Her Midlife Miracle

She doesn't cook, and she isn't well organized She laughs easily and likes hanging out in cargo pants. No one would describe her as high-strung. In fact, Marcia Cross is pretty much the antithesis of Bree Van De Kamp, the fierce, tightly wound perfectionist she plays so convincingly on Desperate Housewives. While Bree finds solace in her carefully polished silver and artfully arranged peonies, "I really have to force myself to tidy up around the house," Cross says with a laugh. "I wish I could do all the things Bree does. But those are not my strong suits."

Here's another difference between the two: At 44, Cross is pregnant with twins, having married money manager Tom Mahoney, 49, last June in a church wedding that included 240 guests, seven flower girls, and a five-foot-high wedding cake layered with roses and lilacs. The babies are due at the end of April, just as Housewives stops shooting for the season.

Cross's pregnancy is not being written into the show — the plotlines were established too far in advance — which means her burgeoning belly has to be hidden from view. She's been wearing more sweaters on camera, though now "we're just shooting chest and above," she says. Adds fellow Housewife Teri Hatcher: "We have a lot of jokes about what to hide Marcia's pregnancy with. A few days ago, we used an entire gingerbread house."

Now that Cross is expecting, her face and figure are fuller: Her breasts, she exclaims, are "ginormous." The extra curves make her look more approachable and vulnerable than the sewing-needle-thin ladies of Wisteria Lane. This afternoon, she's wearing a black cotton scoop-neck shift with an Empire waist as she sits in a health food restaurant near her home in Los Angeles, sipping chai latte. The snooty, stiff way she holds her neck as Bree — as if she's just caught the scent of something decidedly unpleasant — is completely absent. Instead, Cross is an intent and careful listener, and unlike Bree, who wears a smile so fake a diamond couldn't scratch it, she often breaks into peals of hearty laughter. "She does a kind of whoop with her laugh that you can hear all across the soundstage," says Felicity Huffman, who plays the beleaguered Lynette on Housewives. "Bree is a master at hiding how she feels; with Marcia, you know what's going down right away. She wears her heart on her sleeve."

At one time, that was almost literally true. Before she met her husband, Cross says, she was involved with a string of men who had no interest in marriage or family and who broke her heart. Then, three years ago, "I decided to stop picking the wrong men," she says. And yet, she adds, "I'd given up on finding the right one."

Around that time, she also started to feel that her acting career had peaked. Cross had achieved some notoriety as the psychotic doctor Kimberly Shaw on the nighttime soap Melrose Place, which she followed with a role in the TV drama Everwood with Treat Williams. But she was not optimistic about the future: "I remember thinking, Wow. OK, maybe I'm done. I started to feel like I didn't want to waste my life if I couldn't get to a better place professionally."

With the prospect of two dreams — an acting career and a happy marriage — fading, Cross decided to take action. A few years earlier, she'd begun work on a master's degree in psychology.

"I was definitely heading toward becoming a therapist," she says now. And man or no man, Cross was determined to adopt a child. She might miss out on marriage, but no way was she going to miss out on being a mother.

Which is why, when she was sent the script of an ABC pilot called Desperate Housewives, she wanted to read for a small part, that of Mary Alice Young, the deceased narrator. "I thought it would be a great part-time job for a single mom." Cross flashes a smile and then says, "Obviously, it didn't work out that way."

Obviously not. The hit show is now in its third season, and Cross and company are seen by an audience of more than 21 million viewers each week. Suddenly, everything is falling into place for Marcia Cross, in a way so perfect that not even Bree could have planned it better.

It's taken Cross by surprise, in part because conventional wisdom says these things tend not to happen to women her age. "And I'm getting to be well over 40," she points out. On her 15th birthday, Cross recalls, she went to one of her sisters in tears, feeling devastated. "I said, ‘I'm 15, and I'm halfway there.' I thought my life would be over at 30 — when my life didn't even start until then."

Cross is reluctant to take credit for her recent run of good fortune. "It's not like you just put your mind to it and it happens. I was stuck in my acting career. I was stuck in my personal life, and it was painful. I had to look good and hard at myself." Still, she does allow that if you "take some responsibility for what you've created, then you have the power to change it."

Try an issue of Good Housekeeping FREE!
Reprinted with permission of Hearst Communications, Inc.