealing a small army of gray invaders. &amp;quot;Go ahead and write about it.&amp;quot;  At 43, the actress has an enviable Hollywood r\u00E9sum\u00E9, a happy 12-year marriage, two well-adjusted young children, and two feet firmly on the ground. When her hit TV show Judging Amy, which ended in 2005, was first making it big, her mother \u2014 a Hartford, CT, judge whose job inspired the show \u2014 worried about the impact on her daughter. &amp;quot;My mom kept saying, &amp;#039;You&amp;#039;re going to change! Hollywood&amp;#039;s going to change you!&amp;#039; She was so nervous.&amp;quot; Mom needn&amp;#039;t have worried. Brenneman may be stepping back into the TV limelight with the Grey&amp;#039;s Anatomy spin-off series Private Practice, but she won&amp;#039;t let it go to her head, with or without the silvery hairs.  For her, family comes first \u2014 husband Brad Silberling, 44, a successful film director, and their children, Charlotte, 6, and Bodhi, 2. They are the ones who help her keep her perspective, she says. &amp;quot;I think if I was only an actor and I didn&amp;#039;t have my family \u2014 well, for those folks, the thought of never being a huge star is probably terrifying,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;For me, it&amp;#039;s only mildly terrifying.&amp;quot;  Hazel-eyed and pretty, Brenneman has none of the airbrushed sheen that actresses post-40 begin to acquire \u2014 though she freely admits to having tried cosmetic fillers and Botox. &amp;quot;Not my thing, in terms of actually paralyzing the facial muscles,&amp;quot; she says about Botox. &amp;quot;I have weird little thoughts and a weird little face that can reflect them, and I suddenly felt like I couldn&amp;#039;t do my thing. But as for fillers, yeah, I am totally down with collagen. I admit it; I use it.&amp;quot;  Although she occasionally splurges on impulse shopping sprees \u2014 &amp;quot;I can really waste a lot of time on the Internet&amp;quot; \u2014 she says she doesn&amp;#039;t relish the prep for red-carpet appearances. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m just really a lazy homebody,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I would go to twice as many events if I didn&amp;#039;t have to get dressed. But having to deal with all that hair and makeup stuff? That&amp;#039;s enough to make me just want to stay home and eat trail mix.&amp;quot; Though slender and sleek, she&amp;#039;s not concerned with living up to super-skinny standards. &amp;quot;Please, I&amp;#039;m a carb addict,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And somehow, I&amp;#039;ve convinced myself that whatever I eat, at home, after 10 p.m. doesn&amp;#039;t count. I know I&amp;#039;m lucky that I don&amp;#039;t gain weight all that easily, although ever since I had my kids, I do have these sort of....&amp;quot; She gestures at her midsection. &amp;quot;Flaps, I guess you&amp;#039;d call them. But, hey, what are you going to do, right?&amp;quot; She laughs, more happily than ruefully. &amp;quot;Amy has a shocking lack of vanity that disarmed me,&amp;quot; says Silberling, who let out a whoop of laughter when told for which magazine she&amp;#039;s being interviewed. &amp;quot;Oh, she is such a good housekeeper!&amp;quot; he says sarcastically. &amp;quot;I wind up being the Felix Ungar to her Oscar Madison.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not the neatest person in the kitchen by any means,&amp;quot; Brenneman says in her defense. &amp;quot;But what really gets me is if somebody \u2014 and by that, I mean my husband \u2014 uses a peanut butter knife and then leaves it in the sink. It&amp;#039;s just sticky and gross. But oh, he&amp;quot;ll laugh when he reads that, because he&amp;#039;s just going to think, Excuse me? Who do you think you are?&amp;quot; The couple first met on the set of the long-running TV series NYPD Blue in 1993, when she was a cast regular and he was directing several episodes. &amp;quot;I couldn&amp;#039;t put her in that category of emotionally consumed actors I had met,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;But I thought: She&amp;#039;s attractive, energetic, bright \u2014 there has to be something wrong with her.&amp;quot; For her part, Brenneman recalls, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know if it was love at first sight, but when I saw him, I remember thinking, OK, there&amp;#039;s the future. It was that kind of moment.&amp;quot; When the pair began dating, they had a delicate issue to confront. Silberling had been involved with the young TV actress Rebecca Schaeffer when she was killed by a stalker in Los Angeles in 1989. His 2002 film Moonlight Mile, about a man coping with the tragic death of his girlfriend and then bonding with her parents, was largely based on that painful experience.  Brenneman knew about Silberling&amp;#039;s past. &amp;quot;I just loved the bad boys and the crazy people back then,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And so I just immediately thought, Oh I&amp;#039;m attracted to him because he&amp;#039;s a depressive and he&amp;#039;s had this tragic event. But it only took about five minutes of talking to him to know he was not defining his life by this tragedy. He was healthy.