Mississippi Girl

This article was in last Sunday's Parade magazine. Just wanted to pass along this beautiful Southern belle.

Sela Ward's Southern Charm

The stucco patio of the restaurant Orso is one of Sela Ward’s favorite havens in L.A. But today we’re under attack.“Would you prefer to go inside?” she offers, as a breeze blows through the fruit trees overhead, releasing another hailstorm of berries. One pings off the rim of her glass of iced tea. “It’s just that it’s so lovely out here,” she cajoles, her soft voice sweetened with the slightest Mississippi drawl.“Let’s stay,” I concede, as a nut bounces sky-high off my balding pate. How could anyone ever refuse Sela Ward?

A rare combination of Southern charm and Northern grit—you don’t win two Emmys for two separate hit TV series (Sisters and Once and Again) by hiding your light under a bushel—Ward, 53, sits back in a black T-shirt and jeans and luxuriates in the beauty of the garden. With a new movie co-starring Dylan Walsh and Penn Badgley due out Oct. 16—a remake of the 1987 thriller The Stepfather—and half a dozen other projects in the works, Ward doesn’t get much downtime.“I was such a late bloomer, I’ve had to do a lot of catching up my whole life,” she says. By “late,” she means 27, when she moved to L.A. to start acting. Ward had first headed to New York to work in advertising, then quickly segued to modeling, which she credits with giving her a lifesaving skill in Hollywood: “I got very well-prepared for rejection,” she says. “You’d walk in one door and the photographer would say, ‘Oh, my God, you’re fabulous,’ and you’d walk in the next and they’d say, ‘Uh, thanks very much’—and that would happen three or four times in only one day. I developed a thick skin early on.” Yet, try as she might, the girl still comes across as sensitive and refined.

“Growing up in the South, it’s all about manners and propriety,” Ward says. “Every weekend, I went to charm school in the Sears department store, where I learned such fabulous tidbits as how to blot your face with a damp cloth to remove some of the powder and give yourself a little glow.” She also learned another wily strategy: “how to make a man feel like he’s the center of the universe.” That turned out to be the inverse plan of action employed by her husband, venture capitalist Howard Sherman, on their first blind date. “He took me to an L.A. Raiders football game, and what I loved about him right from the start was that he took me seriously. He was interested in what I had to say and what I thought. That’s every man’s key to a woman’s heart. Women want to be cherished,” Ward says.Today, the couple live in L.A. with their two children—Austin, 15, and Anabella, 11. They also have a farm in her hometown of Meridian, Miss.

“When I go down there, I feel like I’m wrapped in a warm blanket of community and belonging,” Ward says. “I love the heat, the smells, the sound of the frogs and the cicadas at dusk. Oh, and those little bottles of ice-cold Coke—that’s my guilty pleasure.” In fact, for her milestone 50th birthday, Sherman invited 80 guests over for grits, quail, and assorted Dixie delicacies. A big sign on the barn read: SELA IS TURNING 50—IT'S ALL GOOD!“It’s the only thing I could think of to say about it,” Ward admits with a resigned laugh. “We even put it on the paper fans—because in the South, honey, you have got to have fans!”

by Robert Masello