A Winner Never Quits
By Dana Kennedy
Source: Entertainment Weekly
Date: April 14, 1995
It's Like Heaven," says Jessica Lange. It's just four days after her Best Actress win at the Academy Awards, but she's not talking about her Oscar. Heaven, in this case, is the 110-acre horse farm in the rolling hills outside Charlottesville, Va., that she calls home. Less than 24 hours after taking the prize, Lange and two of her children packed up, left the Los Angeles rental where they'd been living since January, and flew home. "A great calm has come over me," says Lange, speaking just before she goes to pick up her kids at school. "It was time to come home. But after a while, after I'm back in the calm, I feel a strong urge to get back into that madness again."
Lange, 45, has been commuting between the madness and the calm for most of her 19-year career, both personally and professionally. Ever since 1981, when she burned through the screen in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Lange has reveled in taking her characters to the edge -- and back. It's familiar terrain. "I've always had a place in my heart for the madness in people," she says. "I certainly can slip into it myself. I have to be vigilant to keep things balanced and not go in that downward spiral."
To the outside world, Lange seems to be on the roll of a lifetime. After five previous Academy Award nominations (including a win for 1982's Tootsie) and several years of relative obscurity, winning the Oscar for her portrayal of the troubled, seductive wife of an Army officer in Blue Sky was especially sweet. Moreover, the film, made with Tommy Lee Jones in 1991, had been sitting in a bank vault since Orion Pictures de-dared bankruptcy and hadn't been released until last August. Lange also has two movies out this spring: Losing Isaiah was released in March and Rob Roy, a love story set in 18th-century Scotland with Liam Neeson, opened April 7. And she will be seen this year reprising Blanche DuBois, the role she played in 1992 on Broadway, in the CBS version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Alec Baldwin will costar with her again as Stanley Kowalski.
Lange, though, sounds more bemused than elated about her victory. "It's great to get recognition for that little film, but whether it will change anything for me, I don't know," she says. "I can't say the scripts were stacked up in front of the door when I got home. It still doesn't seem real."
Maybe that's because in the two weeks leading up to the Academy Awards, Lange's life was a blur. She was finishing up Streetcar, promoting Rob Roy, planning for Oscar night, and taking care of her kids. Business as usual for an Oscar-nominated movie star and working mother? Here's a glimpse into what Lange calls "that madness."
At First, it's hard even to find Lange on the enormous Streetcar set, built on a soundstage off Hollywood's Melrose Avenue and designed to look like New Orleans. You have to walk down a cobblestoned street, past bars and pawnshops, until you get to Stanley Kowalski's house. Just past the courtyard, under a panoply of drooping dead plants, you glimpse Lange. She's in costume as the fey, worn-out Blanche, standing -- no, swaying--beyond the French doors.
It is the penultimate week of filming on Streetcar, 13 days before the Oscars, and because the movie is being shot mainly in sequence, Blanche is beginning her own final downward spiral. Lange collapses on a chair after a wrenching scene and is silent. Then she calls out, "Let's do it again right away!" Director Glenn Jordan obliges: Lange and costar John Goodman do another take. "It's just too hard to let the moment slip away," she says. "And I don't want to think about what I'm doing."
Lange has a history of losing herself in her characters -- especially the more troubled ones. "Blanche was beginning to overwhelm me," she says later about her scenes that day. "This is when the character is at her most intense and I feel myself reeling out of control with her." A member of the production staff agrees. "The character is starting to shred and so is Jessica," she says.
Lange didn't worry about such actorly intensity back in the '80s when she was doing films like Frances. "Physically and emotionally, that was exhausting. I went pretty far out there." But now, with three kids, daughters Alexandra, 14 (by dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov), and Hannah, 9, and son Walker, 7 (by her live-in companion of 13 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard), Lange is wary of bringing her edgier roles home. "People may think I disappeared over the last four years, but I've deliberately chosen smaller parts so I could be with my family more," she explains. "My kids come with me on location and we set up these gypsy encampments, but it's just not the same. You're preoccupied, and you're working six days a week. It's not fair to them."
John Goodman, who also worked with Lange on Everybody's All-American and Sweet Dreams, is so fond of her that he almost chokes up when asked about her. "It was her idea to get me into Streetcar, and it's the finest thing I've ever been in," he says. "We act goofy together, but I think of her as a person of the plains -- rock solid," Goodman thinks she's learned how to handle demanding parts without sacrificing herself and her family. "She's really at the top of her game," he says. "But at the same time I think it's costing her less emotionally, She can get into those tough scenes, but they don't take the same toll."
Lange is not so sure. At the moment, her family is scattered. Shepard, 51, is working on the CBS miniseries Streets of Laredo in Texas; Alexandra -- or Shura, as she is known -- is on an Outward Bound trip in Maryland; Hannah and Walker are with Lange.
"Hannah said to me the other morning, 'Mother, do you think playing these crazy women is going to make you crazy?' " Lange says. "I said, 'Well, I suppose you could look at it that way. Or else it's a great opportunity for me to get rid of that craziness through someone else.' "
Lange laughs. "I don't know if she was buying that or not."
Four Days Later, on Saturday, Lange is in a nearly windowless suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena. "It's just like the mole set!" wails Lange, referring to the living conditions on Streetcar, where she's just spent two months. "I never see the sun!"
Dressed in a creamy yellow Calvin Klein pantsuit, her blond hair curling below her ears, Lange looks softer and younger than she did as Blanche. Guarded by movie publicists grimly communicating via walkie-talkies, Lange will spend the day at a press junket fielding questions about Rob Roy. It is noon now, and she's eager to escape.
