Comeback hopes rest on stand-up gigs in Las Vegas

Sunday, Sept. 10, 2006 | 7:40 a.m.

She's back. A little older, a little wiser. Clean and sober.

She's ready to try to reclaim a career that flourished in the '80s and '90s but withered on the vine.

"I've been off for quite a while," the 52-year-old actress and comedian Marsha Warfield says.

The Chicago native started out as a stand-up comedian in the early '80s and landed a few movie roles, including "D.C. Cab," a 1983 comedy that featured Mr. T. "Not many people remember, but Bill Maher was in the movie also," Warfield says of the star of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher."

Warfield made more films, including "Mask" with Cher, before landing her dream role - as the bailiff Roz on the hit NBC sitcom "Night Court." When the series ended in 1992, she went back to stand-up, movies and more television. She even hosted a talk show, "The Marsha Warfield Show."

"I was sailing along this wonderful, lucky street," Warfield recalls. "I had everything I wanted then all kinds of stuff started happening and I didn't handle it well."

She lost her home in the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Southern California. Her mother and an aunt died within three months of each other. Her best friend passed away.

She started abusing drugs, mostly marijuana and cocaine.

About the time she moved to Las Vegas five years ago, she did some self-examination and didn't like what she found.

"It's embarrassing," she says. "It's such a stupid trap to fall into, but it happened."

She decided to clean up her act.

"I just quit. There was no formal rehab," she says. "I wasn't lucky enough to get arrested so I could get some publicity and make a lot of money. One day I just looked at what I was doing and said this was stupid."

Her career has been in limbo. But she's looking at the rungs of the ladder that will take her back up to the top, or somewhere near it.

The first rung is to get back into comedy, doing her outspoken stand-up routine.

She's using "Michael Colyar's Comedy Extravaganza" as a testing ground, proving to herself and to fans she still has what it takes. Warfield and Colyar are from the same area of Chicago but didn't get to know each other until the mid-'80s, when they were hanging out at some of the same comedy clubs in L.A.

She joins Colyar's cast at Fitzgeralds every two or three weeks, talking about a variety of things - growing older, life in the '60s, politics, world affairs.

Sometimes she goes to Los Angeles and tries out her comedy at clubs there, and Vegas comedian George Wallace has brought her onstage at his Flamingo gig.

She would love to do TV and movies again. But stand-up comedy is her primary interest right now.

"I was a stand-up long before I was an actress," she said. "I'm going to let the stand-up take me wherever I go.

"I don't have the same expectations I used to have. Whatever happens, I hope to enjoy it and give it my all."