Interview: Jessica Lange: Exceptional women: it takes one to know one

Published on Wednesday 23 December 2009 18:59

THERE is a small, intricate tattoo on Jessica Lange's left wrist which explains a lot about the determinedly contradictory film star. "Oh, I got this a long time ago.

• Jessica Lange. Picture: Getty

It's a Celtic knot," she explains when I mention it. "It represents the continuity of life. It's complex but it all connects to the same point."

She looks tired and a little fragile as we sit side by side in a hotel suite in Galway, where she is hosting an actor's masterclass, but the ancient Celtic symbol of longevity and rebirth could not be more fitting. Lange turned 60 this year, and has 30 films and two Oscars under her belt, but over the past decade the star of Tootsie, Cape Fear and Rob Roy has almost disappeared from our cinema screens, either sidelined or ignored by mainstream Hollywood studios.

This year, though, she has made what has been described as the showbiz comeback of the year. In September, Lange won the Best Actress Emmy Award for her role in Grey Gardens, a dramatic adaptation of Albert and David Maysles legendary 1975 documentary of the same name about the reclusive aunt and cousin of the former US first lady, Jackie Kennedy Onassis. She has since been nominated for a Golden Globe Award for the same role.

Lange's performance as the deliciously eccentric Edith "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale, the flamboyant mother of an equally eccentric daughter, "Little Edie", played with equal relish by Drew Barrymore, has revived a career she was seriously considering leaving. "I fell in love with these women years ago," says Lange. "I had actually thought about developing the story myself a while ago, but it all fell through. Then Drew brought the project to me out of the blue and I jumped at it."

Grey Gardens – made by first-time director Michael Sucsy – has helped rescue Barrymore from forgettable popcorn rom coms and Lange from professional limbo. Lange ages 40 years in the film and captures all the grotesque absurdity of Big Edie – her performance is poignant and engaging, even as she sets your teeth on edge.

Vivacious New York socialites in the 1940s and '50s, the Beales retreated to Grey Gardens, their derelict 28-room mansion in the East Hampton, Long Island, where, increasingly co-dependent, they lived in gothic squalor surrounded by stray cats, piles of rubbish and a wandering racoon. "It's a portrait of a mother and daughter and a certain period of American history," says Lange. "They were once the highest of New York society and ended up these eccentric recluses who lived together their whole lives,"

The Bouvier Beales became a strangely inspiring cause clbre in the 1970s. "They lived in the most squalid conditions you could imagine for years," says Lange. "Yet they had great character and great humour and were two of the most entertaining people you'd ever meet."

Lange herself is a curious bundle of paradoxes which stem from a surprisingly rebellious youth. Born in 1949, a country girl of Finnish descent, she was raised in the small town of Cloquet, Minnesota. At 18, she dropped out of a photography course at Minneapolis University with her Spanish tutor, Paco Grande, to lead the bohemian life studying mime in 1960s Paris. The couple married in 1970 but the relationship soured and at 25 she returned to New York. (They eventually divorced in 1981.)

"I didn't even want to be an actress when I was young," she declares. "It was a gradual process, from studying photography then mime in Paris. I didn't start acting classes until I was in my mid-twenties, when I moved back from Paris to New York. It was only then I discovered that acting combined all the things I loved. "

I mention we don't see many films about strong mature women these days and Lange bristles. "I know, and it's too bad," she says. "There's a wealth of stories and wonderful actresses out there, but we never see them on the big screen anymore. Hollywood has become a corporate industry ruled by accountants only interested in demographics and the highest profit. Its a nasty bed partner for art."

It's no surprise that she was attracted to the extraordinary Edie Beale. From the beginning Lange was never a simpering starlet, preferring to play extreme, often deeply disturbed personalities. Her most memorable parts have been as tormented, damaged women: the murderous, seductive Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1980); the unstable, victimised actress Frances Farmer in Frances (1982); the tragic country singer Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams; and Carly, a manic depressive army wife in Blue Sky (1994), for which she won her second Oscar.

"Acting for me has to be an emotional experience," she says. "I'm not interested in playing characters where there's no meat on the bone. The larger the character, the better it is." The irascible Edie Bouvier Beale is large enough – and a long way from her movie debut as the token blonde wearing strategically shredded clothes in the paw of an oversized ape. Her first ever film was Dino De Laurentis's disastrous, much-derided remake of King Kong in 1976, an experience that left a mortified Lange fleeing back to modelling and the actors' studios for years, where she forged a fierce determination to engage with tougher, more serious roles.

Four years later she rebounded with another remake, this time to wide acclaim, as the smouldering adulterous waitress, Cora, in The Postman Always Rings Twice, a torrid retelling of the 1946 film noir in which she is fatally attracted to Jack Nicholson's drifter. In 1982 she simultaneously achieved massive commercial success as Dustin Hoffman's love interest in Tootsie, while attracting much critical acclaim for Frances.

Frances, she says, "shifted everything to a whole different level", and was a turning point in her personal life. She met playwright and actor Sam Shepherd on set and they have been together – although never married – ever since. The couple now live in New York but raised a family on a ranch in Virginia, a world away from Hollywood. They have two children, Hannah, 23, and Walker, 22, and Lange has a daughter, Shura, 28, from her previous relationship with Russian ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov.

All three children have now left the family nest but Lange freely admits that motherhood took precedence over stardom. After Tootsie and Frances her career snowballed, and she became one of the most bankable female stars of the 1980s. But her preference for earnest roles combined with a deep commitment to her family held her back from mega stardom and increasingly distanced her from Hollywood's demands.

By the late 1990s , despite appearing in Scorsese' Cape Fear and winning a second Oscar for Blue Sky, her star was already on the wane. She never quite regained her critical and commercial clout, until now.

Thirty-five years ago, while the Maysles brothers filmed The Beales of Grey Gardens in that ruined Hampton's mansion, Lange was taking acting classes and waiting tables in nearby New York. How does she feel about bringing Grey Gardens' misfit, strangely inspiring heroines back to dramatic life?

"Its like coming full circle. This part was a gift, and they don't come around that often for me anymore," says Lange with a rueful smile. "When I look back , the films I feel great about have mostly been based on real women. I felt that playing Frances Farmer and Patsy Cline, and I feel the same way about Edie Beale. There have been disappointments along the way. But, hell, I've been real lucky, it's been an interesting 35 years."

&#149 Grey Gardens is on Channel 4 on Christmas Day at 9pm. The Maysles brothers' documentary, The Beales of Grey Gardens, is on Wednesday, 30 December at 12:45am, also on Channel 4.