By Mark Dawidziak | Cleveland's Plain Dealer  

Patricia Heaton sits in her Warner Bros. dressing room, dinner perched on her lap. It's a taping day at "Everybody Loves Raymond," which means that she and co-star Ray Romano soon will be trading lines in front of a Burbank studio audience.

This is what's called her break. There's a knock on the door. An assistant rushes in and hands her a couple of pages. They are last-minute revisions to the script.

Heaton cheerfully takes the pages and returns to her dinner. Between bites, she answers questions about her life, her career and the organized chaos of taping days.

"Thursdays are a little crazy around here," the Bay Village native says, "but look at what I get to do for a living. Let's be serious. There are people out there with really tough jobs. I think there's a real appreciation of that around here, especially after Sept. 11.

"We all have this feeling of working with renewed vigor this season. It's nice to know that, at this difficult time in our country, your job is to make people laugh. Your job is to make people feel a little bit better at the end of those long Mondays."

Heaton has won two consecutive Emmys for doing her job so well on "Everybody Loves Raymond," which began its prime-time run in September 1996. She received her second statuette for best actress in a comedy at the November ceremony twice postponed after the terrorist attacks.

"I was truly shocked that I won," Heaton says. "The whole night was incredible. The only thing I had planned at all was acknowledging everybody in the armed forces," which she did in an emotional acceptance speech.

Tomorrow night's "Raymond" episode begins a special two-part Mother's Day story about Heaton's character, Debra Barone, getting into the mother of all fights with her ever-critical mother-in-law, Marie (Doris Roberts, who won her first Emmy in November).

Airing at 9 p.m. on WOIO Channel 19, the episode concludes with Debra deciding she likes it when Marie doesn't speak to her. To Ray's horror, she intends to keep it that way. The battle continues on May 13.

With two Emmy wins and a hit show, Heaton has been the subject of two cable documentaries over the last few months: one as part of Lifetime's "Intimate Portrait" series, the other on E!

"That just shows you how shallow our society has become, that a TV actor's life is the subject of such things," she says. "Now that didn't stop me from participating, of course, because I think I'm fascinating."

Behind the humor is the candor. Heaton will talk about the pain of being 12 and losing her mother to a brain aneurysm. She will tell you about her bouts with depression. She will tell you about the rocky early days of her marriage to David Hunt (the happy couple now has four sons).

Heaton even will tell you her age. She turned 44 on March 4.

"I take the business of show business very seriously, but I don't like to be dictated to," the outspoken Heaton says. "If somebody in this town says you shouldn't talk about your age or your politics, that's the first thing I'm going to do. I just don't believe in all the junk you're supposed to do to protect your career.

"When I got to L.A., I went through a sort of epiphany. I realized there were other things I could do in life that were meaningful. Acting didn't have to be the be-all and end-all of my life. The minute that I latched onto that, it gave me a certain kind of freedom."