Mayim Bialik and Marcie Leeds Recreate Iconic Scene From 'Beaches'
The actresses haven't seen each other since the 1988 film.
— -- Nearly 20 years after they appeared together in the 1988 classic "Beaches," Mayim Bialik and her co-star Marcie Leeds reunited for the first time.
The pair re-enacted their iconic opening scene, in which Bialik and Leeds played 11-year-old versions of Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey's characters.
The funny short video is Bialik and Leeds' tribute to director Garry Marshall, who passed away last month. "I was in a movie when I was 12 years old called 'Beaches' that changed my life and my career forever," Bialik posted on YouTube alongside the video.
Bialik went on to star as the title character in "Blossom" and has been part of the "Big Bang Theory" cast since 2010. Leeds, on the other hand, decided to leave acting and is now a surgeon in Chandler, Arizona. But, it turns out, the two share a love of science. Bialik has a bachelor's degree and Ph.D in neuroscience.
Besides shooting the video, the pair spent some time catching up over lunch, and Bialik posted excerpts from their conversation on her website.
Leeds revealed what prompted her to leave show business forever.
"After 'Beaches,' I did an episode of [the 1990 TV show] 'Parenthood' with Leonardo DiCaprio," Leeds told Bialik. "That was the first time I had kissed anyone and it was actually really heavy and weird for me, so I decided that having to deal with stuff like that was not what I wanted to do. I decided after that to leave acting."
Leeds decided to go to medical school after a visit to a cadaver lab in high school and, as a surgeon, ended up operating on one very famous patient, Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, on the day she was shot.
"On the day Congresswoman Giffords was visiting Tucson, Arizona, I was coming on call Saturday morning to be the senior resident on the trauma service that day, January 8, 2011," Leeds recalled.
"They then brought in a woman dressed in a black dress with this huge thing over her head. They said, 'This is the congresswoman – she has a gunshot wound to the head,'" Leeds continued. "And we started resuscitating her, I started asking her if she could move certain limbs and all she was doing was grunting. She couldn't speak."
Giffords survived, and for the next two weeks it was Leeds' job to check in on her every day.
"It was such a circus between the press and the cops and the Secret Service," Leeds remembered. "She had 10 people outside her room at any given moment. So I'd go in at 4 o'clock in the morning when there was nobody there, and I'd see her and do an exam. Her husband was always by her bed and we would chat about how she was doing."
Now in private practice, Leeds has no regrets about leaving show business.
"I love what I do; I don't regret my decision to leave acting," she said. "The grass is always greener I guess, but actually being where I am now has truly been quite a feat in itself."
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