\n<\/p>\n
She has been electrocuted, hatcheted, murdered by a doll with her soul trapped inside it. She has also notched up an epic kill count of her own, decapitating one victim with a nail file, eviscerating another and melting one unfortunate\u2019s face off with boiling water. And that was before she joined \u201cThe Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAt least in the \u2018Chucky\u2019 movies you get stabbed in the front,\u201d Jennifer Tilly says coolly, shooting a knowing look at this reporter as she lands the rimshot.<\/p>\n
We are in a booth of the Margaux restaurant at the Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village. It is midafternoon and we are the only customers in the place. Ms. Tilly is wearing a simple black minidress with a flounced neckline cut low. D\u00e9colletage is her wardrobe default.<\/p>\n
Picking at a mesclun salad, Ms. Tilly appears young enough to force a double-take; at 66, she has spent four decades in the public eye. The Academy Award nomination she sometimes fudges in conversation to make seem like a win came so long ago that Bill Clinton was president.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
That was for her inspired portrayal of a mobster\u2019s floozy hellbent on a theatrical career in Woody Allen\u2019s \u201cBullets Over Broadway.\u201d The role, as written, was a camp inside a parody inside a million show business clich\u00e9s. And it was a keystone in a career whose watchword could be \u201cmeta.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ms. Tilly has a knack for embodying characters who somehow stand above or outside themselves. Think the scream queen Tiffany Valentine in the endlessly recurring \u201cChucky\u201d horror series. Think of her stylized lesbian femme fatale, Violet, in the thriller \u201cBound,\u201d the directorial debut of Lana and Lilly Wachowski. Think of her turn as a conniving gold-digger in the Jim Carrey comedy \u201cLiar Liar.\u201d<\/p>\n
You would probably have to look back to the 1950s to find an actress with a career resembling Ms. Tilly\u2019s. In that benighted era, smart and beautiful women like Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Judy Holliday were perennially cast in jiggle roles: empty headed, screen-filling eye candy. Each was obliged to squander much of her talents playing cartoon characters. Ms. Tilly has also been cast in her share of cartoons \u2014 literally, in the case of her voice work for the \u201cMonsters, Inc.\u201d films and \u201cFamily Guy\u201d TV show \u2014 and yet she always conveys that she\u2019s in on the gag.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cJennifer can seem almost like a caricature of herself with the boobs and her voice and all the jewelry,\u201d said Sutton Stracke, a cast member of \u201cThe Real Housewives of Beverly Hills<\/a>\u201d and one of Ms. Tilly\u2019s closest friends. \u201cBut behind all that is a wildly brilliant intelligence that can sometimes overwhelm you and sometimes sneak right by.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Tilly joined the Bravo series in its current season, which wraps up on Tuesday. For a while, she had been popping up on the show as \u201ca friend,\u201d said Andy Cohen, the host and executive producer of the franchise, and he liked what he saw. \u201cWhen she enters a scene, you want to watch,\u201d he said. But when he asked her to amp up her participation, she didn\u2019t jump at the chance.<\/p>\n \u201cShe didn\u2019t want to do it,\u201d Ms. Stracke said. \u201cI had been begging her to do this. They had wanted her for years.\u201d<\/p>\n The reason for her reluctance, Ms. Tilly explained, was simple. She was already a real actress. Why play a \u201creal\u201d housewife? \u201cI\u2019d been a character on the show,\u201d she says, catching herself quickly to make a correction. \u201cThey don\u2019t like us to say \u2018characters.\u2019 But I didn\u2019t know if I wanted to fully commit.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The producers finally persuaded her to join as a foil of sorts to Erika Girardi, Bozoma Saint John and Kyle Richards. Think of her, Mr. Cohen suggested, as the carbonation in your favorite beverage. \u201cShe\u2019s a kook, in the best possible meaning,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Tilly is also a gambler who, at the height of her career, \u201ctook a severe left turn and did the \u2018Chucky\u2019 movies,\u201d she says. \u201cCan you imagine Cate Blanchett suddenly doing a slasher film?\u201d She decided to do \u201cReal Housewives\u201d in that same spirit. \u201cI thought I could take it and have some fun with it,\u201d she says. \u201cPlus, I was having intimations of my own mortality.\u201d<\/p>\n Unlike some other people on the show \u2014 with their laboriously perfected physical surfaces veneered over substrates of emotional, psychosocial and financial decay \u2014 Ms. Tilly didn\u2019t need the gig. In addition to an impressive r\u00e9sum\u00e9, she has that greater rarity: a contented existence. Partnered to the same man, the professional poker player Phil Laak, for nearly two decades, she has won Saturn, GLAAD and MTV movie awards. She is also a professional poker player<\/a> herself, the owner of a World Series of Poker bracelet, with roughly $1 million in career earnings and a spot in the Women\u2019s Poker Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n There is one further detail. Ms. Tilly is rich. How rich? When her seven-year marriage to Sam Simon<\/a>, a creative force behind \u201cThe Simpsons,\u201d came to an end in 1991, the divorce settlement provided her with a percentage of the net proceeds of the show\u2019s earnings. Revenue from the longest-running American animated series, longest-running American sitcom and longest-running scripted prime time TV series, along with its related comic books, video games, books and other tie-ins, has been estimated in the billions.