Finding Her Way Through a Forest: a Profile of Jessica Lange
JESSICA LANGE, the actress, was first cast as a “pretty blonde,” but slipped out of that trap and emerged as one of the finest actors of her generation, able to find depth in all of her characters and to convey that depth both on stage and on the movie screen.
She was born in 1949, the third of four children of a selfless mother who held the family together and a restless, alcoholic father who could never find a job that pleased or suited him for long. He was a traveling salesman, a Ford dealer, a gym teacher. From her mother, Jessie Lange learned patience and endurance; from her father the idea that she had special talent, and should be ambitious, that she shouldn’t settle.
Because of her Dad’s chronic dissatisfaction, her family moved a good deal when she was a girl but Cloquet, Minnesota was her favorite of the towns where they lived. She had some mild depression, which was never treated.
Jessica went to the University of Minnesota but didn’t like the academic side of college much. The end of the 1960’s were tumultuous years in America and her academic classes didn’t seem relevant to the Vietnam War, racism, feminism, or the ecology movement. Theater was much better at exploring those issues, and the bohemian atmosphere of theater productions appealed to her.
Dark roles in theater allowed her to make some use of her depression, to fuel her performances by tapping into the darkness. And the better plays had a poetry in the lines which she adored. When a play worked, when the writing, acting, directing, lighting, and costumes all came together, there was a magic that she never found anywhere else in the world.
In those college years, she met the only man she ever married, a gifted Spanish photographer named Paco Grande. He was handsome and exotic and she loved the way he could lose himself in painting and sculpture. Within a few months, Jessica had dropped out of college, and gone traveling with Paco, to New York City, and then all through Europe, where they met Gypsies, and talked politics in French cafes.
In 1971, Paco was busted for drug possession. His lawyer, eager to make his client look respectable, noted that it would help Paco’s defense if he and Jessica were married. So they tied the knot, but soon Jessica left Paco and moved to Paris to study mime. From 1971–1973, she did mime and street theater in Paris, learning a passable French, learning to use her face to great effect.
In 1974, she returned to New York in 1974, and reluctantly began working as a model, because it paid well. In between modeling jobs, she waitressed at the Lion’s Head Tavern in Greenwich Village. She took acting lessons, which she loved, and dance lessons which she liked, and went on occasional film auditions, which never panned out.
Over the Christmas holidays in 1974, she spent time with her family. Her parents told her they were concerned about her. They felt the vagabond life she was leading had little purpose or direction. They said it was no wonder she was struggling so far away from her roots; she ought to return to Minnesota, or at least put down roots in a town more sensible and affordable than New York City.
Meanwhile, in Hollywood, Dino De Laurentiis, a brash, gutsy Italian film producer, was remaking the 1933 classic “King Kong.” He needed his Fay Wray, the female lead threatened by a rampaging ape. De Laurentiis and his casting people had looked at thousands of head shots of models and actresses, had interviewed dozens of women interested in playing Fay Wray, and made screen test after screen test. They’d never found a Fay Wray they liked.
Someone liked Jessica’s modeling photos enough to fly her out to Hollywood to test for the part, and she was thrilled to be driven through the famous gates of M-G-M. But the second assistant director who met her told her she wasn’t right, she wasn’t what they were looking for. Then, sensing her grave disappointment, the man said since she’d flown all the way out, he’d give her a brief screen test.
He must have liked what he saw because he asked the assistant director to come in as she did more line readings. The assistant director fetched the director, and the director summoned Dino DeLarentiis, and before the day was over, Jessica was being signed to play the part of Fay Wray.
By then, it was mid-December 1975. Jessica was twenty-six. She went home to Minnesota to spend another Christmas with her parents. They were ready with the usual well-intended questions: ‘When are you going to decide what you’re really going to do with your life? What are your plans for next year?’
Jessica told them that her plans were to star in a big Hollywood movie and that her male co-star would be a huge mechanical ape.
Things got even weirder in the New Year. Dino De Laurentiis knew that Universal Pictures was also re-making “King Kong.” The thinking in Hollywood was that only one “King Kong” movie could turn a profit. So De Laurentiis decided he had to release his “King Kong” first. He sped up the production. Fay Wray’s wardrobe was thrown together at the last minute. The actors barely had time to rehearse their scenes.
At a time when Jessica was still insecure about her acting, she was being precariously suspended 40 feet above a concrete floor as a mechanical ape attacked her. Luckily, she was supposed to act “scared,” which wasn’t a stretch. She was not only worried about the mechanical ape; she was also worried that the movie would bomb. As she sat in a giant hydraulic hand, she thought… ‘I guess this is better than being a waitress at The Lion’s Head.’
She learned that an actress needs to be able to summon a sense of humor and to trust their colleagues. The main cameraman, Harold Wellman, had actually filmed the original “King Kong” in 1933. Having him on the set was reassuring.
