It's been over two decades since we last saw the Taylors of Home Improvement on the small screen. So what has the actor who played Jill Taylor been up to since then?
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00:00 It's been over two decades since we last saw the Taylors of "Home Improvement" on the small screen.
00:05 So, what has the actor who played Jill Taylor been up to since then?
00:09 While Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor was arguably the biggest star of the '90s family sitcom
00:14 "Home Improvement," the show wouldn't have been the same without his exasperated wife
00:18 yelling at him nearly every episode. Patricia Richardson, who played Tim's wife Jill Taylor,
00:24 clearly enjoyed her time on the show. She told Closer Weekly,
00:28 "Tim and I were always cracking each other up. We came up with so much of what you saw on the set
00:32 every day."
00:33 "Even if you do something crazy, is parking your car under a tree filled with birds. I am not…"
00:37 After nearly a decade on air, "Home Improvement" filmed its final episode in 1999. And while the
00:45 lovable Taylors will forever remain a family stuck-in-90s flannel in our minds, you might
00:50 be wondering what Patricia Richardson has been doing since her "Home Improvement" days.
00:54 Richardson may have looked right at home on her television screens, but she was never really
00:59 comfortable with the time she had to spend away from her real-life children because of work.
01:03 She had been forthcoming about why she didn't want to commit to doing another season of "Home
01:07 Improvement," telling Closer Weekly,
01:09 "I was a single divorced parent and away from my kids too much. That's why I've kept quitting the
01:14 business — to be with them."
01:16 Still, for someone who claims to keep quitting the business,
01:19 Richardson sure does have a lot of hit shows on her resume. For example,
01:24 she went on to play supporting roles in two successful television series,
01:27 "Strong Medicine" and "The West Wing."
01:30 And while we may best remember Richardson sporting a slightly imperfect,
01:33 chestnut-colored half-pony, these days, she's embracing the gray. In late 2020,
01:39 she captioned one Instagram pic,
01:41 "Okay here we have covid hair grow out. Just don't wanna cut it. So, new covid fashion raccoon hair."
01:48 Thanks to "Home Improvement," Patricia Richardson remains a fan favorite on the
01:52 small screen after all these years, but she has made just as many notable appearances
01:56 in the world of theater. Fast forward almost four decades after her Broadway debut as an
02:01 understudy in 1974's "Gypsy," and Richardson made her comeback to the boards as Mrs. Caldwell in
02:07 the 2017 off-Broadway production of "Cruel Intentions" the musical. The play was adapted
02:12 from the 1999 movie "Cruel Intentions," starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Reese Witherspoon.
02:17 When speaking to Playbill a month after being cast,
02:20 Richardson shared that she needed to dust off her vocal cords. She said,
02:24 "I'm relearning to sing, or actually, learning to sing for the first time.
02:28 When I sang before, I just belted."
02:31 The actor noted that she hadn't sung professionally in years,
02:34 so she enrolled in singing lessons to bring out her best voice. It was obviously worth it,
02:39 as a HuffPost review praised the cast's singing, writing,
02:42 "The vocals in the production were extraordinary."
02:45 On "Home Improvement," Patricia Richardson had been Tim Allen's on-screen wife,
02:50 someone who always backed him up in his endeavors. While the two weren't a couple in real life,
02:54 Richardson made sure to stand by her colleague when Pamela Anderson accused him of indecency
02:59 on set in her memoir "Love, Pamela." According to Anderson, who played Lisa the tool girl for
03:04 the first two seasons of "Home Improvement," Allen once flashed her in a hallway between takes.
03:10 In her book, the former Playboy model wrote,
03:13 "He said it was only fair because he had seen me naked.
03:16 'Now we're even,' said Allen. I laughed uncomfortably."
03:19 Allen denied the incident ever happened in a statement to CNN,
03:23 claiming that he would never do such a thing. Unfortunately for the actor,
03:27 a clip of him seemingly flashing his on-screen wife resurfaced around the same time.
03:32 In the video, he can be seen lifting up a kilt while facing Richardson,
03:36 who makes a shocked face afterward. She quickly cleared the air and said it was not how it may
03:40 have seemed. Richardson told ET,
03:43 "He was well-dressed under there. I was just shocked that he lifted the kilt,
03:46 not by a man in boxer shorts."
03:48 Anderson later told Variety that she was sure Allen had no ulterior motives,
03:53 and she said that he was likely just pushing his boundaries as a comic.
03:57 "So, I don't know. I don't know."