Fast Chat by Lewis Beale
Source: Newsday
Date: March 19, 2006To say that Jessica Lange has had a nontraditional life is to understate the obvious. The 56-year-old actress' first film was the disastrous 1976 remake of "King Kong," a picture that could have single-handedly killed her career. But the Minnesota native, who proved to have the talent to go along with her looks, eventually won Oscars for "Tootsie" and "Blue Sky." She also had notable affairs with Bob Fosse, Mikhail Baryshnikov and her current longtime lover, playwright-actor Sam Shepard. In movies like "Frances," Lange gained a reputation for playing high-strung women, many of them with serious emotional problems. And she's never played the Hollywood game, preferring to live as far away from Tinseltown as possible.
In "Don't Come Knocking," which opened Friday, Lange stars as a small-town waitress who encounters the father of her child (Shepard) for the first time in two decades. Freelance writer Lewis Beale interviewed Lange at a midtown hotel.
LB: What's it like working with Sam Shepard, someone you've been living with for more than 20 years?
JL: Working with him is very easy, it's very comfortable. When you're so familiar, it just brings a lot of texture and history. Especially for these two characters, it made the work very easy. They have this history together, they go back 20 years.
LB: What about when you have disagreements on the set? Are they different from the ones you have in real life?
JL: Oh, sure. Because then you're talking about dialogue, about character interpretation, or how to play a scene. We didn't have any disagreement on this. He wrote the script, it was his language, and I basically was an actor for hire.
LB: What kinds of roles do you get offered these days?
JL: More and more it's these small independent films, because the big studio films don't have roles for women of a certain age. It's these small independent films that are still interested in character-driven pieces.
LB: Yet you're known for playing these kind of larger-than-life, crazy women.
JL: I'm immediately drawn to characters who are in some kind of emotional upheaval. I think they're more fun to play, and they allow you to be much more expansive.
LB: You've admittedly had many lovers, tried all sorts of drugs and lived a variety of different lifestyles in many different places. It's like you're a hippie who just happened to become a film actress.
JL: [Laughs] Partly I was never that ambitious; it's something that kind of fell into place along the way. I was here in New York doing underground theater, then I was in Paris studying mime, then I was back in New York and I thought maybe I'll take some acting classes 'cause I don't know what else to do. It wasn't a design. There wasn't an overriding ambition to become an actor. It just kind of followed in a progression of 'what the hell am I going to do next?' I see that has shadowed my choices. It's the only reason I take a film, not because I think it's going to be good for my career or because it's the best thing to do next.
LB: Was there a point in your career when you could have become a star with a multimillion-dollar salary?
JL: Yes, definitely. Everybody has that little golden era. Probably after "Frances" and "Tootsie." I could have, at that moment, gone on a much more commercial route than I did. I, on the other hand, took that golden opportunity to make "Country" .
LB: Thinking back to "King Kong," can you remember what that experience was like?
JL: I had done that film as kind of a lark. I was a struggling actor in New York City, not even really daring to go out on auditions yet, when I was kind of thrown into this mix. I did it because it sounded like such a Hollywood story. They were gonna pick me up, and fly me to Los Angeles, and do a screen test on the old MGM lot, and it was like "Whoa! This sounds like a lot of fun." I never thought anything would come of it. So a year later, the film comes out, and I think I was in a state of shock. A year before I had been living in a fifth-floor walkup in the Village, working as a waitress at the Lion's Head; now the most expensive movie of the time was being released, it was on the cover of Time magazine, it was more than I could really process. It was surreal.
LB: What's the best advice anyone's ever given you about the business?
JL: I remember Chuck Grodin, when we were doing "King Kong," he said to me, I'd never done a film before, and suddenly I'm acting in this big mechanical hand, and before a blue screen, and he took me aside one day and said, "You know, not all movies are like this." That was good advice. [Laughs]
LB: So now that you've been in the business 30 years, what's the biggest change you've seen?
JL: Small independent films have taken over what the studios used to do, which was make really interesting, character-driven pieces. If you look back at the mid-'70s to late '80s, that was a really golden era, especially for women's roles. There are certainly less of those parts ... a movie that is driven by your character, really interesting characters, fully fleshed-out female characters. I don't see many like that anymore.