I bring to you one of my all time favourite interviews of Nicollette. Really intimate.

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NICOLLETTE SHERIDAN BARES HER SOUL
“I’m not a home-wrecker and I’m not the vixen I played on ‘Knots Landing.’ I’m quite the antithesis of that”
By Mary Murphy

Her heart is broken. And it’s a surprise: Nicollette Sheridan is usually the one who breaks hearts. She sits huddled on a green lounge chair on the patio of her exquisitely decorated Bel-Air house, looking beautiful, without a touch of makeup. To an outsider, she has everything: youth, beauty, fame, wealth. She’s a princess in a Hollywood paradise and yet Sheridan herself doesn’t feel that way. For the past three months, except for working on the NBC movie ‘A Time To Heal‘, she’s been holed up in this palatial prison wondering what went wrong in her love affair with Michael Bolton.

“It’s been a really down period,” she says. “Three months ago, Michael and I slipt up. I spent a lot of time alone. It was a time to reflect. I had to look at my life… It was painful.”

This is certainly not the kind of conversation you would expect from Nicollette Sheridan. On Knots Landing, in which she played petulant vixen Paige Matheson for seven years, she was called The Brat, for speaking her mind and getting away with it. But it’s her rogue reputation with men that follows her everywhere. She’s known for lining up lovers like dominoes, then toppling them over. In the past few years she’s been linked with actor John Ritter, Knots Landing‘s Joey Gian, musician Roger Wilson, and movie mogul Jon Peters. In 1991 she married L.A. Law heartthrob Harry Hamlin, then left him for Bolton.

As if her real life weren’t steamy enough, Sheridan is the subject of endless tabloid speculation. One charged that she was dating Tori Spelling’s boyfriend, Nicholas Savalas. “He’s my [half-] brother!” she says. “They hooked me up with my own brother. You can’t win.”

Off-camera, Sheridan has always affected a tough, wisecraking persona. She’s a Hollywood heartbreaker who used to go off-road biking and dance on table tops. But sitting her in a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt, she’s softer than anyone would imagine.

“They just don’t get it,” says pal Jackie Collins, who met Sheridan when she starred in Collin’s TV miniseries Lucky/Chances. “It’s Nicollette the body, the blonde, and the boys. That’s all they see. They’re wrong. Nicollette is an old soul who is very wise, very smart, and very nurturing of her friends.”

Sheridan has always hidden behind her brazen image. It was easier to be a bad girl than a girl with a broken heart. “Throughout the years, I have really sort of laid low and kept to myself,” she says. “And, of course, therefore I have been picked on a lot, and people could fabricate whatever they felt like saying about me.” Now, she wants to explain herself and set the record straight.

This week, Sheridan is taking the biggest risk of her career when she appears as a woman who suffers a stroke during childbirth and has to reevaluate her life, in ‘A Time To Heal‘. But in just a few hours, she sill fly to Japan, where Bolton is touring, to try to put back together the pieces of her broken heart.

“I love him very much,” she wails, twirling her blond ponytail and looking very much like a love-struck teenager. “You know how they say that opposites attract. Well, Harry and I were opposites. But Michael and I are very much alike. And we are struggling to have the ultimate relationship.”

The past few months have been her own time to heal. She and Bolton have talked, they’ve learned from their mistakes, and they’re trying again.

Sheridan met Bolton in 1991. Hamlin was away and she went to a party with her closet friends, sax man Kenny G and his wife, Lyndie. “Michael was so funny,” shw says, remembering that meeting. “He makes me laugh more than anyone else I ever met.”

It wasn’t, she insists, love at first sight. “We weren’t dating when the press said we were having a relationship. It started off very slowly, but we did start dating soon after my split.”

She remembers her first trip on the road with Bolton. “I stood in the wings,” she says. “I watched him in awe. I couldn’t sing to save my life, so it’s incredible to see how he puts out so much emotion. I love watching him sing. And I love the fact that we’re not both actors and that he is successful in his field.”

She quickly learned how successful. Wherever he goes, he causes a ruckus. She doesn’t. At first, it was difficult. “Women freak out when they see him,” she says. “They just freak out. I can go to the grocery store, to the movies, or walk my dog in the park. It’s getting harder and harder for him to do anything like that. I definitely don’t create the kind of chaos he does.”

Is it threatening? “No,” she says. “I don’t feel threatened. Just scared.”

Mutual friends try to explain the Bolton-Sheridan attraction. “I think they’re perfect together,” says Collins. “He has a very dry sense of humor, and he really cares about her – and not just in a sexual way. He wants to look after her, he’s concerned for her, he wants the best for her.”

So what went wrong in the first round of their relationship? “It’s difficult,” Sheridan says. “Long distance is difficult. And we’re difficult. We’re both very strong and very demanding. We’re both Type A personalities.”

Whatever the intial attraction, whenever it “officially” began, Sheridan’s passion for Bolton quickly soured her marriage to Hamlin. He is still scarred from the breakup, which friends insist “blindsided and traumatized” him. “It was just cheap,” Hamlin told TV GUIDE. “I didn’t want to be involved with that. I was very much in love.”

Sheridan doesn’t want to talk about Hamlin. “We are trying to work on our friendship,” she says, “and we agreed not to talk about our marriage.” When she learns he’s discussed her, she’s shocked, then angry.

“The breakup didn’t come out of left field,” she insists. “We had been in therapy for a year. We were growing apart. It wasn’t due to any involvement with anybody else. It was our own problems that were insurmountable.”

One of the problems, say friends, was their age difference – he was 40 when they split, she just 28. The tabloids suggested that Sheridan left Hamlin because he was “dull”.

