At 52, Marilu Henner has life and health on track

The actress was determined not to wind up like her mother.
SCRIPPS HOWARD
She may not be the wedding planner, but Marilu Henner knows a thing or two about weddings. After all, she's had two of her own and is about to have her third.
In ABC Family's next movie, "Love Rules!" airing at 8 tonight, she plays the bride's mother who commandeers the task of plotting out the wedding like Napoleon at Austerlitz.
Henner, who's best known for "Taxi" and "Evening Shade," will wed her fianc & eacute;, Mike Brown, sometime at the end of the year. Though they were friends in college, it took them 22 years to get together.
Ironically, they ran into each other after college while Henner was applying for her first marriage license to actor Frederic Forrest. It wasn't until her second divorce from producer-director Robert Lieberman that Brown came back into her life.
"He heard I was divorced from a mutual friend who'd seen me in the show 'Chicago,"' bubbles Henner at breakneck speed. "And he said I'm going to look her up and see what happens."
Health-conscious
At 52, Henner still looks like a bride. And that's not by accident. She's written several books on fitness and diet and is a proponent of a scrupulous health regime.
"Before my mother died I was a poor eater, a smoker, used to drink a lot of coffee," she says, sipping a glass of spring water.
"When I watched my mother with arthritis ... she was teaching dancing in December, went to bed with the flu in January, went into the hospital in February ... she was having neurological problems. She had her leg amputated in April and she died in May -- within a five-month period."
Henner was living in California at the time and traveling back and forth to her hometown, Chicago.
"When I saw them hook 13 things up to my mother ... I said, 'If my mother gets out of here alive I'm going to learn everything I can about the human body so I can make her life more comfortable. And if she dies, I'm going to learn everything I can about the human body and make sure this doesn't happen to anybody else in my family."'
She became "a real student of health," she says.