The first time Teri Hatcher was diagnosed with the dreaded midlife condition known as frozen shoulder, she was in her late 40s and still starring on Desperate Housewives, the soapy, nighttime network drama that turned the fictional set of Wisteria Lane into a tourist attraction. 

Yet if Hatcher expected that—as the star of a show focused on the lives and loves of midlife women—there would be understanding of her newly-debilitated state, she was in for a nasty plot twist. 

“No one gave a shit,” she says bluntly. “Like, I would say to the producers—they’d write a scene for [me] to open a trash can, and I would be like, ‘Just so you know, as you set up the camera, I can’t do that with my left arm…I literally can’t lift my arm.’ And they’d say, ‘Why can’t you? Frozen shoulder? What’s that?’ There was not a human being [on the show] that took it seriously or with any empathy.”

Fast forward a decade later, and the actress found herself contending with frozen shoulder a second time—only this time on the opposite side. Fortunately, by that point, enough of a narrative shift had happened around what women experience as they move through perimenopause and menopause that Hatcher’s story had a happier ending. “When I had it the first time, I had actually come across an article with the title of, ‘Five Serious Diseases with Ridiculous Names,’ and frozen shoulder was one of them,” she recalls. “It was a serious disease that everybody thought was a joke…but now, lots of people recognize it as a serious thing. Lots of people talk about it.”

Hatcher is more than happy to lend her voice to the conversation—and to all the other ones that are increasingly happening when it comes to women’s health in midlife, whether sharing her experience with menopause hormone therapy (which she has been on for more than a decade), or the stress she incurs being a caregiver to her aging parents, one of whom has dementia. 

After a decades-long career that has included her breakthrough role on the 1990s TV show Lois & Clark and a memorable cameo on Seinfeld, as well as films like Coraline and Spy Kids, she’s now fighting for midlife storylines to be more regularly portrayed in Hollywood. In addition to recently launching a podcast, Desperately Devoted, where she rewatches Desperate Housewives episodes alongside her daughter, the writer and director Emerson Tenney, 27, and actress Andrea Bowen, 35, who played her daughter on the show, Hatcher, 60, is also mining her life for a one-woman show she’s writing, among other original projects. “I’d love to finish one of these scripts and get that on the air,” she says. “I wish there were more age-appropriate jobs for women.”

In the meantime, she finds herself explaining to producers that, while, yes, she could “play younger” than her actual age, as they insist, she really doesn’t want to: “I’m like, well, thank you… but I want to be telling the story of a 60-year-old single woman.”

A Realistic Attitude About Aging

If Hatcher is so adamant about more diverse age depictions onscreen, it’s because she has a profound appreciation for the stage of life she’s now in. “I’ve only witnessed her step even more into self-love and acceptance,” Bowen says. “Her message is that it is OK and awesome to age. That aging comes with changing—and changing is good.”

Right now, one of the biggest changes Hatcher has been adapting to is being an empty nester. While she and Tenney (who’s an only child; her father is Hatcher’s ex-husband, actor Jon Tenney) are extremely close, Hatcher believes “it’s the right move as a parent to give [adult children] their space to become their own person and be there to support it and champion it.” 

For Hatcher, the hardest part of doing so has been, “trying to make her not my first call when something good happens to me. Or something bad. Sometimes I will even call her with a question… and I’ll be like, just so you know, I called Jill and Dena and Tracy before I called you. I just want you to know you weren’t the first call—but nobody answered, so I had to call you!”

Another big change has been understanding that she does not actually move through the world the same way she did 20 years ago. “You’ll hear people say, ‘Age is just a number,’ and I think I’m in the camp of feeling like that’s not true,” Hatcher admits. “I was talking to a girlfriend the other day about how my number one fear is, I don’t want to break something… I hope I get 30 more years, but I’m aware there’s a punch-out date, and I’m getting closer to it.”

Certainly, her experience as caregiver to her 90-year-old parents has shifted Hatcher’s thinking about what it means to grow older. “I want to be able to walk up a hill for three miles carrying my future granddaughter to show her the view of some flowers,” she notes. “My mom can’t do that.” 

