Marilu Henner Has Some Advice for You

She talks ‘Taxi’ boom, her husband beating cancer — and remembering, well, everything

Natasha Stoynoff,

AARP

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Published August 01, 2024

Marilu Henner against light blue background

Elizabeth Carney

Actress Marilu Henner, 72, has long had a penchant for dishing up advice and going her own way. Best known for her role as single mom Elaine Nardo in Taxi, she recalls the exact moment fame overtook her, as well as her childhood in an artistic community (with a gay uncle and her psychic aunt), her unnerving photographic memory and raising boys to be men. AARP caught up with the stage and screen star, who is touring the country with her one-woman cabaret show, Music & Memories.

Embracing your heritage

My father was Polish; my mother was Greek (Kalogeropoulos). My brother went to this tiny Greek village, Methoni, walked into a restaurant and said, “I’m looking for the Kalogeropoulos family.” He found 31 relatives and brought back these videos of everyone sun-kissed and eating and drinking on the beach. Why did we leave?

The heart of Chicago

Growing up, our home was the cultural center of the neighborhood. We had a dancing school in the backyard, a beauty shop in the kitchen and art classes upstairs. My mother taught dancing; we had 200 students between the ages of 2 and 80, including the nuns who came for stretch class. Everybody had their first kiss somewhere on our property, and one of my first memories was being onstage at 2½.

An uncle’s advice

My uncle lived upstairs with 10 cats, two dogs, two birds, a skunk, 150 fish and his boyfriend, Charles. He taught art at the Catholic grammar school next door and gave art classes upstairs. When I was 10, he said, “Mary, when you’re an actress, make sure you are nice to everybody.”

**A Bewitched talent**

I had an aunt who was psychic. She told my mother when I was born: “This one is going to make a mark for herself. This one’s going to be famous.” I also get feelings about things. It’s like, OK, this is going to happen, and it does. We used to call it tweaking, like Samantha in Bewitched, tweaking my nose. If I wanted something like a taxi on New Year’s Eve, I’d say, “Give me a minute.” And suddenly a limo would pull up, and the driver would say, “Where do you need to go?” Manifesting. We may all be able to do it, but we don’t own it enough.

The moment it all changed

My life changed on Sept. 15, 1978. Taxi went on the air three days earlier. I was in Europe with Johnny Travolta — we were dating. We flew back to New Orleans for the Ali-Spinks fight, and afterward, I was walking down the street with the guys from Taxi, and people were honking, yelling, “Hey, Louie! Hey, Nardo! Hey, Banta!” We all looked around, and we all knew our lives had changed. It was such a powerful moment.

Total recall

I have what’s called a “highly superior autobiographical memory” — HSAM. People with HSAM have an extraordinary retrieval system. Everyone has the potential to remember more than they do. It’s our strongest line of defense against meaninglessness, because you’re able to take information from your past, bring it to the present and let it inform a better future. I do something fun at my cabaret show: People tell me a date, and I tell them what day of the week it was, what I was doing and what song was popular, then sing a couple of bars.

Do the locomotion

One of the greatest gifts my dance-instructor mother gave us was the love of movement. Motion is the lotion. My mother would say to me, “Run around the block a couple of times. Burn off some of that energy!” I was always this energetic little kid. It’s who I am, it’s what I need to do, and I’m in better shape now in a lot of ways than I was in my early 20s.

Let me tell you ...

I’m the queen of advice. My brother always says, “You write books just so you can give everybody tips.” I’ve written 10 books, and they always have tips in them. I love talking to people. I love sharing information. I think it [comes from] being a middle child.

Talking about sex is like karaoke

Nobody wants to be the first one at the microphone, but once you start talking about it or somebody starts singing, you can’t get the microphone away from them.

The other treatments

My husband has been a survivor of two major cancers — bladder and lung — for 20 years now. Doctors thought he was going to die. They wanted to cut, burn, cauterize, poison, blah, blah, blah. He didn’t do chemo, he didn’t do radiation — he wanted to find alternatives. I make no judgments about people doing what they need to do, but we put together a protocol that worked for him and wrote a book about it. My husband saved his life, and he’s still around for me to aggravate.

Raising them scrappy

My two boys, Nick and Joey, have never given me one day of trouble. They love each other. They work hard. I lost my parents so young that I wanted my boys to survive in the world and be scrappy should anything happen to me. I was never the mother coddling her kids. I taught them about consequences. I even wrote a book called I Refuse to Raise a Brat. They’re millennials with a strong work ethic.

Food and you

After both my parents died in their 50s, I started seeing my life through the prism of health. I read hundreds of books and talked to several doctors and nutritionists. I took human anatomy classes at UCLA. I made the connection between food and health and learned to love the foods that love me. Dairy products didn’t love me. Meat didn’t. Gluten and sugar didn’t. I experimented on myself and changed my life. My husband and I eat 99 percent plant-based. No dairy, no meat, no chicken, no gluten, no refined sugar. Once in a while, we have sushi. That’s our not-so-guilty pleasure.

The importance of cast families

Everybody has an essence or filter through which they see their lives, and mine has always been family. Every group of people I’ve ever been close to, I turn into a family. I’m still super close to my Grease family and my Chicago the Musical family and definitely my Taxi family. During the pandemic, I started Zooms with the Taxi gang, and we’re about to do our 21st. Nothing is better than friend maintenance.

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Natasha Stoynoff is an award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling coauthor of 15 books who frequently writes about celebrities and culture for AARP The Magazine. On staff at People magazine for a dozen years, she has freelanced for The Washington Post, USA Today and Time.