The Bert Osborne Files
More interviews with Piper Laurie by Bert Osborne.
Here's the first of Bert's interviews with Piper Laurie, published Jan. 15, 1994, in Creative Loafing.
PIPER LAURIE INTERVIEW ("Wrestling Ernest Hemingway")
Had anyone suggested 40-odd years ago that Piper Laurie -- at the time, one fetching ingenue in a Hollywood studio system cluttered with fetching ingenues -- would be still going strong in the 1990s, she's probably the only person who'd have believed it. And we're not talking about a career of television commercials or dinner-theater gigs, either. We're talking about Academy Award nominations and celebrated performances on the legitimate stage. Piper Laurie in [The Cherry Orchard]? Sure, and Tony Curtis in [King Lear], right?
This may not sound like a very complimentary line of questioning to begin a recent exclusive interview with the 61-year-old actress, though it's intended to be. Laurie says she understands. "When you put it like that, it sort of sends a chill up my spine," she replies with a laugh. "It suddenly hits me how truly amazing it is, the notion of a former starlet doing Anton Chekhov. My God, it really [is] wonderful. I've been so fortunate."
The latest evidence of Laurie's good fortune is [Wrestling Ernest Hemingway], which opens here next week. Director Randa Haines (who previously guided the actress to one of her three Oscar nominations, for 1986's [Children of a Lesser God]) teams Laurie with Richard Harris, Robert Duvall and Shirley MacLaine in a bittersweet character study about male-bonding and late-blooming romance among the seventysomething set. "All four of us are playing older than we actually are. I needed a couple of hours worth of old-age makeup every day, but they let Shirley get by with about 30-minutes worth," she offers jokingly.
Laurie plays Georgia, a coquettish widow with a weakness for old movies, who toys with the affections (but rejects the advances) of Harris' freewheeling Frank. It's a comparatively small part, Laurie acknowledges, "But she [is] a character, and I had a lot of fun doing it. I don't think I've ever played anyone quite so silly before." After a pause, she adds good-naturedly, "Come to think of it, though, I probably know Georgia a lot better than I'd care to admit."
Haines first approached Laurie with Steve Conrad's script two years ago, when the director was assembling a group of actors to give it a read-through. "I was amazed when Randa told me it had been written by someone who was only 21 or 22," the actress remembers. "There's an insight to the story and a power of observation that's surprisingly mature for a person that age."
At that initial reading, Laurie read the part of Helen, the sharp-witted but sympathetic divorcee who manages Frank's apartment building. The role involves a few more scenes -- and, she notes, "a lot more potential" -- yet Helen ended up being played by MacLaine once the cameras started rolling. "I think the people at Warner Bros. wanted Shirley because they consider her a bigger name, a better draw at the box-office," she speculates.
Still undervalued after all these years? [Wrestling Ernest Hemingway] is Laurie's 32nd feature film in a career which began back in 1950 (pre-dating MacLaine by five years, Harris and Duvall by longer), playing Ronald Reagan's teenaged daughter in [Louisa], an altogether fluffier variation on a similarly geriatric theme (grandmother Spring Byington must choose between elderly suitors Edmund Gwenn and Charles Coburn). That irony aside, Laurie has weathered the 43-year interim between [Louisa] and [Ernest] with a seemingly deliberate penchant for the unpredictable.
Make no mistake: Her career started predictably enough. At the age of 18, she signed a seven-year, 15-picture contract with Universal. The studio promptly changed its new property's name from Rosetta Jacobs to Piper Laurie, and capitalized on her wholesome good-looks and youthful vitality to market her as a kind of female counterpart to the all-American Rocks and Tabs of the era.
She made her share of stock Westerns ([Mississippi Gambler], [Dawn at Socorro], [Smoke Signal]). And stock romantic comedies ([No Room for the Groom], [Has Anybody Seen My Gal?], [Ain't Misbehavin']). And stock flying-carpet adventures ([The Prince Who Was a Thief], [Son of Ali Baba], [The Golden Blade]). Her roles were vaguely derivative; she typically played pert love interests to the likes of leading men Tony Curtis (on four occasions) and Rock Hudson (on three), although she also co-starred once with a popular talking mule (in [Francis Goes to the Races]).
