“People don’t give Tim enough credit for the acting he was doing, he’s brilliant, leave him alone”: Hollywood Star Sets Comes Clean

Patricia Richardson co-starred with Tim Allen on the hit 1990s sitcom “Home Improvement.” The 72-year-old actress played Tim “The Toolman” Taylor’s wife Jill Taylor for eight seasons from 1991 to 1999. 

She overruled Allen’s critics and set the record straight about Allen in an interview with Fox News. She said: “People don’t give Tim enough credit for the acting that he was doing. He had never acted before. He was getting acting lessons on the side.

“I’d worked in New York theater for years, and all actors sometimes have trouble listening. We’re self-conscious or we don’t know what we’re doing or we’re not really listening to the other person and just trusting ourselves to just respond.

“Tim did that immediately. Tim did that to such a degree that it scared him.”

“Early on in the first couple of episodes, if I would cry about something — the first time that I did that — he was so listening, and he was always so involved and just bouncing back. 

“We were always just so listening to each other and reacting that I saw tears starting to come out of his eyes.

“And that totally freaked him out. 

“And he stopped everything and just said, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute! She’s upset.’

“’Director John Pasquin said, ‘She’s acting, Tim.’

“I kept telling the guys who would like, bug him, and after our first couple performances, they would be on him.

“And I would be like, ‘Why are you giving him such a hard time? He’s brilliant. He’s better than a lot of actors I’ve worked with that are really actors in New York who don’t even look at you, you know?’

“So, I was like, ‘Stop. Leave him alone. He’s doing great.’ And I always thought so.

“Obviously, Jerry Seinfeld was so charming and great.

“But I don’t think you ever had to see Jerry do something serious, you know, like losing his parents or talking about the death of his father or dealing with lots of things that we dealt with in that show.”

“Tim was right there for it always. And so it’s not surprising that he went on to a long career of doing a lot of movies and other shows.”

“I didn’t know who Tim was.

“He wasn’t really well-known then, but he had gotten an ACE Award for a Showtime special that he did. And so they sent that to me.

“My husband, who used to build houses with his dad, flipped.

“He’s, like, laughing his ass off, you know? 

“And I’m kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is kind of funny, he’s good. Whatever, I’ll go in.’

“I hadn’t worked in a year because I’d been pregnant and having babies with colic.

“I was so happy to be working again. And then Tim. I immediately found him so funny, and it was like this immediate thing back and forth between us. 

“It was instant. And we both really enjoyed that. 

“And so it was kind of evident really from the first read-through that it was going to be a different thing for them and a wonderful thing for me.

“It was so fun,” she said.