Jeff Bridges was also in the film, and within his surfer dude persona, he was impressed by how seriously this mime-and-street-theater actress Jessica Lange was approaching the movie. Movie veterans in the cast told Jessica ‘It’s not usually like this,’ or ‘No matter how many movies you make, you’ll never do another one like this.’ So she really didn’t know what to think of movie-making and had no idea how the movie would be received.
“King Kong” turned out to be a hit, and even won an Academy Award… in Special Effects. Critical reaction to Lange’s acting was mixed; many thought she was terrible. But Pauline Kael, of all people, who panned almost everything and everyone, pointed out that Lange had a great face for the movies, and talent too — a Carole Lombard for the 1970’s. Jessica thought ‘That was the beginning of my film career.’
But there weren’t many offers. Her friend Bob Fosse was making “All That Jazz” and asked her to be in it. As what? she wondered. “All That Jazz” was about a company of singers and dancers. She couldn’t sing, she could barely dance. Looking back as an older actor, she was profoundly grateful to Bob Fosse, who was already late with the movie and over budget, yet created some scenes for her. His fiercely protective attitude in this crucial period might have saved her film career. And the critics were kinder this time; they liked her work in the film. She thought “THIS, not King Kong, is the start of my film career.”
Suddenly, she was an A-List celebrity, hanging out with other celebrities. She dated the Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, and though they never married, in 1981 she bore his child, a girl they named Aleksandra. Baryshnikov never learned English, and she never learned Russian. Their marriage was expressed in French. They were not terribly impressed with language or needy to be perfectly understood in words.
In 1981, she starred with Jack Nicholson in Bob Rafelson’s remake of the James M. Cain novel “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” She played Cora, the adulterous wife of a simple Greek guy proud of his greasy spoon joint. She assists in her lover’s killing of her husband, knowing it’s wrong. “The Postman Always Rings Twice” wasn’t a great film but she managed to portray a not-very-nice woman, in a range of moods from sour boredom to sexual ecstasy to profound grief, and make the audience believe her. It was another new beginning for her; Jack Nicholson was insightful about how film acting is different from theater work, and from what she’d learned in acting class.
Then came 1982, and two very different Jessica Lange movies. “Tootsie” was a crowd-pleasing comedy about an unemployed actor, played by Dustin Hoffman, who tries out for a part on a soap opera as a woman, gets the part and has to keep on pretending to be a woman. Lange played the star of the soap opera.
Her other 1982 film was “Frances,” in which she starred as Frances Farmer, a gifted actress of the 1930’s and ‘40’s who became mentally ill. The film played fast and loose with history but it worked as a film, and Lange was terrific. If playing Cora gave her a chance to play someone living close to the edge, the role of Frances Farmer was a tortured soul, a real descent into madness.
While working on “Frances” she met the playwright and actor Sam Shepard, and left Baryshnikov for Shepard. He proposed to her one day, offering her an antique sapphire ring. She told him she would never marry again but they lived together and had a daughter Hannah in 1985 and a son Samuel in 1987. Jessica wanted her children to enjoy as normal a childhood as possible, so they lived in Cloquet, rather than New York or Hollywood.
In 1984, she and Shepard co-starred in the film “Country,” the best of several Hollywood films in the mid-’80’s about farmers in Middle America trying to hold onto their farms under pressure from the weather and agribusiness. Jessica and Sam played Jewell and Gil Ivy, and the trick was to look absolutely at home on the farm, and to make these characters admirable but not sickly sweet.
She and Shepard were passionate about each other and she loved his looks and creative intelligence. He taught her something about how to face down blue moods with dark humor. But Shepard had a drinking problem, and often treated her shabbily when he’d been drinking. They argued a lot, and finally split in 2009.
Lange describes acting as “trying to find your way through a forest.” She doesn’t dodge the fact that some productions don’t come together, but she won’t blame the actors. They were trying hard to hack through that forest. Sometimes there’s something structurally wrong with the play, but she’s been in productions of great plays like “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” that didn’t work. She feels failure in the theater can’t be analyzed any more than the magic can.
Lange came back to Broadway to perform as Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” She had played the role in London 16 years before and was fascinated to plunge into it again at a later, wiser stage of life. She found the four-hour play exhausting both physically and emotionally, but profoundly moving. The character Mary Tyrone is herself an actress and for years has been deeply addicted to morphine.
The whole play takes place on a single summer day with just four actors: a husband, wife and their two sons. Yet “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” seems to touch on almost everything about the human condition.
Lange believes that the part may be the greatest female role in any American play. It’s “like a fast-moving train.” She gave the part everything she had. The curtain would go up, the play would start churning, its power building and, even in her exhaustion, she found herself transported by the poetry.