Joanna Cassidy vs. Jean Smart
Battle of the Slightly Crazy Cougars

You hear a lot of bitching, from certain quarters, about how few interesting roles there are for women over forty -- they have to play sexless moms, or dull school administrators, or menopausal police precinct captains, if they want to work. But maybe the actors who are doing all this bitching just need to broaden their horizons -- and by that, we mean express their willingness to play broads. Jean Smart and Joanna Cassidy both prove that if a female actor of a certain ripeness can come to terms with her inner cougar, she will have no shortage of either work or fun.

Cassidy's been a bit of a coug for as far back as we remember -- which isn't actually all that far, considering that one of her earliest gigs was on Shields And Yarnell. (Really.) But for a whole class of people who've seen Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead on TBS about eighty thousand times (and...may have also paid full price to see it in the theatre, what?), Cassidy made an indelible impression as Rose Lindsey, the uniform-manufacturing executive who doesn't realize until too late that she's spent the summer employing a teenager! Rose is pretty chill about the revelation, much as she is in general; sure, she has an unfortunate severe red bob and a tendency to overshare about her romantic life, but she's also thoughtful and generous and is a cool boss to Christina Applegate's Sue Ellen. Rose teaches Sue Ellen how to take on responsibility in a job and exhibit a good work ethic, and Sue Ellen teaches Rose to design uniforms for fast-food counter help in day-glo gold and turquoise, which actually wasn't such a bad idea back in 1991. Couldn't Sue Ellen have hooked Rose up with one of her brother's burnout friends? Rose probably would have really enjoyed that!

If not as Rose, you probably know Cassidy best as Margaret Chenowith, Brenda's selfish jerk of a mother on Six Feet Under. Clearly set up to stoke our sympathy for Rachel Griffiths's Brenda -- what hope did Brenda have of turning out normal if this nightmare was her model for womanhood, and so forth -- Margaret was a little bit awesome. Yeah, she made some bad choices, and we're glad she's not our mother, but she always seemed to be having fun, her boisterous guffaw a relief in contrast to Brenda's intractable dourness. Margaret had a rewarding career and a sufficiently happy marriage to Robert Foxworth's Bern that she wed him twice, and after he died, she decided to coug it up with a sexually ambiguous French art teacher. We should all be so joyfully retired.

Cassidy has well over a hundred credits to her name -- on the big screen, in films as disparate as Blade Runner and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Dangerous Beauty; on the small, guesting on TV shows that run the gamut from Melrose Place to Falcon Crest to The District, where she crossed paths with...

Oh hell yes. Both Cassidy and her rival here, Jean Smart, even appeared in the same episode of The District, although it appears as though Cassidy (one year younger than District star Craig T. Nelson) played his platonic friend, and Smart (fifteen years his junior) played his love interest. Obviously.

Smart has more in common with Cassidy than a shared episode of a third-tier, long-cancelled CBS police procedural; she's also a TV veteran, having appeared in the original cast of Designing Women (wisely bailing before Jan Hooks and Julia Duffy were parachuted in). She played Aileen Wuornos more than a decade before Charlize Theron got around to it, joined the parade of Frasier love interests on the eponymous show -- a sorority that includes Oscar nominees Laura Linney and Patricia Clarkson -- and was so memorable as the somewhat negligent mother of a latchkey kid on The Facts Of Life that just seeing the episode title ("Next Door") on her IMDb credits brought it back with complete clarity, even though we surely haven't seen it in twenty years, at least. And her sexy southern purr makes her a great choice as a disembodied voice, which is probably how she got cast as the narrator on Baby Talk (remember?), and as Dr. Possible, Kim's mom, on the popular Disney cartoon Kim Possible.

What of Smart's coug cred, you may ask? Shame on you for forgetting her delightfully inappropriate role in Garden State. As Carol, the blowsy mother to Peter Sarsgaard's Mark, she got up late and condoned pot smoking and slept with one of Mark's peers -- and not just that, not just a kid her kid's age, but one who had a job that required him to wear a suit of armor. Carol was equal parts horrifying and bad-ass: classic cougar.

Which cougar deserves to vanquish the other and claim the highest, flattest rock on which to preen and sharpen her claws? Really, it's no contest. Cassidy may be the veteran in this matchup, with twice as many credits to her name as Smart has been able to amass. However, Smart is the most bracing and fun thing about the current season of 24, as First Lady Martha Logan. And Cassidy is in theatres this week in Larry The Cable Guy: Health Inspector. Hey, at least it's not Larry The Cable Guy: Mammographer.

Advantage: Smart