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LOS ANGELES -- Jessica Walter is tickled pink, having just done something she hasn't done in more years than she can remember. She has had her fingernails painted a shade of dusty rose on the advice of her manicurist. "I should have done my toes, too!" Walter beams. She was letting her nails dry at Robertson Boulevard's Kinara Spa, where we treated her to some pampering.
Examining her freshly painted fingers, the veteran actress of film (Play Misty for Me) and television (Trapper John, M.D.) decides it's probably a good look for her current character, Lucille Bluth. Walter, 64, plays the snooty, financially strapped matriarch of Fox's Arrested Development, which returns for its third season Monday (8 p.m. ET/PT). Due back on the set the next morning to shoot a courthouse scene, she advises keen-eyed viewers to look for her nail color switcheroo at some point during the second episode.
After years of low-cuticle esteem (she's a regular swimmer at UCLA's pool, where the chlorine, she says, does damage), the actress just might show up with colorful nails on the Emmy red carpet Sunday, where she expects to wear a black-and-white couture gown -- a step up from the powder-blue Anne Klein pantsuit she wore to last year's awards.
"Who would ever want to go into a store if you could have something made for you?" Walter asks before being reminded that a couturier's high price might be a deciding factor. "Well, I'm not paying," she says with a chuckle.
Walter has good reason to glam it up this year. She is up for best supporting actress -- exactly 30 years after she won the Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a limited series for her role in the NBC Mystery Movie series Amy Prentiss. "I know it sounds corny, but honestly, I really feel like I've already won just being invited to the party," she says.
Walter's lucky charm for the evening will be her husband of 22 years, actor Ron Liebman.
Walter and Liebman, 68, share homes on the East Coast, but when working on Arrested Development, she keeps a rented apartment in Brentwood not far from her "little doll," daughter Brooke Bowman, 30, a development exec for ABC Family.
When it comes time for her pedicure foot massage, "I could get addicted to this," Walter sighs, saying her feet "so needed this" after yesterday's 13-hour workday.
Putting up with Arrested's Bluth family is never easy.
Lucille could no doubt benefit from her own visit to Kinara. Her character starts off the season with postpartum depression that began 32 years ago with the birth of her youngest child, Buster.
As for Arrested's edgy humor, Walter tries not to worry that it might be too much for America to swallow.
"As far as I'm concerned, we can never push things enough," Walter says. "We try to do it all with class and elegance."
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