Hatcher’s parents have other lifestyle limitations as well, not all of which they’ve been comfortable accepting. “The hardest thing…is the pushback from both of them. Like, wow: They think they can still drive. They think they can still take care of themselves. And they completely can’t,” she says. “I mean, they would have been dead three years ago if I hadn’t taken over. But their perception of their ability to take care of themselves is not based in reality, and that makes it very hard.”

Which is why Hatcher plans to “write a letter now to my 80-year-old self,” for her daughter to give her at the appropriate time. “It’s going to say, When Emerson gives you this letter because you’re still saying you want to drive, and she says, ‘No,’ you need to listen to her!” Hatcher reveals. “So yeah. We do talk about it. I also joke about building a guest house so a nurse can move in with me!”

“I’m Super-Engaged”

Until then, Hatcher is doing everything she can to thrive in her 60s. “She has a kind of childlike wonder for the world and for being alive,” Tenney shares. “We can go out on a hike around the neighborhood, and she will just get like, giddy, looking at the sight of the moon over the hill…My mom lives in those small moments of joy and has really curated her life to hold a lot of those.”

Always proactive about her health, the actress went on hormone therapy back when she was experiencing menopause symptoms, which she describes as “the crazy-making of your body changing and you just don’t know what’s happening.” 

Initially, however, the actress had an intolerable reaction to progesterone, which she says triggered a “really bad” depression—a rare side effect she shares in the hopes of raising awareness. Fortunately, an adjustment in her progesterone dose (for several years, instead of a daily pill, as it is typically prescribed, Hatcher took it for two weeks at a time, four times a year) resolved her reaction. “I went to my doctor and said, ‘Is there another choice?’” she recalls. “And there was.”

Figuring out what works for her applies to all aspects of Hatcher’s health routine. She knows, for example, that she feels her best when she goes for a long three- to four-mile walk, five days a week, and that if she doesn’t watch her salt intake, “I wake up with, like, ‘sausage fingers,’” she says, adding, “The older I get, the more it’s worth it to me to feel better than it is to behave in the other way. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a couple martinis once in a while with my friends!”

To stay mentally sharp, Hatcher works her brain by teaching herself to play piano and studying French on the language app Duolingo, which she also uses to play chess. She’s even toying with the idea of going back to school. “So, I’m super engaged, yeah—I’m engaged in meeting new people, and I’m engaged in getting involved in things I haven’t even thought of yet,” she says. “I definitely don’t like the word, ‘retire.’ It just isn’t in my brain!”

“I’m open-hearted”

One word that is in her brain? Grandmother, which she casually mentions more than once. Not that she’s rushing Tenney. “I don’t think it should be soon, but she definitely wants that at some point,” says Hatcher. 

Recalling that she was pregnant during the shoot for one of her biggest movies, playing a Bond girl opposite Pierce Brosnan in the 1997 blockbuster Tomorrow Never Dies, Hatcher adds, “I gave her the example of…being at a professional place where I felt like I could have a baby and step back, and I didn’t have to be worried [financially]. I could just enjoy what it was to be a mother, and that was the way I wanted to do it.”

For her part, Tenney says she’s looking forward to seeing Hatcher recreate the family’s childhood traditions, “like her incredible Christmas parties—I can already picture my future kids cooking gingerbread with her and helping make stuffing. She’s gonna be [the], ‘Cool Grandma House!’”

As for what else she’s looking forward to in the next few years, Hatcher says she’s just trying to stay “open-hearted”…up to a point. Since her 2003 divorce, she has been mostly single and says she’s not interested in going on dating apps. “You know, as you get older, you get in a groove of your life,” she explains. “I love my home, I love my friends, I love what I do during my week. I don’t live in a state of longing. I don’t wake up and go, ‘Oh, there’s nobody in the house. What a bummer.’”

Besides, she already has someone to snuggle up with: her cat, Fig. “It would definitely be a notable transition to have to learn how to share a space again,” she admits. “Because, you know—that cat’s not moving!”