As Laurie recounts, "I can't say there weren't some positive aspects to those years, but the advantages were personal more so than professional. The enjoyment wasn't in making the movies, because I was too intimidated and lacking of technique. But the studio did provide me with some interesting life experiences. I went to Korea a couple of times with the USO. I was completely apolitical at the time, but I remember feeling such compassion for those soldiers, many of whom were no older than I was. It was quite a hunk of life to chew for someone as sheltered as I was at that age."
Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, Laurie's artistic frustrations started mounting almost immediately. "It was during [Louisa], actually," the actress concedes. "Scenes like [nothing] I had ever worked on in any of my acting classes. A teen caricature I couldn't relate to at all. I'd go home and work hard trying to find something real and honest in the character, but the director was none too pleased about that. I wasn't supposed to think about things or offer my own ideas. I was just supposed to be pretty and [do] it. It all went kind of downhill from there."
Roughly seven years and 15 pictures later, Laurie rejoiced at the prospect of starting anew -- as a bona fide dramatic actress. But it was a proverbial uphill struggle. "It's very clear to me now that there were certain benefits to those studios days. I had some sort of name recognition, which brought me some opportunities, although they were rare and I really had to fight for them," Laurie explains.
"But the name itself represented something else entirely, and I lost chances to play some good roles because of that name," she continues. "It used to embarrass me. I seriously thought about changing it back when I couldn't find a respectable job in Hollywood. I auditioned for a play in New York once, and the author pulled me aside afterward and told me, 'Well, you were very good, but I can't afford a Piper Laurie and what she stands for.' No one else wanted an unknown quantity like Rosetta Jacobs when they could have a recognizable name like Piper Laurie, so that's when I decided I'd just have to change what the name stood for."
To that end, the real turning point for Laurie came with the advent of the live television dramas during the late '50s and early '60s (Playhouse 90, Studio One, G.E. Theatre, etc.). Arguably the best-known of these projects was the original [Days of Wine and Roses], with Laurie and Cliff Robertson portraying the alcoholics recreated on the big screen by Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon five years later.
While it's fashionable today for established film stars and directors to look down their noses at TV, the untested waters of what was then a brand-new medium seemed to breed creativity. Laurie honed her skills, appearing alongside up-and-coming actors like Jason Robards and George C. Scott. And she worked with such Hollywood-bound directors as Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer and Sydney Pollack.
"You had a sense that there was the whole world watching," Laurie recalls. "A lot of the shows were very faulty. Technically, they were kind of a mess. It was scary. In a way, it was much more intense than an opening night in the theater, because you knew that you'd never have a second shot at doing it better the next night."
Laurie spent four years crafting a diverse range of (mostly downtrodden) characters on television before agreeing to make her next film. "I felt I had a lot of catching up to do, having played nothing but ingenues before," she observes. Then, as the physically and emotionally crippled girlfriend opposite Paul Newman's pool shark in director Robert Rossen's [The Hustler] (1961), Laurie finally shattered Hollywood's perception of her as merely another pretty face. She earned her first Oscar nomination for her performance in the movie and, having reached a peak of newfound respectability within the industry, she suddenly retired.
She married Joseph Morgenstern (the former Newsweek film critic) in 1962, and they had a daughter, Annie. They moved to upstate New York. Laurie took up bread-baking and marble-sculpting. "It wasn't so much that I made a conscientious decision after [The Hustler] that I wasn't going to make another film," she maintains. "It just seemed like acting was such a trivial way to occupy one's time. There was the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War, other things that were more important to me, not the least of which was my family."
