Rita Wilson 'Grateful' for good health, long marriage, new creative outlet

NEW YORK — A few years ago, Rita Wilson had a fateful meeting with singer/songwriter Kara DioGuardi. Both had played the aspirational temptress Roxie Hart in the long-running Broadway revival of Chicago, and the production's dance captain thought they'd hit it off.

"I was in awe of her talent," Wilson says of DioGuardi. "I told her, 'God, I wish I could write a song.' She said, 'What makes you think you can't?' I said, 'Kara, I don't play an instrument; I wouldn't know where to begin.' She said, 'Do you have things you want to say? Do you have an idea for a song?' "

Wilson did: "I told her, 'It has to do with being grateful,'" she says, chatting before a recent performance at the landmark Café Carlyle. What else would you expect from Tom Hanks' wife of more than 25 years?

Thus began the process that led to the actress/singer/producer's self-titled album, out Friday, featuring a track called Grateful (co-written with DioGuardi and Jason Reeves) and songs crafted with other noted country and pop tunesmiths.

Rita Wilson has double mastectomy, cancer

Wilson's sweet, lightly smoky voice will be familiar to those who heard her 2012 debut AM/FM, a collection of favorite tunes from the '60s and '70s. But writing new songs also provided Wilson, 59, with an outlet "for everything I was feeling and going through emotionally" — and gratitude notwithstanding, it wasn't all cheerful.

Last spring, shortly after returning to Broadway in Larry David's hit comedy A Fish In the Dark, Wilson discovered she had breast cancer. She took a leave from the play to undergo a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, resuming her role as David's character's wife after about a month.

Now cancer-free, Wilson credits Hanks with helping her through the ordeal. "We actually managed to laugh a lot," she says, as they have throughout one of modern Hollywood's most famously resilient unions.

"Part of it is that Tom and I weren't babies when we met," Wilson says. "And my parents infused in me a great sense of commitment, and the importance of family. Tom came from broken marriages on both sides of his family, and I think he was really seeking that. And we both want to be married; you make it work because you really want it to work."

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Wilson will set domestic comforts aside temporarily to launch her first national tour March 29. (She'll perform songs from both her albums when she appears on music series The Kate, streaming March 19 and beginning to air on public television stations.) My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, the sequel to the film smash that launched her producing career, is out March 25. "I have a small part in it now; so does John Stamos. We had to get in as many Greeks as we could."

Another Broadway engagement may be in the cards as well. "I'd love to originate a role in a musical. Hopefully something like that will come about," she says.

There are still limits, though, to the challenges this multitasking cancer survivor and late-blooming songwriter will tackle.

"My youngest son  is licensed to skydive," Wilson says. "He jumps out of planes, and he wants me to go with him. I'm like, 'I don't know — maybe?' It feels like I'm taking enough of a leap right now."