A few days before HBO’s “The Gilded Age” Season 3 finale drew 5 million US viewers, Emmy and Tony Award-winning actress Christine Baranski, who plays Agnes van Rhijn in the historical drama, described her character as “a slow reveal,” a woman who “is from that mold of tough ladies who do what they need to do and play the hand they were dealt. It wouldn’t be until the end of the event (held at the Elms Mansion in Newport), that I would realize that while she was talking about Agnes, she was, in my humble opinion, also describing her own unexpected and slow-to-be-revealed-story: with a Polish-American upbringing, a significant loss in her childhood, a family connection to the Gilded Age, and a chance encounter with the show’s creator, Julian Fellowes.
Baranski spoke to the Rhode Island press, her admiring fans, and members of her family, prior to the main event, The Preservation Society’s 2025 Summer Lecture Series (The John G. Winslow Lecture: Christine Baranski in Conversation — “The Gilded Age” and Beyond). She revealed early on in the press conference, and later in the lecture, that she has a deep connection to her Polish-American heritage. Her grandparents were Polish stage actors and she grew up always having actors and performers in her home, in Buffalo, NY. She then told the audience about a meaningful moment with her father, who passed away when she was eight years old. After a performance of Polish singing and dancing, when the singers were “waving their scarves to say goodbye, I saw tears going down his face and he was shouting, “Bravo,” and I was so embarrassed that my father was behaving this way. I’d never seen him cry and I kept saying, ‘Tatuś, tatuś (father in Polish), stop it.’ And he was so moved by these performers it was a moment when I realized how powerful performers are… It’s my fondest memory, my deepest memory of my father, and to this day I can’t tell the story without getting moved.”
During both the press conference and the lecture, Baranski was also asked about her experience filming the series in Newport. She responded by saying, “It is enchanting, it’s sort of magical for the actors, we all pinch ourselves to think how lucky we are to be on a show where we get to be part of this extraordinary world that’s depicting this time in American culture and history.” When NBC 10 WJAR asked, “Can you think of a way that filming in Newport and working in Rhode Island is different from your experiences going anywhere else?” Baranski laughed, “Well you do have a bunch of really nice houses here. Newport is just so unique, I said to my cousins, my God it feels like we’re in Europe! But of course they did want to replicate European aristocracy so in a way, it’s not quite America; Newport is parenthetical, isn’t it? You have 18th-century architecture in Washington DC and Philadelphia, but this is something else.”
Adding to the enchantment of filming in Newport was the discovery of the family lineage connecting Baranski’s late husband, Matthew Cowles, to “The Gilded Age.” He was, as Baranski recalls, the “great grandson of Joseph Drexel, and his Aunt Bessie’s Elizabeth Wharton Drexel portrait by Giovanni Boldini is hanging in the Elms. It was rather thrilling when I discovered it; I did not know that her portrait was there. I didn’t know initially that Matthew was from a Gilded Age family because he took me off on his motorcycle after a play and he had a black leather jacket and smoked unfiltered cigarettes and just seemed more like a James Dean type. And over the course of many years I discovered his family history. In fact, there were these rather beautiful family portraits and I had them restored and cleaned, and they’re hanging in the family homestead in Bethlehem, Connecticut. It’s Joseph Drexel who formed the banking company with his brother Anthony and J.P. Morgan. [Drexel] was also a philanthropist, he was a founding member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Opera, and he collected musical manuscripts that are now in the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, and my late husband’s cousins are here tonight.” (For those of you who watch this show, can you believe this?!)
I asked Baranski what she had found most surprising or what she had learned by being part of this show. She said, “The years after the Civil War seriously changed America. We went from an agrarian to an industrial society rather quickly. I didn’t realize how much money the North had after the Civil War; there was this boom of wealth, and change was happening at such an extraordinary pace, so “The Gilded Age” has been a learning experience, a history lesson for all of us, and I happen to love studying history so that’s just been tremendous. I think Julian Fellowes, being an Englishman, knows more about American history than 99% of Americans. I think it’s a public service to people to watch this show and to understand that the beginnings of American capitalism started here.
Close to the end of the press conference, a podcaster asked, “How do you choose your roles?” Baranski responded, “You know, it’s not as though you have ten offers on any given day and you say, ‘Gee- I wonder which one I’ll take.’ Things come along and you go with it — you don’t have an infinite number of choices as an actor. I am such a fortunate actress to be on a show of this caliber, produced by HBO, and that’s now going to go into a fourth season. It’s funny, it’s almost luck — except people want you for your reputation or your skill set, and you fall into things. I remember being at an HBO after party and I’d heard rumors that Julian Fellowes wanted to do an American version of “Downton Abbey” about the Gilded Age in America and I got so excited I had the temerity to go up to this estimable man and introduce myself and say, ‘If you ever do it I would love to be in it; my late husband was from a Gilded Age family.’ And then when it finally happened, here I am sitting under Aunt Bessie’s portrait at the Elms and thinking, ‘Well how did this happen?’ It does seem sort of magical, doesn’t it?”
I have to say, the magic is palpable.
During the event Bill Tavares (Communications Manager at The Preservation Society of Newport County) thanked the Rhode Island Film & Television Office and its Executive Director, Steven Feinberg, for “turning our mansions into stars.” The Breakers, the Elms, the Newport Casino (and many more locations) all play a role in The Gilded Age, and I, for one, can’t wait to see where they go to film Season 4!