She pauses. "Career-wise, I sensed that everything was simply starting all over again. I had proved that I could play alcoholics and cripples, so that's all anybody was offering me. After a while, those types of roles can get to be about as boring as any of those silly things I did at Universal. I kept turning scripts down, and eventually people stopped asking me."
It was 15 years after [The Hustler] when director Brian DePalma asked her to play Sissy Spacek's crazed mother in the Stephen King-inspired horror movie [Carrie] (1976). As fate would have it, Laurie had been "itching" to resume an acting career, and her decidedly auspicious comeback was rewarded with a second Oscar nomination. Unwittingly, she had managed to bypass the pitfall of many a contemporary with her abrupt (albeit belated) transition from leading lady to character actress.
"I left my career and when I decided I wanted it again, I went back to it, which is a terribly lucky thing to be able to do," Laurie submits. "I really can't know what might've happened if I'd stuck with it instead of taking that time off. I don't regret the decision. I guess I could've made a lot more money, though."
Since returning to the business, Laurie's paychecks have been steady, at least. She and Morgenstern divorced in 1981, but they parted on relatively good terms. (She delights in telling the story of their last visit: Morgenstern happened to drop by the set of [Trauma] -- the soon-to-be-released Dario Argento-directed thriller, in which Laurie plays a "Rrrrromanian" clairvoyant -- just in time to watch the filming of his ex-wife's depacitation scene!) Laurie moved back to California several years ago and continues to alternate her work between the various mediums.
On TV, Laurie won an Emmy for her work in support of James Garner and James Woods in [Promise], and she garnered additional nominations for [The Thorn Birds] and [The Bunker] (as Magda Goebbels to Anthony Hopkins' Adolf Hitler), among others. She played Lady Macbeth in a PBS production of the Shakespearean tragedy. And offbeat director David Lynch introduced her to a whole new generation of '90s audiences via his short-lived cult series [Twin Peaks] (in a few episodes, Laurie even got to impersonate a Japanese businessman).
Her other films include the Australian-made [Tim] (1979), cast as the older woman who romances a young, then-unknown Mel Gibson. She played a stern Auntie Em in the gloomy sequel [Return to Oz] (1985), and an especially shrewish Agatha Christie murder victim in [Appointment With Death] (1988). She most recently co-starred with Gregory Peck in [Other's People Money] (1991) and with Albert Finney in [Rich in Love] (1993). Laurie begins shooting next month on [The Crossing Guard], in the "very good company" of writer-director Sean Penn, and co-stars Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, Robin Wright and David Morse.
Moreover, the actress has recently rekindled her interest in the theater -- she played the not-so-coincidentally crippled Laura in a 1965 Broadway revival of [The Glass Menagerie], and toured during the '80s in a one-woman show about Zelda Fitzgerald -- with critically acclaimed performances in Larry Kramer's AIDS polemic [The Destiny of Me] (last year in New York) and, accidentally crippled again, as Madame Ranyevskaya in Chekhov's [The Cherry Orchard] (this fall at the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in Cleveland, where Laurie took the "break-a-leg" adage to an extreme by breaking her ankle during the first week of rehearsal).
Did the '50s contract starlet ever imagine she'd survive to be playing the classics -- or actively working at all -- some four decades later? "Deep down, I never thought otherwise," Laurie asserts. "I mean, I was very serious about acting long before I was under contract to Universal. I always believed in myself and in my abilities. I can honestly say that at no time did I think it [wouldn't] happen."
Indeed, it has. And, thus, Piper Laurie has changed the meaning of her name and everything she stands for.
"I have, haven't I?," she concurs.
It might sound conceited, if only it weren't so true.
Here's the interview Piper and Bert did for "A Christmas Memory," which ran Dec. 19, 1997, in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
PIPER LAURIE INTERVIEW ("A Christmas Memory")
Piper Laurie is fast becoming something of an authority on screen adaptations of Truman Capote's work. In last year's sadly underseen film version of his autobiographical novella "The Grass Harp," the actress starred (radiantly) as the ethereal Dolly Talbo, opposite Sissy Spacek as her rigid sister, Verena. In the new Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of Capote's "A Christmas Memory" (airing Sunday night at 9 on CBS), the names have been changed but the characters are essentially the same, with Ms. Laurie now assuming the role of the hard-hearted Jennie Faulk, to Patty Duke's sweet-natured sister Sook.