Lange tells her handlers she wants to go outside and marches out to a patio table. She's played the media game long enough to know all the angles ("I'm not good with anecdotes!") but rarely comes across as jaded or snippy -- even when she doesn't like the questions.
What is it like to be an actress over 40 in Hollywood? Lange frowns. "Well, for one thing, I've never lived in Hollywood. I don't know if that's hurt or helped me." She frowns some more. "In all the interviews I've done lately, I always get asked about plastic surgery. I think: 'Would this same interviewer be asking this question of males in my age group?' Would they actually say to De Niro, 'Hey, you're 50 years old, have you thought of having work done on your face?' It's such bulls --. It's very insulting to assume that every woman as she ages is going to become so anxious about it that she'll consider it."
Unlike many actresses, Lange does not complain about the dearth of roles for older women. "I've never had that kind of commercial leading-lady career to begin with," she says. "Some of my best roles--in Frances and Sweet Dreams--came in my 30s, but I would say that Blanche DuBois and Mary MacGregor [from Rob Roy] are really my best roles, and they came in my 40s. So who can say? Anyway, I've always been kind of marginal. I've never been what I think of as popular. I am never going to win a People's Choice award, know what I mean?"
She is even less politically correct about the sudden leap in certain actresses' salaries--like the $12 million Demi Moore is earning for Strip Tease. "It's absurd to me that this kind of salary is paid to any actor," Lange says. "As far as I'm concerned, there's not an actor on the face of the earth that's worth that kind of money. It certainly is not a measure of talent--it's a measure of financial viability. And I've never done films just because they'll make money."
Four more days have passed, and Lange is back on the "mole set." Streetcar finished filming at midnight the previous night, but the actors have to return for a east photo shoot. Lange is sitting in her trailer in her bathrobe when Walker and Hannah run in with a package. It contains a gift Lange ordered for Goodman: a sterling silver cigarette case just like the one Goodman's character, Mitch, offers to Blanche when he meets her.
In the play, Mitch tells Blanche to read the inscription on the cigarette case, but she can't make it out. He strikes a match and she draws closer to read the Elizabeth Barrett Browning quotation. Lange had the same inscription engraved on Goodman's case. She reads it aloud as her kids look on: "And if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death."
Lange knows something about the kind of turbulent love Tennessee Williams wrote about. Despite frequent rumors of a split, she's spent 13 years with Shepard, whom she met on the set of Frances while she was still involved with Baryshnikov. "I had no idea what to expect when Sam and I ran off together," she recalls. "But I do believe now that it will last forever. I'm as much in love with him as I ever was. I just have the sense that we're destined to be together. I'm not easy to live with and neither is Sam, so we are well matched." (In recent years, Shepard has declined to comment on Lange to the press.)
After an initially painful break with Baryshnikov, she says the two are now "wonderful friends. I love him dearly." Lange has custody of Shura, but the teenager sees Baryshnikov often. Lange says she looks like her father and is "very Russian."
Lange believes her attraction to "larger-than-life creative men" stems from her relationship with her father. Though difficult and domineering at times, Al Lange, who died six years ago, was a "tremendous influence," according to his daughter. She describes him as the "storm" of the family and looks upset when asked if it's true he was an alcoholic, saying, "I don't like to think about it."
Though she's never had therapy and doesn't believe in it, Lange says that depression, which she struggled with regularly until after she had children, runs in her family. That collective dark streak, she explains, was tempered by her mother, a housewife, who still lives in Minnesota near Lange's three siblings. "She was my refuge," says Lange. "Without her I think the rest of us would just have spun out into the vortex."
Instead, Lange left Minnesota after one year of college to run off to Paris with Spanish photographer Paco Grande, the only man she has ever married. They were divorced in 1980 but remain on good terms. "I've had a wildly romantic sexual life," she says. "I've known some really great men. I was never out there looking for somebody. Somehow it always just appeared, which is probably extraordinarily lucky in a world where people spend a lot of time trying to find that person."
Five days later, Lange is dressed in Calvin Klein again--this time it's a floor-length black dress. Escorted to the Academy Awards by Rob Roy director Michael Caton-Jones and her brother George, a pilot, Lange says she was stunned when her name was called. "People were saying I was going to win, but I had tremendous doubts," she says. "It happened so fast." Even though she knows what it's like to win--she was named Best Supporting Actress for 1982's Tootsie--Lange was worried about tripping while walking up to the podium. "I was excited be-cause this was the first time my kids were all watching and knew what was going on," she says. "I knew how excited they would be."
Everyone wondered where Shepard was--and why Lange didn't thank him. Simple: He was back in Virginia with Shura, supervising her pajama party. "He never comes to these things," Lange says. "They make him uncomfortable." She didn't thank him, she explains, because "a relationship is very private. I thanked my kids because they follow me around to all these places."
After the Oscars, Lange went to parties at Mortons and Chasen's, then returned to her house at 2:30 a.m., where her kids clamored to see the statuette. Walker taped flowers to it. By noon the next day, Lange and her kids were airborne. Now back home, where she plans to take a year off before signing on to another movie, Lange recalls something she said to her daughter back in L.A. "I said, 'Hannah, you don't know how happy I am to be finished.'" Lange pauses for a beat. "And she said, 'Mother, probably not as happy as I am.'"
So Jessica Lange may not be returning to the madness right away. But she promises she'll be back.
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