He'd done Broadway theater, a few short-lived TV series and nearly 30 movies, from "Philadelphia" and "Scent of a Woman" to "Revenge of the Nerds II" and "Robocop 3."

She'd done Euripides and O'Neill at Yale, pounded a beat on "Hill Street Blues," taken temperatures on "St. Elsewhere," prosecuted sex crimes on "Equal Justice," been spurned by Robert De Niro in "Falling in Love," mothered Reese Witherspoon in "Pleasantville" and flirted with Kelsey Grammer in "Frasier."

Then, last year, she was cast as Lois, the intrepid blue-collar mom on Fox's "Malcolm in the Middle," and he got Josh, the permanently frazzled White House aide on NBC's "The West Wing."

And suddenly, with Kaczmarek appearing on the cover of TV Guide as the linchpin of the year's best comedy and the New Yorker magazine declaring Whitford "fabulous" in the season's best drama, things changed.

He gets hailed on the street by people who say, "Hi, Josh!" She gets a studio limo to take her and the couple's 3-month-old son to the set.

A few weeks ago, shortly after they were asked to be joint presenters at the Writers Guild Awards - "We're like this couple act now," Whitford says - a stylist arrived at their home with armfuls of drop-dead designer dresses, all in Kaczmarek's size.

"That hasn't happened to me before," she says, grinning at the memory. "And it was really, really fun."

After his acting classes at Juilliard and hers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Yale School of Drama, after all the stage work, the "After-School Specials," the small parts in big movies and the promising series that went nowhere, he's doing a literate, adult drama and she's doing a boisterous sitcom that fits her like one of those designer dresses.

"We're so lucky, it's disgusting," Whitford says.

Show Biz Gathering

Kaczmarek, 44, and Whitford, 40, are having a light lunch - one bowl of chicken-matzo-ball soup, two spoons - at their favorite coffee shop, Victor's. It's a bustling room on a busy Hollywood corner, the kind of casually show-bizzy gathering place where a pair of customers who seem to be plotting a murder turn out, upon further eavesdropping, to be writing a woman-in-jeopardy TV movie.

Just a few weeks ago, Whitford and Kaczmarek moved into a house not far from here. Pretty much everything that could go wrong did: appliance disasters, plumbing tragedies, scratched walls, broken moldings and, the final indignity, a three-week wait for phone service.

"I told the phone guy that if he called me one more time (to change the service date), I was going to strangle him," Kaczmarek says.

She didn't, though, which is one difference between Kaczmarek and her sitcom character: Lois might actually have gone for the guy's throat.

The "Malcolm" family, which has no last name, is a little like "The Simpsons" in 3-D. Lois and her husband, Hal (Bryan Cranston), have four boys who specialize in various kinds of Bart-like misbehavior. Far less patient than Marge Simpson, Lois alternates between dire threats and wisecracks that would have made Roseanne proud.

"Lois can be pretty scary, but Jane makes her likable," says the comedy's co-executive producer, Al Higgins. "Without her, I doubt that the character would work. You feel that she really cares about these kids she's screaming at."

Growing Up in Greendale

"One of our favorite things as children, all four of us, was one of us screaming, 'Mom's putting on her girdle!' And we would run up to Mom's bedroom, where she would be struggling into her girdle, and one of the kids would have her bra on his head, playing Mickey Mouse."

For another thing, Kaczmarek has spent years playing women with more grit than glamour. Though she did get a call-back for the Glenn Close role of the seductive but psychotic girlfriend in "Fatal Attraction," most of her parts have been closer to the one she played in 1984's "Falling in Love": the somewhat drab wife whose husband, played by De Niro, falls for a radiant Meryl Streep.

"I've been playing middle-aged since I was 26," Kaczmarek says with a shrug.

Her own life, on the other hand, hasn't lacked for romance. On her first date with Whitford, 10 years ago, she accompanied him to an opening-night cast party in New York - he was doing Shakespeare in Lincoln Center - and he rode her home on the handlebars of his bike.

Wisconsin in Common

Jane was visiting from Los Angeles, where she was a regular on ABC's "Equal Justice" for the single season it lasted. Brad was a few years away from his first regular series role, a cynical private eye on the don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it NBC sitcom "Black Tie Affair," known at one point in its brief life as "Smoldering Lust."

Though he's done his share of classical stage roles, Whitford says filmmakers most often see him as an obnoxious yuppie. It's a far cry, he says, from the arty bohemian image he cultivated at Connecticut's Wesleyan University, where he was an undergraduate, and Juilliard.

Josh Lyman, his "West Wing" character, is something else again: a slightly wonky, more than slightly sarcastic workaholic who thinks fast and talks even faster.

Intense and impatient, Josh is the sort of character who seems to live on Chinese take-out and sleep under his White House desk. Whitford lets on, however, that a romantic entanglement is in the cards. Naturally, it's someone from the office: Josh's equally smart-mouthed assistant, Donna (Janel Moloney).

Even for Whitford, who appeared on Broadway in "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin's "A Few Good Men," learning Josh's pages and pages of rapid-fire dialogue is like cramming for a monster exam every week.

"And Aaron writes in every 'um' and 'yeah,' so you'd better know every word," he adds. "It's pretty brutal."

Kaczmarek: "He shows up at home some nights exhausted."

Hard Work, Bad Show

"Men" tanked just a few weeks into the 1998-'99 season. Sorkin, who had started working on the new drama, quickly made his move.

"With all due respect to that other show, I was delighted Brad was available," Sorkin says gleefully. "He can do comedy, drama, anything you throw at him."

For his part, Whitford observes that good actors work just as hard on flops as they do on hits. And you never really know which is going to be which, he adds.

"I'm just doing what I've always done," he says, "except now a lot more people are watching."

Kaczmarek and Whitford's offstage life has been as eventful lately as their careers. Too eventful, in fact.

In December, their 2-year-old daughter - named after Kaczmarek's grandmother, Frances, who turned 100 last year - acquired a brother, George. Because of what turned out to be a temporary problem with his immune system, the baby had to stay in the hospital long after Kaczmarek went home. Until his immune system began functioning properly, his parents weren't even allowed to hold him.

"We were told we might have a very, very sick baby, and we were frantic," Kaczmarek recalls. "It was 10 days of hell."

Even now, with a healthy infant, an active toddler and a new house, life isn't exactly peaceful.

It helps, Kaczmarek says, that she's able to take George to the set and nurse him in her trailer during breaks. "Malcolm's" producers have been as accommodating about the baby as they were in the weeks before he arrived, when they'd shoot her in close-up or behind a giant frying pan to hide her pregnant profile.

Protecting Children

Asked if they'd ever take Frances or George to an audition, Whitford, who is given to a certain Josh Lymanesque overstatement, replies: "I'd rather give them crack pipes."

Over the last of the chicken soup, Kaczmarek says that, with both of their shows having been renewed for a second season and their careers finally stable, they've been thinking about adding to their family.

"Yeah, I'd like to have more children," she says, a little dreamily.

More children, plural? As in more than one more? As in the four her own parents had, or the four on "Malcolm in the Middle"?

In reply, Kaczmarek just smiles.

Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 28, 2000.