Nancy Dussault (Muriel Rush) From "Too Close for Comfort": Then & Now

[Brian Damage]

Nancy Dussault is best known as playing Ted Knight's wife Muriel Rush in '80s TV series "Too Close for Comfort."

http://www.tmz.com/tag/Nancy%20Dussault/

[catlover79]

She still looks great! Besides Muriel Rush, I remember her most for her turn as the sassy hooker who intrigues Wojo in the first season of Barney Miller.

[HuntingtonM15]

She looks great for 73!

[catlover79]

Didn't she co-host Good Morning America at one point?

[Marvo301]

Originally Posted by catlover79

Didn't she co-host Good Morning America at one point?

Nancy was a co-host of GMA from 1975 - 1977.

[catlover79]

Originally Posted by Marvo301

Nancy was a co-host of GMA from 1975 - 1977.

Thanks! Was she before or after Sandy Hill?

[Marvo301]

Originally Posted by catlover79

Thanks! Was she before or after Sandy Hill?

Sandy Hill replaced Nancy Dussault when she left GMA.

[catlover79]

Originally Posted by Marvo301

Sandy Hill replaced Nancy Dussault when she left GMA.

Thanks - I take it that's when Joan Lunden came in.

[Marvo301]

Originally Posted by catlover79

Thanks - I take it that's when Joan Lunden came in.

Joan Lunden joined GMA as a reporter in 1976. She filled as a co-host for Sandy Hill when Sandy was away on assignment. She was so popular with the audience that it didn't take long for her to be promoted to permanent co-host.

[Big3sCompanyFan]

Originally Posted by HuntingtonM15

She looks great for 73!

Wow, I thought she was older.

Too bad the show couldn't have lasted longer and they don't have more seasons on DVD.

[mstewart]

She looks great.

Nancy Dussault was quite underutilized as a television actress. She was on the The New Dick Van Dyke Show in the 70s. Her role of Muriel Rush on Too Close for Comfort was not written very well.

[Big3sCompanyFan]

Originally Posted by mstewart

She looks great.

Nancy Dussault was quite underutilized as a television actress. She was on the The New Dick Van Dyke Show in the 70s. Her role of Muriel Rush on Too Close for Comfort was not written very well.

Why do you say that??

I thought the character of Muriel Rush was great.

[TMC]

Originally Posted by mstewart

She looks great.

Nancy Dussault was quite underutilized as a television actress. She was on the The New Dick Van Dyke Show in the 70s. Her role of Muriel Rush on Too Close for Comfort was not written very well.

This article is from June 1986, which was around the time that Too Close for Comfort was retooled as The Ted Knight Show:

The Women’s Liberation movement passed right by Nancy Dussault. She was always too busy working to pay attention to a cause that had increasing women’s participation in the work force as one of its primary goals.

Dussault was a daddy’s girl who grew up happy, secure and able to smile on cue. She even went to college to be a schoolteacher. Her life was spent doing what she was told and never really thinking about it. Eventually, she became a Broadway singer but only her profession, not her attitude, changed.

Life caught up to her five years ago when she first performed the lead role in a summer stock production of the musical I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road.

“This show has changed my life,” says Dussault, who also co-stars with Ted Knight in the TV series Too Close for Comfort. “This is a show about a lady who is fighting for her life, fighting for her independence. It really follows my age, my pattern, my life.

“I was always so busy doing things that I didn’t sit down and say ‘How do I feel about things?’ ” says the actress, who will turn 50 this month. “But this (musical) really makes you want to reveal yourself. I have to open myself up, and sometimes that is really hard.”

Dussault will again star in I’m Getting My Act Together when it begins previews at the Burt Reynolds Jupiter Theatre on Tuesday. It will run Thursday through July 20.

The musical, written by Gretchen Cryer and first performed off-Broadway in the early 1970s, deals with the relationship between a feminist singer and her manager. The singer is launching her comeback and, against the objections of her manager, decides to incorporate new material into her act. The manager is surprised by the singer’s newfound independence and does not quite know how to handle the situation.