"I have to admit, we had a couple of readthroughs of the script our first day on location, and since the last major part I'd played was the same character that Patty's was based on, there was a moment or two where I had a bit of trouble separating myself from that and plunging into my own character," Ms. Laurie recalls during a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles.
"There was this kind of emotional pull that I never anticipated, where I was truthfully wishing that I were doing it," she explains with a laugh. "Just for that one day I felt this real attachment to the Dolly/Sook character. By the second day, I got over it and started getting involved with my own work."
The actress continues, "I liked playing Dolly, because everyone treated me so nicely, like I WAS Dolly. They all smiled and everybody was great, very helpful. They just loved me off-camera. With this one, I really got the cold shoulder from people around the set. I was treated so coldly, and that was funny for maybe a couple of weeks, but then it started getting to me. It got to be very exhausting, being so unrelentlessly mean and angry, and having my face painted that way, too."
Filmed this summer right here in Georgia (specifically, Peachtree City, Sharpsburg and Senoia), the production also features Anita Gillette and Jeffrey De Munn as the other Faulk siblings -- and be on the lookout for a couple of local actors in small roles, including Suzi Bass and Lala Cochran, who co-starred as Big Mama and Sister Woman, respectively, in Theatre in the Square's recent mounting of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
"A Christmas Memory" reunites Ms. Laurie for the fourth time with director Glenn Jordan, with whom she was worked in three other TV-movies: "In the Matter of Karen Ann Quinlan," opposite Brian Keith; "Toughlove," with Lee Remick; and "Promise," starring James Garner and James Woods, for which Ms. Laurie finally won an Emmy, after six fruitless nominations over a 30-year period.
"
There are pros and cons to working with someone repeatedly like that," Ms. Laurie observes when asked about working with Jordan again. "Sometimes, actors tend to be overly sensitive if a director doesn't like what you're doing or has some other idea of what you should be doing, and the pro is that you don't overreact, because we know each other really well, and there's a groundwork of basic respect and admiration.
"The con is, you don't want to let an old friend down," she adds. "Glenn's not just somebody I've worked with before. He's a personal friend, as well, and that's quite a responsibility. He asked me to do this, and I don't want to disappoint him. That can be a heavy load, or a load maybe some actors wouldn't want to carry."
With the character of Jennie Faulk, "I just went all out, and I didn't hold back a bit, but I had this feeling that Glenn probably wanted to tone me down a little. We've learned to truth one another, and he was right, because this is a family show, and you wouldn't want to give too many kids nightmares by playing her like some kind of a Margaret Hamilton ("The Wizard of Oz"'s Wicked Witch)."
What does it say about her that Ms. Laurie has been frequently cast in such "mean and nasty" roles -- or that she's so good as playing them? "I think it's the kid in me who loves pretending, getting to act out all your childhood fantasies, being the mean and nasty witch, and really getting off doing things that you'd NEVER do in your own life," she maintains.
"It's fun to some extent, and I think it's partly because I don't look mean, so it's done for effect. I guess it happened for the first time with 'Carrie.'"
Playing Sissy Spacek's religious fanatic of a mother, "Carrie" (1976), based on Stephen King's horror best-seller, marked Ms. Laurie's stunning return to the screen after a 15-year absence. She began her career in the early 1950s, a frustrated actress in the body of a pretty starlet who was routinely squandered in a series of frolicking (she calls them "mortifying") B-movies: "Son of Ali Baba," "No Room for the Groom," "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?," etc.
