Acting has to be an emotional experience
Source: The Daily Telegraph
Date: 2/05/2007In 1977 you'd have got long odds on Jessica Lange graduating to her current status as a grand American tragedienne.
She had floated into the movies as a ravishing, scarcely clad Valkyrie in Dino De Laurentiis's unfairly unloved remake of King Kong, and all but floated straight back out again.
"The perception became that it was nothing to be taken seriously," she says, "and therefore I wasn't either." She went back to modelling, and didn't act again for three years.
But 30 years on, here she is in her dressing room on Shaftesbury Avenue, about to star as Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams's first great play, The Glass Menagerie.
This is not just stunt casting. Her stage CV may make for quick reading, but it consists of three Himalayas: Blanche DuBois in A Street Named Desire, in which she made her stage debut in 1992; Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night; and Amanda Wingfield, an indigent matriarch who nurses unrealistic hopes of marrying off her cripplingly shy daughter Laura to what she calls, with proper Southern finesse, a "gentleman caller".
Lange has actually scaled two of these theatrical peaks twice, first in New York, then, with a different director, in London. In each case, she sees the second production as a corrective to the first.
"Somebody should have taken me aside," she says, "and said, 'Listen, don't tackle Blanche DuBois as your Broadway debut.' But I've always been terribly wilful and, if it's something I wanted to do, I would never try to figure out what the consequences might be. In London, I worked with Peter Hall and he actually had the good sense to instruct me in how to translate a performance into the theatre. Because my performance on stage in New York was great. I mean there was not an untrue moment up there. But you had to be there on stage with me!"
The Broadway incarnation of The Glass Menagerie was also blighted, with actors coming and going and critics underwhelmed. "We were snake-bit from the get-go. One misfortune after another befell us." Perhaps it's an instinctive trace memory that prompts her, while we talk, to turn down the backstage babble coming through the intercom. "They leave those things on in intermission and I'm always half-waiting to hear somebody in the audience say, 'What a piece of s***!' Knock on wood, this one has a whole different life."
Lange is still very much the Valkyrie, though more soberly clad today in all-over brown. She first came across the play as a curious 13-year-old schoolgirl in northern Minnesota. A friend persuaded her to join a speech club, and the first speech she gave was from the play.
"An interviewer once asked Williams, 'To what do you attribute the anger in your plays?' And he said, 'I don't think you mean anger.' The loneliness that is bred in the bone of every one of his plays is something that, even at 13, I connected very deeply to. Amanda doesn't have the kind of dramatic puissance of Blanche. But all of Williams's women are real scrappers, no matter how frail and ethereal or poetic they appear. At their base, the spine of the character is always absolutely solid steel. Tennessee's motto in life was 'En avant'."
As a young woman, Lange met the playwright twice, the first time at his home in Key West, Florida, when she was dating Bob Fosse and all she had to her name was King Kong. "I think I was probably more star-struck with Williams than I've ever been, before or since. He would tend to ramble because, come dinner time, he was fairly well in his cups. But I was listening in awe."
The second time she met Williams was on St Barts in the Caribbean, by which time she had played an angel of death in Fosse's All That Jazz (1979) and had a baby with Mikhail Baryshnikov. "I remember him bouncing my little daughter on his lap and talking about Chekhov. He was infinitely fascinating, I thought."
The angel of death has hovered over the entire career that followed. She was killed by a car crash in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) a plane crash in Sweet Dreams, (1985), and was Oscar-nominated for her portrayals of mental instability in Frances (1982) and Blue Sky (1994), winning for the later.
"Acting for me has to be an emotional experience. If it's not, then it just doesn't mean anything to me." When she was first offered the part of a soap actress in Tootsie (1982), "I kept thinking, there's nothing to do here. It ended up being a much better part than I ever thought it could be." She won an Oscar for that, too.
The early 1980s were what she now calls, with only a glimmer of wistfulness, her "golden time". "It's very short-lived and you don't realise it is at the time." She managed to use her commercial clout to get Country (1984) made. "If I went to a studio now and said, 'Would you do a movie about farmers losing their land, kind of based on Grapes of Wrath but set in contemporary times? How about it?' Can you imagine? They would laugh!"
She never lived anywhere near Hollywood, and motherhood — she has two more children with Sam Shepard – increasingly kept her off the job market. "I remember my agent's analogy at the time. 'All the other girls are in the gym working out. You're lying up in that hammock with those babies.' Motherhood has informed all my parts, just because to me the state of motherhood is when your heart is completely open.
"No matter what you have to stay about Amanda Wingfield — is she unkind, cruel, stupid, selfish? — what she wants is what's best for her children."
Nowadays she tends to make smaller films that look increasingly like pitstops between the stage roles. She is still waiting for Shepard to write her a part.
"You would think maybe at some point he might write a play that would have a part in it for me. But, see, when I say things like this then he gets really pissed off. He says, 'I've written a lot of parts you could have played.' I would love to do one of his pieces and be directed by him on stage."
In the meantime, she wants to take Mary Tyrone to New York, and there is talk of Chekhov. "The Cherry Orchard would force me into an area that I've sidestepped. Look, if I weren't too old, I'd just keep playing Blanche every couple of years. For many, many years, I wanted to play her, and I knew sooner or later I'd get to the right age to do it. Just because there's no part like that. She's divine."