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Forget the Ingénues; Cue the Grown-Up Women Ostage -
Forget the Ingénues; Cue the Grown-Ups
HOLLYWOOD
has always been a man’s world, but as Pink might sing, so what? On
Broadway at least, women can still be rock stars. Among the big-name
talents from film and television who have appeared behind Broadway
marquees this season are Joan Allen, Jane Fonda, Allison Janney, Susan Sarandon and Kristin Scott Thomas.Along
with more than a dozen other equally renowned actresses on New York
stages, they have been playing rulers, heroes, scholars and terrorists.
As lovers they have been pursued rather than pursuers; as angry
combatants they have been the first to resort to violence. Once in a
while they even get to sing. And they are all over 40.
“On the
stage there is a broader, more expansive range of age,” said Ms.
Sarandon, who at 62 dons a 12-foot-long robe and a Marge Simpson hairdo
eight times a week as Queen Marguerite, the prophet of doom and source
of compassion in Eugène Ionesco’s “Exit the King.”
This unusually
large collection of stars is partly happenstance and partly the result
of Broadway’s habit of casting well-known actors to pump up sales, a
tactic increasingly popular in these recessionary times. But the
current number and quality of roles for actresses on the New York stage
is especially noticeable at a time when Hollywood is more obsessed than
ever with youth and is providing so few meaningful parts for women, no
matter what their age.
Women occupy less than 40 percent of all roles in television and film, according to the Screen Actors Guild’s
most recent casting data report. As for female leads, women over 40 get
fewer than a quarter of them, even though their age group accounts for
more than 45 percent of the nation’s women. They also have a much
shorter career than their male counterparts.
Agents, of course,
tend to shudder when a client mentions interest in the stage, since it
pays a fraction of the money that can be made from a few takes in a
film. Yet the theater offers women the kind of demanding and complex
parts that male performers, from Clint Eastwood to Leonardo DiCaprio, take for granted in their movie roles.
Ms. Allen, 52, who recently starred as Katharine with Jeremy Irons, 60, in the middle-age love story “Impressionism,” found that audience members, familiar with her as Pamela Landy, the honest C.I.A. investigator in the Jason Bourne thrillers, didn’t expect to see her in
such a full-bodied role. Katharine, Ms. Allen said, is “funny, serious,
clueless and smart as a whip. I get a chance to show that range more.”
She recalled one woman waited at the stage door to tell her, “I had no
idea you could do all that.”
In “Mary Stuart” the British stage
actress Harriet Walter, 58, is the 16th century’s most powerful woman,
Queen Elizabeth, while Janet McTeer, 48, is her nemesis — roles that have earned them both nominations for best actress at next month’s Tony Awards.
In film “women’s roles on the whole are defined in terms of their
family relationship to the hero,” Ms. Walter said from her basement
dressing room at the Broadhurst Theater, not far from a tank that
collects the 400 gallons of water it takes to produce an onstage
thunderstorm. “They are the wife, the girlfriend, the mother, the
daughter. Rather than being the center of their own story, they’re
usually a planet revolving around a male figure.”
“It’s not that
you want the big central roles necessarily,” she continued. “It’s just
that you want your person to have a life outside, to be a complex
three-dimensional person who isn’t just there to offset somebody else
or fulfill a function in the story.”
Ms. Walter was particularly
struck by the richness of the terminally ill music scholar, played by
the 71-year-old Jane Fonda, in “33 Variations” and the complicated
bipolar patient that Alice Ripley, 45, portrays in the musical “Next to
Normal.” (Both are Tony nominees.)
A few blocks away the prize-winning “August: Osage County,” with its monstrous mother and aggrieved family, has employed Elizabeth Ashley, 69; Estelle Parsons, 81; and Phylicia Rashad, 60. In “Irena’s Vow” Tovah Feldshuh,
who said she’s 56, is a Catholic Polish maid saving Jews from Nazi gas
chambers. In the fall Ms. Scott Thomas, 48, performed in Chekhov’s
“Seagull” as the self-absorbed diva Madame Arkadina.
Similarly meaty roles have lured screen actresses Off Broadway as well. Olympia Dukakis, 77, the matriarch in Craig Lucas’s ambitious, tragicomic play “The Singing Forest,” offered troubled souls either psychoanalysis or phone sex, while Jane Alexander, 69, a bitter blinded painter, orchestrated her escape from a nursing home in “Chasing Manet.”
In
film, aside from the occasional movie about Queen Elizabeth (both the
16th- and 21st-century versions), major roles for women over 35 are
rare.
One reason is that such movies are notoriously difficult to
get made. Ms. Allen and Mr. Irons, for example, are also starring
together in a movie about the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The project was initially developed by HBO but bogged down, so they tried to sell it as feature film, Ms. Allen,
blond and X-ray thin, said, “but a female-driven biopic just isn’t
going to do it.” The movie will have its premiere this fall on Lifetime.
