Another place ER was good about diversity that doesn’t get talked about much was age. Sure, okay, the actors playing doctors tended to be relatively young. But not so the rest of the cast. And it wasn’t just patients of all ages, either. It felt like just about the only show I’ve seen that really seemed to acknowledge from day one that not everyone there would be young and hot. Ellen Crawford was only on about a third of the show’s episodes, but the ones she was on include the pilot and the finale.
If you only know her as Nurse Lydia Wright, well, you’re not alone there. She’s got a TV and movie career going back to the ’80s, but it’s mostly of the “did one episode of Murder, She Wrote” sort. She has one Broadway credit, also from the ’80s, and none of my usual references have much information about her. She apparently did some work for the Utah Shakespeare Festival, but how she supported herself for the decades before she started acting—she was over forty when ER debuted—I cannot tell you.
Possibly she was a housewife; she’s married to character actor Mike Genovese, who we’ll get to next week, but both her pages and his list a question mark for when they were married. Like so many other minor show business figures, there just isn’t much information there. I’ve written before about how I’m technically okay with that, given I do not actually feel entitled to every little detail of her life, but I’ll admit to still being cruious about things like how she got into acting and why.
It’s worth noting that her character actually was fired at one point. There was a plot point about how, to save money, Dr. Romano (Paul McCrane, coming up in three weeks in this spot) cut hours of a bunch of senior staff. When she and a few others protested, they were fired. Because the hospital needed to run like a business, not like a service, and her incredible skill level and knowledge base weren’t valued as much as saving the hospital a few bucks by hiring younger, less experienced nurses. I feel like this is a lesson we’re still not learning.
Carol Hathaway may have been a flashier, more noticeable character, but Ellen Crawford as Lydia Wright was one of the people who helped flesh out the emergency room as real. This is something the best shows set in places like hospitals and things do. I can name several shows along those lines, shows that had a recurring staff of characters who may or may not have even had names half the time but were always there because a fire department or police station doesn’t have new staff every week. And the very best of those shows started developing the smaller characters as well, leading to things like Lydia’s actually getting married in the ER itself.
Show you value my knowledge base; consider supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!