Although she eventually proved herself a competent dramatic actress -- on several live television dramas in the late '50s (including the original "Days of Wine and Roses"), and as Paul Newman's dejected girlfriend in the classic 1961 film "The Hustler" -- she walked away from the business shortly thereafter, upon marrying film critic Joseph Morgenstern and having a daughter, Annie.
A three-time Academy Award nominee (for "The Hustler," "Carrie," and as Marlee Matlin's misguided mother in "Children of a Lesser God"), Ms. Laurie has been working steadily in the 20 years since that comeback of hers -- but don't call it making up for lost time. "That time wasn't lost. It's just that acting seemed like such a frivolous pursuit to me at the time. There were a whole lot of more important things going on, in the world in general, and in my life in particular," Ms. Laurie says.
Among her other memorable roles since then: the Australian romantic drama "Tim," opposite a then-unknown Mel Gibson; the TV-movie "The Bunker" (as Magda Goebbels to Anthony Hopkins' Adolf Hitler); the mini-series "The Thorn Birds"; David Lynch's short-lived cult series "Twin Peaks"; and the films "Other People's Money" with Gregory Peck, "Rich in Love" with Albert Finney, "Wrestling Ernest Hemingway," with Robert Duvall and Richard Harris.
"Acting is a lot more fun for me now, instead of all those intense things I felt I needed to do before to prove myself," Ms. Laurie acknowledges. "I can actually enjoy it now, and I feel freer about the whole process. It's not the life-or-death proposition it used to be."
Neither is the fact that, at the same time "A Christmas Memory" is airing on network TV, the Showtime cable station will be broadcasting the Horton Foote drama "Alone," starring Hume Cronyn, and featuring Ms. Laurie in a one-scene cameo.
What's a poor Piper Laurie fan to do?
"Well, it's a lovely Horton Foote script, and Hume Cronyn is wonderful in it, but I'm only in one scene and they didn't really need my character for the story," she replies. "That's why I'm telling all of my friends to watch 'A Christmas Memory,' and then tape 'Alone' if they just have to see it."
Here's the Q&A Bert did with Piper in conjunction with "The Faculty," which published Jan. 8, 1999, in the Atlanta Press.
Piper Laurie Q&A ("The Faculty")
WHO:
Former studio ingenue-turned-legitimate actress Piper Laurie, 66, who's going on nearly a half-century in the movie business. Signed by Universal to a seven-year contract at the tender age of 17, she debuted as Ronald Reagan's daughter in a comedy called "Louisa" (1950) and proceeded to score in a series of frothy flying-carpet sagas (frequently cast opposite Tony Curtis or Rock Hudson). Her turning point came with the advent of live television dramas in the late '50s, when she triumphed in such productions as the original "Days of Wine and Roses." After earning an Oscar nomination for her big-screen breakthrough as Paul Newman's doomed girlfriend in "The Hustler" (1961), she took a 15-year hiatus from Hollywood to marry then-Newsweek / now-Wall Street Journal film critic Joseph Morgenstern and raise a daughter. Laurie's sensational screen comeback as Sissy Spacek's maniacal mother in "Carrie" (1976) brought her another Oscar nomination, and in the years since she has developed into a first-rate (if still underappreciated) character actress. She was Oscar-nominated again for 1986's "Children of a Lesser God," and on TV she co-starred in David Lynch's short-lived cult series "Twin Peaks." Among her other notable films: "Tim" (top-billed over a newcomer named Mel Gibson); "Other People's Money," "Rich in Love" and "Wrestling Ernest Hemingway" (with Gregory Peck, Albert Finney and Richard Harris, respectively); and she delivered a radiant performance in 1996's little-seen "The Grass Harp."
WHAT:
"The Faculty" -- the latest concoction from high-school horror-meister Kevin Williamson (who also wrote "Scream," "Scream 2" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer") and action-packed director Robert Rodriguez ("Desperado," "From Dusk Til Dawn") -- in which a motley crew of students band together to battle the nefarious schemes of their alien-possessed teachers. The kids range from nerdy Elijah Wood to cocky Usher Raymond. In addition to Laurie, the eclectic ensemble of faculty members includes Salma Hayek, Jon Stewart, Bebe Neuwirth, Famke Janssen and Marietta native Robert ("T2") Patrick.