<\/p>\n \u201cListen, once you hear she owns a piece of \u2018The Simpsons,\u2019 that is such a delicious piece of historical information,\u201d Mr. Cohen said.<\/p>\n Ms. Tilly, who remained close to her ex-husband until his death from cancer in 2015, seems as surprised as anybody by this twist of fate. \u201cNo one thought the show would go on for trillions of years,\u201d she said. \u201cBelieve me, I thank Sam every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Her wealth puts her in a bracket apart from most fellow housewives. She has two adjacent houses in the pricey Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, one she calls a \u201cplayhouse\u201d that is used mainly to store her wardrobe. She also keeps a beach house in Malibu, a place she seldom visits because it is \u201chaunted,\u201d she says, as well as residences in Las Vegas, Vancouver and Manhattan.<\/p>\n Unlike many of the celebrities who accept loaner clothes from high-end fashion brands, courting clicks and brand awareness, she buys her own haute couture dresses. The extravagant jewelry she wears she pays for herself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cJennifer is an owner, not a loaner,\u201d said Cameron Silver<\/a>, an entrepreneur credited with building the market for high-end vintage clothing in Los Angeles. \u201cIt makes a huge difference when the clothes are your own, when you take your jewelry off at night and it goes in the safe, as opposed to a security detail.\u201d<\/p>\n Also unlike certain of her fellow housewives, Ms. Tilly makes no secret of her humble origins. \u201cWhen we were little, we used to move every year,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The second of four children, she was born Jennifer Ellen Chan in Los Angeles. Her father, Harry Chan, was a used-car salesman of Chinese origin. Her mother, Patricia Tilly, whom Ms. Tilly described as a debutante turned hippie, was a Canadian schoolteacher and stage actress. They divorced when Jennifer was little, and she was raised mainly in rural British Columbia by her mother and stepfather, John Ward.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThey told us growing up that he painted post offices and that, when he finished painting one post office, we had to go look for others,\u201d she says of her stepfather. \u201cMy sister has her dark theories. She thinks they may have been run out of town.\u201d<\/p>\n She was referring to Meg Tilly, one of her two sisters, also an accomplished actress and Academy Award nominee, who has gone on to a second career as a novelist<\/a>. \u201cWe could never have friends sleep over when we were growing up,\u2019\u2019 Meg said by phone from her home in British Columbia, \u201cbecause there wouldn\u2019t be enough for everyone to eat.\u201d<\/p>\n Their shared challenges forged a durable bond, she added. The two sisters imagined that, when they grew up, each would have lots of money and open a store. Meg\u2019s would be a confectionary where children without enough money could get free candy. Jennifer dreamed of a shop selling glamorous gowns.<\/p>\n Cinderella got her wish, it would seem, given that she now travels routinely to Europe for the couture shows, wears custom clothing from Chanel and Balmain and has a sizable jewelry collection that includes a diamond brooch Eddie Fisher once bought for Elizabeth Taylor and a charm bracelet that belonged to Joan Crawford.<\/p>\n And then there are the pieces that got away, like the Cartier flamingo brooch formerly owned by Wallis Simpson, the former Duchess of Windsor. At a 2010 auction, Ms. Tilly couldn\u2019t bring herself to offer the roughly $2 million it took the win it. \u201cI dropped out at $800,000,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n If Ms. Tilly was initially \u201cchagrined\u201d at being pigeonholed as \u201cthe rich one\u201d on Season 14 of \u201cThe Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,\u201d she has since made peace with it. \u201cJennifer is not only in on the joke \u2014 she wrote<\/em> the joke,\u201d Mr. Cohen said.<\/p>\n After a few tentative early episodes, she found her comedic rhythm, acing situations with a studied na\u00efvet\u00e9 and sometimes giving herself over to the caricature of the clueless zillionaire. In an episode that included an outing to the Caviar Kaspia restaurant, she said blithely, \u201cI just try to order the most expensive caviar on the menu, because I figure it\u2019s probably the best.\u201d With her breathy voice and sparkly attire, she regularly commandeers the screen time that, in reality television, is the only valid currency.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything I ever succeeded in, I worked for,\u201d says Ms. Tilly, whose decision on whether to extend her stay as a Real Housewife beyond the current season shifts by the week. \u201cI earned my way through college and sold Moveable Feast sandwiches<\/a> when I first came to Hollywood for 80 cents.\u201d<\/p>\n When acting teachers told her she had no talent, she refused to listen. \u201cI never believed in having a backup plan,\u201d she says. \u201cThat assumes you won\u2019t succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n And if playing the hand you\u2019re dealt is core to her philosophy, so is knowing when to bluff. \u201cPoker is a metaphor for life,\u201d she says. \u201cIf someone acts one way, they are not necessarily that way.\u201d<\/p>\n Long after many actresses her age have been cruelly pushed aside, she is busy reinventing herself as a sexy moneybags with a stealth sense of humor on a hit franchise.<\/p>\n \u201cListen, I play poker with billionaires, guys way above my pay grade,\u201d Ms. Tilly says. \u201cAnd I win.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n