Taking A Different Road Sherry Stringfield’s Desire For A ‘Normal Life’ Was The Factor In Her Decision To Quit ‘Er’

For Sherry Stringfield, the decision to walk away from the fame and fortune that came with her starring role in “ER,” was a simple choice.

“Do I want to continue going down this road?” she said. “Or do I want to take a different road? I had a pretty good taste of what working on the show meant in my life and I just realized it’s not for me.”

Last Thursday night was her last night in the plum role as Dr. Susan Lewis. Stringfield sent a small shock wave through Hollywood this week with the news that she was quitting television’s highest-rated show to do, well, nothing much. All she wants, she said in an interview, is to “live a more normal life.”

“It’s a little embarrassing,” Stringfield said of the attention that has surrounded her decision. “In my opinion, it shouldn’t be that important. I do think it’s kind of ironic though. Here I’m supposed to be starting this normal life and my name is in headlines all over the country.”

Stringfield has moved back to New York from Los Angeles, one of the other factors in her quitting the show. She appeared totally relaxed over lunch last week at the Plaza Hotel. The 28-year-old actress was dressed in a dark velvet jacket that almost matched her hair, newly returned from Dr. Lewis’ blond to its natural rich brown.

Her decision to leave the Thursday night NBC show that reaches 37 million viewers every week was not especially hard for her to make though it did come slowly to fruition, she said, mainly because “it took a while before anyone would take it seriously.” First she had to convince her own representatives that she really wanted to take this step.

“My agent was like spitting water over the table at lunch when I said what I wanted to do,” she said. Executives at Warner Bros., which owns the show, reacted at first as if she were another star angling for more money.

What she really wanted, she said, was more of a life. She said she started thinking about the concept of just walking away from the show when an “ER” director, David Nutter, said to her at the end of a typically grueling day on the set, “It’s not a race.”

“That said it perfectly,” Stringfield said.

Though she had already spent one season on another hit show, “NYPD Blue,” Stringfield said she was prepared neither for the demands of “ER” nor the hysterical attention that swirled around the show from its first episode.

“It’s confusing because within a day you’re surrounded,” she said. “That’s how it is in L.A. All of sudden in everyone’s eyes you’re a big TV star, without any booklet on how to handle it.”

But more than anything, it was the pace of the show that got to her. “You don’t get a moment.” she said. Days on the set, which would begin at 6 a.m., would often last more than 15 hours. Unlike other shows where actors can spend many off hours in their trailers reading or relaxing, “ER” demands an enormous amount of time on the set, she said, because many of the cast members appear in a majority of the scenes. Even off hours and weekends are filled with studying lines for the next day’s shooting, she said.

“I wanted to go home and cook pasta,” she said. “But there was no time.”

More important, she said she felt she had no time for her family, which still lives in her native Texas, or her boyfriend, a successful businessman, in New York.

Stringfield laughed about the attention her boyfriend, whom she preferred not to name, has been getting because of her decision. “He thinks it’s funny,” she said. “It’s like he’s the hero. But it’s not all about the guy - a lot of it is - it’s a whole lifestyle thing.”

Curiously, Stringfield still calls herself a workaholic.

“I really like to work,” she said. But she may not be working a lot in the near future.

As a condition of allowing her to leave the show, Warner Bros. television mandated that she not work in television for the 2-1/2 years left on her “ER” contract, which paid her a reported $70,000 an episode, and that she get permission to work on a film unless it takes place during the 12-week hiatus in the “ER” shooting schedule. “ER” is making 22 episodes this year.

Stringfield said she was so firmly convinced that she wanted to “drive more slowly, stop and roll in the grass” that she had no real trouble agreeing to these conditions. In fact, she said, the restrictions might be helpful in “keeping me from losing my head and agreeing to take another part that would lead to 15-hour days and no life.”

But she said the studio was “sending a message” to other television actors in setting out the limitations. The message: “We’re not weak.” “It was definitely their point that other actors would not see this as a precedent,” she said.

Most other actors, those who waited on tables for years before getting even a small role on a marginal show, might have some trouble understanding the message that Stringfield herself wants to send. She readily agrees that her career has been “one blessing after another” of opportunities.

Shortly after finishing acting school, she got an enviable role as a vixen on the soap opera “Guiding Light.” Soon after that she landed the part as David Caruso’s former wife on “NYPD Blue.” When that role was made superfluous by Caruso’s decision to walk away from that series, she was invited to read for the Dr. Lewis part of “ER”

“I recognize what I’m doing is rather unprecedented,” Stringfield said. “Some people may question this from the point of view of the American work ethic. But what about the American ethic of family values? There are people who seem to think it’s weird that I don’t want to be famous, that I don’t want to be on magazine covers. I find that so alarming. I pick up a magazine sometimes and see someone on there in a strange pose with almost no clothes on, and I think there’s something a little weird about that. Is it so weird for me to want more time to be free and be with my family?”

After she exits Thursday night, with Dr. Lewis moving to Phoenix to be with her niece, Susie, Stringfield said she would continue to watch “ER,”

“I love the show,” she said. “It’s so great. And they’re all my friends.”

She said she might try to do some theater in New York eventually (“I don’t think they can stop me from doing that”), but for now her plans are more modest.

“I have some travel plans lined up,” she said. “But today,” she said with a broad grin at the prospect. “I’m going to the Pottery Barn to buy some long candles.”