WHEN:
Monday, Dec. 28, 2:30 p.m.
WHERE:
By phone from her home in Los Angeles.
Q: Is it just me, or is your role in "The Faculty" the smallest and least developed of all the characters? I kept waiting for something to happen with you, and it never really does. Were a lot of your scenes cut?
A: No, maybe a couple of shots of me and Robert Patrick lurking around the halls, but it was a small part, which is why I'm kind of surprised you'd even want to talk with me about it. (She laughs.) I don't have much to say about it, really, except that it was fun to do and I adored working with Robert Rodriguez. I went to see it with my daughter and her husband, and we had a good time. I don't see a lot of horror movies, so I'm not really much of a judge, but we laughed a lot and enjoyed ourselves. I liked it.
Q: It's not bad enough you practically disappear from the movie midway through. On top of that, you're about the only cast member who DOESN'T get to undergo some gross alien metamorphosis.
A: Yeah, well, I figured since this was one of the few things I've done lately where I was getting paid a normal salary instead of working for scale, I was just happy to be there, you know? (She laughs.) Besides, I've already done enough of that stuff, believe me, so I was relieved.
Q: Let's talk about some of that stuff. Death scenes don't come any more grandiose than the one you had in "Carrie," being skewered to the wall by a set of airborne kitchen utensils.
A: Those few minutes of the movie took a whole day to shoot, and it was very technical and methodical work. They had me rigged into this iron vest underneath the nightgown I was wearing, and in each of the spots where I was to be stabbed, there was a block of wood attached to the metal. Each block was in turn attached to a thin wire that went through a tiny whole in my nightgown and threaded out across the room to where the special-effects man was standing up on a ladder. They shot each knife separately, hurling at me on all these different wires, but it was all done in slow motion. It took 45 seconds or a minute for each object to get to me, and then they sped the film up later.
Q: What was it like being decapitated in "Dario Argento's Trauma" (1993)?
A: I'd heard Argento was like the Alfred Hitchcock of Italy, and the whole thing sounded like such great fun, playing a Romanian clairvoyant with long black hair, a thick accent and all. I probably hadn't laughed so much since I'd done "Carrie," in fact. What I remember about the decapitation scene is that my ex-husband just so happened to be visiting me on the set that day, and it just struck me as funny that he got to spend all day watching his ex-wife have her throat slit and her head cut off. (She laughs.)
Q: Any fond memories about (the 1977 "Carrie" knock-off) "Ruby"?
A: Well, I have to admit I took that before I had any idea "Carrie" would be the great success it was. I'd just decided to get back into the business and basically needed something to support our move from New York to LA.
Q: Do you think people in the movie industry tend to look down on horror movies?
A: I think they used to. I mean, when "Carrie" was first released, people looked down on it. It was really amazing at the time that Sissy and I both got nominated for Oscars, because for the longest time horror movies just didn't get Oscar nominations, you know?
Q: When you first read the script for "Carrie," though, did you look down on it in a sense?
A: Well, let's just say it wasn't something I ever would've gone to see on my own. (She laughs.)
Q: Having seen "The Faculty," what do you think distinguishes it from other horror movies?
A: I think it has some of the freshness of "Carrie," with all the young actors in the cast. There's an underlying innocence to it, and I do think it's funny. (A pause.) I hear it's doing pretty well, and it would be nice to be in a commercial success for a change. I'm still kind of saddened by "The Grass Harp" not getting a proper distribution. They kept changing the release date, which gave people the impression there was something wrong with the movie.
Q: Based on how uncooperative Miramax was about letting me see "The Faculty" in advance, I got the impression there might be something wrong with this movie, too.
A: (A pause.) Like I said, I hear it's doing well and it would be nice to be in a commercial success for a change. (She laughs.)