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‘Cagney & Lacey’s’ Sharon Gless stars in ‘Burn Notice’

At a Hollywood meeting, a quarter-century ago, Sharon Gless had an instant reaction.

“I said, ‘Well, I don’t like the guy with the beard,’ ” she says.

The guy was producer Barney Rosenzweig, and the beard was temporary.

“I thought it was courtly,” he recalls.

Less temporary were her doubts. They persisted, even after she became a star of his “Cagney & Lacey” series.

“The first year, we fought like cats and dogs,” Gless recalls. “Our fights were famous.”

And then?

— “Cagney & Lacey” became a hit. It ran for six full seasons and won two Emmys as best drama series. Each year, one of its stars won the best-actress Emmy — Tyne Daly four times, Gless twice.

— Gless and Rosenzweig have been married since 1991. TV series are like that, he says, cauldrons of anger and romance.

Lately, Rosenzweig has been a keeper of “Cagney & Lacey” history. That includes a DVD and a book.

Gless doesn’t have much time for history. Unlike most actresses at 64, she’s been busy.

She was a regular on Showtime’s “Queer as Folk.” She played a hard-nosed U.S. secretary of defense in the British mini-series “The State Within.” Now she plays the hypochondriac mother of a fired spy in cable’s “Burn Notice.”

Series offers have always flowed to Gless. For “Cagney & Lacey,” she hesitated.

“I knew I would love working with Tyne,” she says. “And I knew it was a good script. [But] actors are not the best judges of material.”

At it turned out, “Cagney” would be historic.

The idea started, Rosenzweig says, when he read the Molly Haskell book: “From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies.”

One statement intrigued him, he says: “She said there had never been a buddy picture for women.”

So he hired Barbara Corday and Barbara Avedon to write one, about cops. The script lingered for five years. Rosenzweig and Corday married in 1979. Their project became a TV movie in ’81.

Daly was always lined up for Lacey and CBS wanted Loretta Swit to play Cagney.

The movie scored big in the ratings. Swit returned to “MASH”; Rosenzweig cast Meg Foster as Cagney in a spring trial run of the series. For the fall season he was told to re-cast the role.

Earlier, he says, Corday had suggested Gless. “I thought, ‘yeah, that’s interesting,’ but she didn’t grab me.”

Later, he and Corday were watching a mini-series about old Hollywood. “There was this girl playing Carol Lombard and I said, ‘Now, THAT’S Chris Cagney!’ Barbara Corday hit me and said, ‘Dummy, that’s Sharon Gless again.”‘

Gless had grown up around Hollywood. Her grandfather (Neil McCarthy) was an entertainment lawyer, working with Cecil B. DeMille, Louis B. Mayer and Howard Hughes.

She signed a studio contract in 1974 and got the usual cute-blonde roles in “Faraday and Company,” “Switch” and the final years of “Marcus Welby.”

But she had a showy role in “Turnabout,” with a husband and wife accidentally switching bodies. Better roles followed.

Glass replaced Lynn Redgrave in the “House Calls” series, which is one reason she had no interest in replacing Foster. “I wanted something of my own,” she says.

So she hesitated. She disliked the guy in the beard. They fought fiercely; then life changed.

The show ended in 1988. Rosenzweig, now divorced, married Gless three years later.

He has spent some of his time in semi-retirement, mining memories. She has been busy jumping from role to role to (now) “Burn Notice.”

Catching ‘Cagney’

— On DVD: The first season of “Cagney & Lacey” recently came out.

— The book: Barney Rosenzweig wrote: “Cagney & Lacey ... An Inside Hollywood Story Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blonde.”

— Also, Sharon Gless now co-stars in “Burn Notice.” That’s 10 p.m. Thursdays on the USA Network, starting June 28