Women Behind the Scenes Spotlight: Margaret Nagle

Today’s Women Behind the Scenes spotlight is focused on actress turned screenwriter and TV producer Margaret Nagle.

Margaret was born and raised in Berkeley, California and got her start in the industry by doing a lot of commercial, voiceovers and guest spots in TV shows like Family Ties, Jake and the Fatman, Who’s the Boss, L.A. Law, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Jeff Foxworthy Show and American Dreams. But her best known role was on the cult-hit series My So-Called Life where she portrayed beleaguered biology teacher Ms. Chavatal.

She put her acting on hold, however, to take of her son who was autistic “before the big wave of autism was happening, so it was very much a mystery at the time, and it was before all the services were available to help with it,” she shared in an interview (Link) . Combine this experience with that of growing up with a brother who was disabled in a car accident at an early age, and the work that Margaret has done as a writer-producer becomes clear as to the inspiration behind it all.

Her first script was the 2005 HBO TV movie Warm Springs that told the struggle of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Kenneth Branagh) with polio; how he left his upscale, Victorian life in New York City, moving to Warm Springs in the backwoods of Georgia for several years with his wife Eleanor (Cynthia Nixon) by his side. This film received a record-breaking 16 Emmy nominations and won five Emmys in 2005, including the award for Best Television Movie.

In 2007, she was the series creator, executive producer and writer on the short-lived but critically acclaimed Lifetime drama Side Order of Life that focused on a photographer (Marisa Coughlin) who reevaluates her life when her best friend is diagnosed with cancer.

She was the driving force behind the 2009 CBS TV pilot The Eastmans in which Donald Sutherland would have portrayed a heart surgeon and would have centered around a complicated family of doctors, but was not picked up to series.

The following year she shifted over to the period drama Boardwalk Empire, working on seasons one and two of the HBO series as a writer and supervising producer. That same year she was selected by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer to be a member of the first Imagine/Reliance Writers Lab, a group of screenwriters paid to generate scripts.

Her most recent works are the script for The Good Lie, an upcoming movie about the Lost Boys of Sudan, that will star Reese Witherspoon as an American woman who takes in four refugees; the script for The Goree Girls, which is based on a Texas Monthly article about the first all-female country western band that was started in a Texas prison; and she is also developing a pilot that she will executive producer for Viola Davis at HBO.

Her big project right now, though, is being executive producer and writer for the highly-anticipated FOX drama Red Band Society (based on the Catalan TV series Polseres Vermelles) that will star Oscar winner Octavia Spencer (The Help), Dave Annable (Brothers & Sisters) and Disney star Ciara Bravo (Big Time Rush). The medical drama will take a provocative, unconventional and, at times, comic look at the lives of patients in the pediatric ward of Ocean Park Hospital in Los Angeles. The series makes its debut on Wednesday, September 17 on FOX at 9 PM.

Margaret is married with two children and she can be followed on Twitter @Margaretnagle73.