&amp;quot; After their careers had taken off \u2014 Silberling had directed the Meg Ryan weepie City of Angels, and Judging Amy had earned high ratings \u2014 the couple tried to start a family. Ultimately, they turned to in vitro fertilization, which worked after one attempt. Having a second child proved more difficult. &amp;quot;The journey toward him was long,&amp;quot; Brenneman says. &amp;quot;It included me thinking about using donor eggs, and four rounds of in vitro. I wound up thinking, OK, I&amp;#039;ll try this one more time, and when it doesn&amp;#039;t work, we&amp;#039;re going to go to Guatemala and adopt. But then, amazingly, it worked. So now I feel so blessed to have both of my kids.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s why Brenneman would only return to TV \u2014 after a two-year break \u2014 as part of an ensemble. &amp;quot;Judging Amy was the greatest job ever,&amp;quot; Brenneman says. Besides being the star, she was also cocreator and producer. &amp;quot;But it sucked a lot of my life away. In this dance we do \u2014 this working-motherhood dance \u2014 Judging Amy was my child more than my actual child was. And I don&amp;#039;t want to do that to my children \u2014 or myself \u2014 again. We worked too hard to have them for me not to be around.&amp;quot; Her son, Bodhi, is &amp;quot;the Buddha boy,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s something kind of resolved and settled about him.&amp;quot; Charlotte, she says, is so far blissfully not a child of Hollywood. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s 6 going on 4 \u2014 she&amp;#039;s naive in the best ways. She&amp;#039;s also very affectionate, very emotional, and very strong-willed; sometimes, she doesn&amp;#039;t realize I&amp;#039;m the mom.&amp;quot;  Brenneman herself occasionally feels the same way: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a pretty insecure mother,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not insecure in my love for them, but I always think that other parents know what they&amp;#039;re doing and I don&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot; She tries to adhere to the strict no-TV, no\u2013video games policy advocated by her children&amp;#039;s school but can&amp;#039;t quite pull it off: &amp;quot;They watch a little bit of TV,&amp;quot; she says, lowering her voice to a mock-guilty whisper. On Private Practice, she plays a woman who is often too hard on herself. Violet, an emotionally wounded psychiatrist, works at the Los Angeles wellness clinic that has beckoned the brilliant, vampy neonatal surgeon Addison Montgomery of Grey&amp;#039;s Anatomy away from the trauma and drama of Seattle Grace Hospital. In the pilot, Brenneman&amp;#039;s character is shopping alone in a grocery store, hair pulled back, glasses on, when she encounters the handsome ex-boyfriend who wouldn&amp;#039;t commit to her \u2014 with his beautiful new wife. &amp;quot;Violet is a person who basically believes in talk therapy and was pretty anti-meds,&amp;quot; says Brenneman. &amp;quot;But because of this jilting, she herself is going through a clinical depression, so we&amp;#039;ll see her self-medicate. I&amp;#039;m glad to be able to explore that topic.&amp;quot; She adds: &amp;quot;I myself have been in therapy. Repeatedly.&amp;quot; Now Brenneman is particularly excited to be working on a show developed by a writer \u2014 Grey&amp;#039;s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes \u2014 who incorporates characters of all races while rarely mentioning the color of their skin. &amp;quot;I think that&amp;#039;s so great,&amp;quot; she says, recalling that during the Judging Amy days she \u2014 along with legions of the show&amp;#039;s fans \u2014 felt that her character, Judge Amy Gray, should have a romance with her clerk, the handsome Bruce Van Exel, played by Richard T. Jones, who is black. &amp;quot;We were pushing for me and Bruce to be a couple,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But we weren&amp;#039;t supported in that; the network said no.&amp;quot; But she has broken the rules on TV before. During her first \u2014 and only \u2014 season on NYPD Blue in 1993, she famously did a nearly nude scene that was a controversial and precedent-setting moment in broadcast TV. Brenneman was clad in some underwear during the scene \u2014 albeit of the pre\u2013low-rise vintage. &amp;quot;A friend of mine said, &amp;#039;Oh, I love that scene, and the attention to detail \u2014 and you have that dirty white bra.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Brenneman feigns mortification: It was her own bra. &amp;quot;Now, I would say, &amp;#039;Somebody get me a nice bra and panties.&amp;#039; And not like my big granny panties.&amp;quot; Ultimately, her convictions were more important than her lingerie: &amp;quot;What I thought was, I don&amp;#039;t want to not do something because I&amp;#039;m afraid to do it,&amp;quot; she says.  A Harvard graduate who did stage work in New York before landing her NYPD role, Brenneman has always been willing to go out on a limb \u2014 even when it comes to taking on her own industry. &amp;quot;People are always saying: There are no good roles for women over 40! There are no good roles!&amp;quot; she says, putting on a panicked sky-is-falling voice. &amp;quot;Tell me something I don&amp;#039;t know. But that doesn&amp;#039;t mean you give up; you&amp;#039;ve got to keep going. My revelation isn&amp;#039;t that you can&amp;#039;t have it all, but that there are different stages and ages. Right now, I feel pretty lucky. I&amp;#039;m happy with what I&amp;#039;ve got.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/inspirational-stories/interviews/a17390/amy-brenneman-1007/>