Jean Smart's Heart Surgery Could Have Derailed ‘Hacks’ Season 3—But She Wouldn’t Let It
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Jean Smart will be a heavy hitter at this year's Golden Globes, where the Hacks star is nominated for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy. (BTW, she’s already won an Emmy for her role as standup comedy diva Deborah Vance.) But over the past few years, things haven't exactly been easy for the actress, who underwent heart surgery and lost her husband of three decades, Richard Gilliland.
After her husband's sudden death to a heart condition in 2021, Jean said it "just made more sense for me to get smarter about my health decisions."
"I'm the one running the show now, completely on my own, and if something happens to me, what happens to my kids?" she told People.
Here’s what the 73-year-old has said about her health, plus how she’s doing now.
She previously had heart surgery.
In 2023, Jean revealed in an Instagram post that she had recently had heart surgery. During that same year, she also had an appendectomy, per People.
“February is American Heart Month — a time when the nation spotlights heart health, so it feels important to share with all of you that I’m recovering from a recent, successful heart procedure,” she wrote. “I am fortunate to have excellent professional care and support from family and friends while I continue to recuperate.”
The surgery put Hacks season three on pause for 10 weeks, although Jean wanted to come back in two. After the break, the crew came back for five days—then the 2023 writers' strike started, so they were put on pause again.
“I just was overwhelmed with guilt for a lot of reasons,” Jean told Variety. “Thinking about putting everybody out of work—I just couldn’t stand that. I wanted to come back as soon as I could. It turned into three months, and then we came back for five days, and then the strike started.”
But after the strike wrapped up, the crew immediately “got back on track to finish the show,” creator Paul W. Downs told Variety.
She has type 1 diabetes.
Jean was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was a kid, which influenced her to get into acting.
"My mother insisted that I stay in Seattle for college. I had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when I was 13, and she still hadn't gotten over that by the time I was getting ready to graduate high school," Jean told The New Yorker in 2021. "She was afraid, I think, for me to go out of state to school."
So Jean enrolled in a theater program at the University of Washington.
She fell while filming ‘Mare of Easttown.’
Jean's gotten her fair share of injuries while on the job, too. In May, she shared on The Drew Barrymore Show that she broke a rib and got a concussion while filming HBO's Mare of Easttown.
“I did a scene where I’m drunk with the priest, and we’re playing cards like we do every Sunday, and I fall out of my chair,” she said. “So I thought it might be kind of fun for that to be a thing for that character—that she’s always falling down or almost falling down occasionally.”
But Jean said she “though it would be funny” if she almost fell over a railing while watching her daughter on a date in the show—and it didn't end well. “Like, take five I went over the railing, down the flight of stairs, broke one of my ribs in half and got a concussion,” she said.
The death of her husband Richard Gilliland made her take her health more seriously.
In 2021, Jean’s husband of nearly 34 years, Richard Gilliland, died suddenly from a heart condition. The couple share two sons, Connor and Forrest, and they made her want to consider her health.
"My youngest has just turned 15. He's still in school, and it's frightening to think of your kids having to possibly deal with things without you,” she told People.
Since Richard's death, her older son, Connor, has been living with her. “He's been helping me a lot since we lost his dad, and so it's been very nice to have him around,” she said. “I don't know how single working mothers do it. I really truly don't.”
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