“This show is more about relationships than anything else,” Dussault says. “It’s about people’s inability to talk to each other. It’s about men’s fear of intimacy. It’s a show about a lady who is fighting for her life, fighting for her independence.

“A few men get really angry still,” she says. “They find (the singer) offensive, they find it jarring. But I always get letters and flowers from women who say ‘Thank God someone came out and said that out loud.’ It brings up unpleasant things that have to be discussed.”

The show has changed many of the relationships in Dussault’s life; those with her parents, her friends and her husband. It made her more independent and willing to take control of her own destiny, she says. It may even have saved her relationship with her husband, Valentine Mayer, who also directs the show. Dussault married Mayer a year and a half ago.

“Val and I had reached a point where we didn’t know what was to happen,” she says. “The show really made me re-evaluate my life, what I wanted and how I was going to get it. I realized I had all these choices in my life, which was really scary. But when I came back from this show I was able to make a commitment to him.”

“I think the show really made me start growing up emotionally,” she says. “But it is unsettling for the people around you. They want you to change, they want you to grow, but it’s unsettling for them. And that’s what I’m trying to do in my life. I have started speaking out more and I’m speaking up more, and I think it shows in my work.”

The second song Dussault sings in I’m Getting My Act Together is a ballad called Smile. It is about a woman who spent her childhood smiling for her father. The woman’s father didn’t want her to act on her own, he didn’t want her to think. He just wanted her to smile.

“That’s just the way it was in my life,” Dussault says. “Daddy always wanted me to smile. He wanted me to grow up and be just a sweet little thing.”

Dussault did not grow up as her father had envisioned, but that was more by accident than anything else.

“I went to school to be a schoolteacher,” she says. “I’m just like a nice little person who happens to be able to sing. When I was 20 I was on the Broadway stage.”

She says that at the time “I didn’t even know how I got there.”

But today, Dussault makes no bones about how she got there. “I’m good,” she says simply. After graduating with a degree in voice from Northwestern University in 1958, she moved to New York and found work in an off-Broadway production of The Boyfriend. She later made her Broadway debut in Do Re Mi, and was nominated for two Tony awards for her performance in What’s New at the Zoo? and Bajour.

“I wasn’t driven,” she says of her Broadway career. “It was real easy for me to find work at the time. It’s just keeping it going which is difficult.”

Yet she seems to have no problem keeping her career going. She co-starred on Too Close for Comfort for five years, and will start production soon on a new TV series called The Ted Knight Show. She spent a year and a half as an anchor on ABC’s Good Morning America and spent two years as a regular on The New Dick Van Dyke Show.

Dussault, who considers herself primarily a singer, also spent two seasons with the New York City Opera Company performing in such productions as Carmen, The Mikado and The Cradle Will Rock.

“I had always wanted to go into opera and to be in serious music,” she says. “But I found that I really didn’t fit in. I would go to work in jeans and sneakers, and they would be in pearls and high heels. And this was just for rehearsals.”

It is almost ironic that someone so involved in the theater, a profession that depends on communication, was never able to express her feelings. Dussault says it was one of the reasons she did not do a nightclub act. Until she started performing in I’m Getting My Act Together she was unable to share herself fully with the audience, she says.

“To be successful in a nightclub you have to show a side of yourself to the audience,” she says. “You have to open up and show a great deal of yourself. That’s probably why I never did a nightclub act.

“But in this show you have to do that,” she says. “It hits so close to home. That’s one of the reasons it never gets boring doing this show, because it is always hitting you in another area of your life.”

The show may also have spoiled her for other productions. After finally finding a musical where she is required to give depth to her character as well as sing, she says it will be hard to return to roles such as Maria in The Sound of Music.

“How boring,” she says. “I mean, Maria is such a square. All those musicals have leading ladies who are all Julie Andrews types. The perfect ladies.

“That’s what I love about doing this show,” Dussault says. “You see pretty much all parts of this woman. You see the funny part, the good part, the selfish part, the angry part. You may not like her, but you get a chance to see the real person.”