"My husband and I rotate, depending if I was out late," she says of running the household. Maybe she is the thoroughly modern woman of the world, but she is domestic. She brings home the bacon and cooks it, too.

"I'd work 16 hours on 'Donny and Marie' and go home and my mom would say, 'OK, now we're going to make bread,"' she says. "I'm a domestic chick, too. I do have help (around the house) — when I work, I do. I have a nanny. QVC takes me away, and 'Celebrity Duets' takes me to California two days a week."

She has turned down a dozen Broadway offers and TV projects to stay at home in recent years, she claims, largely to raise her children and nurse her ailing mother. "I think that women can do it all; I just don't think you can do it all at once," she told King. "And I didn't want any regrets with my mother."

Osmond's life hasn't been all curtain calls and domestic bliss, as anyone with a newspaper or People magazine subscription can attest. Her first marriage to BYU basketball player Steve Craig ended in divorce after less than three years. She married Blosil, an award-winning producer, a year later, in 1986.

In 1999, five months after the birth of her third child, as has been chronicled repeatedly, she gave the credit cards and checkbook to her nanny, drove up the California coast and holed up in a small hotel, never intending to return to her family. Blosil reached her on a cell phone and drove up to be with her.

She was suffering from postpartum depression, which left her so inert that she had been unable to get out of bed or even decide what to wear. In the aftermath, Osmond and Blosil were separated for several months but reconciled.

Osmond was treated with anti-depressants and a regimented diet, among other things. She wrote a book on the subject — "Behind the Smile: My Journey Out of Postpartum Depression" — and became an unofficial spokeswoman to put postpartum depression in the public forum, appearing on radio and TV shows and at public-speaking engagements. In the book, she also revealed that she had been sexually abused (not by family members) during her years of touring as a child.

"I was the first celeb to talk about depression," she says now. "A lot have come out since, like Brooke (Shields). It was taboo to talk about, which is so stupid. It shed a lot of light on it.

"I still get e-mails about that book. I had four just last night."

Osmond reports that she is doing well on that front these days, but "once you've been through something like that, you're always on your guard to never go there again. I'm very cautious about what I eat and what is going on with my body."