She leans forward, clearly uncomfortable. “This is dangerous territory,” she says. “I would say that he is much more low-key than I am. I think it’s easier for me to have a sense of humor about myself than it is for him. And I’m a little more personable and gregarious… But that is definitely all I am going to say.”

“Harry is very sedate,” explains one mutual friend. “He likes to come home at night. He’s intense. Serious. She, on the other hand, is spontaneous. Natural. She’s the kind of woman who will show up for a dinner party with her hair wet, just out of the shower. She’s just so much fun.”

Maybe too much fun. Sheridan’s idea of a good time is taking to the hills of Bel-Air and winding roads of Malibu’s Pacific Coast Highway on her Harley-Davidson. At her infamous bachelorette party – detailed in photographs her brother sold to The Star and foreign tabloids – she jumped of top of a table to dance with a 300-pound stripper and had her breast temporarily tattooed with the letter NNO, for ‘Nicollette’s Night Out.’

“I wouldn’t describe myself as wild,” she says now. “That was a bachelorette party. It was a crazy night. My brother is truly sorry he took the pictures. He’s young. He thought it was funny. I’ve forgiven him. But I’m not a home-wrecker and I’m not the vixen I played on Knots Landing. I’m quite the antithesis of that. I’ve actually had a very few relationships. It’s just that they’ve all been high-profile. That’s all people know about me.”

Trying to change that is one reason she took ‘A Time To Heal‘. “I had to do something to force people to see me in a different light,” she says. Adds Collins: “She’s a wonderful actress, but underrated. Mark my words: She’s going to be a big star.”

The producers of ‘A Time To Heal‘ are gambling on her appeal. Exec producer Susan Baerwald worked with Sheridan four years ago on Lucky/Chances. “I see a difference in Nicollette,” says Baerwald. “I see a mature woman here who takes her life and her craft more seriously.”

It is not the first time a blond bombshell has used a TV-movie to prove she’s a serious actress – Farrah Fawcett did it with ‘The Burning Bed‘ 10 years ago. Sheridan wants to emulate Fawcett’s success. To make it happen, she worked above and beyond the requirements of the role, spending weeks at Northridge Hospital. She worked with physical therapists and even used a wheelchair in her house to try and duplicate her character’s struggle. She tried to simulate paralysis and aphasia (the inability to speak or read or write). “By the time filming started, she knew more about strokes than anybody on set,” says Baerwald.

She also knew more about the emotional ups and downs of the real-life Jenny, on whom the story was based. “I tried to climb into Jenny’s head,” she says. “I spent hours talking to her. She and her husbandwere a working couple, and like all of us, they tended to get busy in their lives, caught up in what is going on. Their marriage wasn’t in trouble, but they had lost sight of what they loved about one another. After the stroke, she did not want to go back to what she had. She wanted more out of life. She was very much the nurturer.”

Nicollette glances over her shoulder. Her mother, British actress Sally Adams, sits a few feet away, reading a magazine. Adams was a teenager when she gave birth to Nicollette and now, they look more like sisters than mother and daughter. “I don’t think it is the greatest thing to have a child when you are that young,” says Sheridan. “It was very tough for her being a single parent. But my mother is a very strong woman. Growing up I had to contend with that and I became very opinionated and tough myself – to keep up with her.”

Sheridan never knew her real father, but she developed a strong attachment to her mother’s long-time lover, Telly Savalas, who died in January. When Nicollette was just 10, they moved to Los Angeles to be with him for the start of Kojak. Altough Telly never married Sally, they had a son, Nick, and he called her his wife. In 1976, three years into Kojak‘s run, they split.

Sheridan looks over her shoulder again. Her mother is walking into the house. “I don’t want my mother to hear me talking about this.”

“Telly was my father,” she says. “He is the only father I have ever known.” Suddenly, she has tears in her eyes. “It’s hard to talk now,” she says, her voice breaking.

For years, Sheridan was estranged from Savalas. “He left my life abruptly,” she said of the actor in 1985, “and as far as I am concerned, he’s out of my life for good.”

Since his death, she’s more reflective. “I loved him very much,” she says now. “He was bigger than life. When I was a little girl he was like Superman. I thought he could do anything. He was just everything – strong, powerful, wonderful, warm, tough, loud, giving, Greek. He was always larger than life. Like Michael, he was so charismatic.”

But everything changed when Savalas and Adams broke up. Adams later filed a $5-million palimony suit, which she eventually settled for a reported $1 million. “I didn’t think I fit anywhere,” says Sheridan. “I felt like an outcast. I couldn’t find a way to go outside my mother’s relationship with him. We were both stubborn. Neither of us was willing to take the first step. Maybe it wasn’t my place to do it,” she says sadly. “After all, I was the child.”

She is crying again. “It was so difficult being shut out by him,” she says. “It hurt a lot.”

She made peace with Savalas the week before he died. “I spoke to him,” she says. “It was very powerful. I got to tell him that I loved him. He told me the same thing.”

The sun is setting over the hills. Nicollette shivers, cold now, and moves into the living room. The doorbell rings. It’s her hairdresser, who has arrived to cut and blow-dry her hair for Japan. Soon, she says, she has to start packing. Sitting on a cream sofa, her knees crossed, her chin resting on a pillow, she seems calmer, full of hope.

“Michael and I had all this time apart to realize the power of what we have together,” she says. “I realize I expect too much of myself, and of other people. It’s unrealistic. That’s what happened with Telly. I wish I could have understood that – rather than being stuck in my own needs. There were a lot of years wasted.” She doesn’t want to make the same mistake again, not with Bolton. “There is just a big love there,” she sighs.