Joel Hopkins, the director of the film “Last Chance Harvey,” a romantic comedy starring Emma Thompson, 50, and Dustin Hoffman,
71, and just released on DVD, said that opening weekends are so
important to Hollywood that they drive production decisions. “My
parents go to the movies a lot,” Mr. Hopkins said. “It’s just that they
don’t rush out to see a movie as soon as it opens.” (The film took in a
respectable $15 million in the United States, earning a profit.)
A result is that great talents are terribly underused, said Mr. Hopkins, who wrote “Harvey” specifically for Ms. Thompson.
Unless
a script calls for a bitter woman to be dumped by her husband,
filmgoers have come to expect the kind of nature-defying casting
decisions that had a then 28-year-old Angelina Jolie playing the mother of Colin Farrell, then 27, in the 2004 film “Alexander.” (Val Kilmer, then 45, was the father.) Such couplings are familiar: At 36, Anne BancroftAngela Lansbury,
just three years older than Laurence Harvey, played his mother. (The
Tony-nominated Ms. Lansbury, 83, is currently enjoying herself as
Madame Arcati in Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.”) played the predatory Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate” (1967) although
she was a mere six years older than Mr. Hoffman; in “TheManchurian
Candidate” (1962)
Hope Davis, 45, who stars in “God of Carnage” with Marcia Gay Harden, 49, was asked in 2006 to play Johnny Depp’s
mother in a movie — even though she is a year younger than he is. “That
tells you something about the absurdity of this industry and the whole
age thing,” she said at the time. “Of course I turned the role down.”
In
“Carnage” her character has a son, but he is 11. And unlike films, in
which 50-plus men are nearly always paired with women who are 20, 30,
even 40 years younger, here the women are married to James Gandolfini, 47, and Jeff Daniels, 54.
In the theater women can act their age.
The
stage has other lures as well. For one, it is the ultimate proving
ground for actors. Ms. Janney, 49, best known as C. J. Cregg, the
brainy, wisecracking White House staffer in “The West Wing” on
television, has been nominated for a Tony for “9 to 5: The Musical.”
Theater “demands a lot more of me,” she said. “It requires a different
skill set: singing, accents, physical comedy.”
Ms. Walter
explained that “to carry the audience with you all through an evening,
it’s recognized that you need a certain developed technique and
experience.” Consider a romantic moment in “real life,” she said,
bending her fingers into quotation marks; “you would be whispering and
mumbling to each other.”
Onstage “you have to preserve that
intimacy while knowing that the person at the back of the orchestra can
see you and hear you, and identify with you more importantly, and
imagine they are in the room with you,” she said. “That isn’t something
you can just get up and do.” The stage requires a kind of “mental
agility,” she said, an “awareness of the whole arc of the evening, and
you’re in charge.”
That control is irresistible for an artist,
Ms. Sarandon said. Over a pot of mint tea she recalled a recent film
(she won’t say which) in which the essential qualities of the character
that had prompted her to accept the role were edited out, something she
did not discover until the film was finished. “The first time I saw it
was with an audience,” she said.
Theater is kinder to mature
women in other ways. “Theater is a much more forgiving medium,” said
Ms. Sarandon, who has been nominated for Oscars five times and won
once. Onstage there are no camera close-ups, and an actress can lose or
gain 20 years depending on the lighting. “When you’re doing film,
you’re not necessarily their priority,” she said, referring to
directors of photography. (For the record Ms. Sarandon in daylight, up
close, looks fabulous.)
Live theater is also a different kind of experience. “When you see Patti Smith,”
the punk goddess who will turn 63 this year, “in concert, she’s 19.
That’s the essence of what you get from her. She’s so vibrant, so
committed.”
(Another 63-year-old goddess — at least to her fans — is Liza Minnelli, whose monthlong engagement at the Palace Theater this winter is nominated for the special theatrical event Tony.)
Actresses
who have the most difficult transitions over time tend to be those who
can only play the romantic lead, said Ms. Sarandon, who considers
herself a character actress. Similarly Marsha Mason 67, who appeared in “Impressionism,” remembered Shirley MacLaine,
75, telling her, “In order to keep working, it’s important to move into
character work early because they don’t know what to do with you.”
Ms. Mason noted, with her familiar bell-choir laugh, that putting on a little weight helps fill out wrinkles.
She is preparing to play Winnie in Beckett’s “Happy Days” at the California Shakespeare Theater near San Francisco but recalled a time in her career just after
she turned 40, when, after receiving three Oscar nominations in a span
of five years, her job offers dried up. “When the work started to taper
off, it was a real wake-up call in terms of my well-being.” She moved
from Los Angeles to Abiquiu, N.M., bought some land and started a line
of organic products. That’s where she lives when not onstage.
“We’ve got to put sexy mature women like Jeanne Moreau in films,” Ms. Mason said. “A woman has to feel comfortable in her own skin. We have to figure out a way to dance with it.”
In
“9 to 5” at least Ms. Janney is dancing, singing and being romanced by
a younger man. She has a yearlong contract, and she paused for a moment
to consider that she would be onstage when her birthday comes in
November. “It’s kind of cool to turn 50 on Broadway.”