(Kay remarried eight years ago to an engineer, Lee Snyder. Suddenly, after having cancer, I was in the position of having to care for someone else. “Marg and her dad were close,” says Snyder. Two months after Snyder’s breast cancer went into remission, Helgenberger’s father, Hugh, was diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis. “I didn’t want everyone to think I was going to die,” she says. There’s an anecdote that both mother and daughter tell that corroborates Snyder’s Midwestern toughness and determination, her matter-of-factness in the face of adversity: Two weeks after the returned home from her mastectomy, Snyder was mowing the lawn – with a push mower. But even though I wept at the news of the diagnosis and the double mastectomy, I never doubted her ability to survive. “It made my mother bald and sicker than a dog. “The chemotherapy was terrible,” recalls Helgenberger. Snyder assured her daughter it was nothing – she was a nurse after all – but “nothing” became, over the course of several days, a life-threatening diagnosis of cancer. Helgenberger was a junior at Northwestern University when she received a phone call: Her mother had discovered a lump in her breast. It was that attitude that carried both mother and daughter through Snyder’s diagnosis and recovery. Her daughter seconds that emotion: “My mom survived because she has a tremendous work ethic and a great deal of faith,” says Helgenberger. “Ninety-nine percent of recovery is attitude,” says Snyder. Helgenberger’s mother, Kay, is a 23-year breast cancer survivor and proud of it.
that raise tens of millions of dollars for breast cancer research. Today it is one of hundreds of golf-related events across the U.S. The couple started the tournament five years ago at the suggestion of a friend whose wife had survived breast cancer. The funds are allocated to support the fight against breast cancer. Proceeds of Marg and Alan’s Celebrity Weekend benefit the cancer centers at Jennie Edmundson Hospital in Council Bluffs and Methodist Hospital in nearby Omaha. Helgenberger is the first to admit that celebrity tournaments are a dime a dozen, but this one is close to her heart. Dodge Riverside is located about 60 miles east of North Bend, Nebraska, where Helgenberger grew up and where her mother, Kay Snyder, still lives. “The tournament” is Marg and Alan’s Celebrity Weekend, a two-day charity golf event the couple hosts each September at The Dodge Riverside Golf Club in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “And it’ll give me a chance to get in some serious playing time before the tournament.” She’s renovating her family’s house, planning son Huey’s fall bar mitzvah and, best of all, getting ready to head to Pebble Beach for a long weekend with Alan and Huey, who is now 13.
More evidence bolstering Helgenberger’s reputation as a down-to-earth chick largely unchanged by Hollywood success: ‘CSI,’ which has garnered a slew of Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, is currently on hiatus – “but I’m not,” laughs Helgenberger. At the end of the street, a mile or so away, the horizon is bound by a serene strip of the Pacific Ocean.
The choice of restaurant is hers, Provence Café on Santa Monica’s chic but laid-back Montana Avenue, where ultra-thin women scurry down the street with rolled yoga mats tucked under their arms and clothing stores sell plain white T-shirts for several hundred dollars. Helgenberger arrives for lunch on time, with no cell phone in sight. This is also a mandatory procedure when interviewing celebrities, who generally want to be portrayed as friendly and unpretentious (few actors want the word to get out that they’re high-maintenance and self-involved).įollow the evidence. In ‘CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,’ the top-rated CBS show in which Marg plays Catherine Willows, a Las Vegas stripper turned investigator who traded her tassels for a thermocycler, the governing mantra is follow the evidence.
#MARG HELGENBERGER TODAY SERIES#
The necklace was a gift from Alan Rosenberg, her husband of 14 years and the star of the TV series ‘The Guardian.’ “Alan gave it to me for Mother’s Day,” she says. She’s wearing a T-shirt and white jean jacket, a pair of caramel-colored capris and a pair of tiny gold hearts on a gold chain around her neck they say ‘beloved’ in Chinese, she explains. Marg Helgenberger arrives for lunch with wet hair, explaining that she’s just come from a spinning class. She helps nail the bad guys as the star of TV’s number-one drama, ‘CSI.’ Now Marg Helgenberger is taking on a new foe: the disease that almost claimed her mother. MARG HELGENBERGER: THE CSI STAR TEES OFF AGAINST BREAST CANCER