Los Angeles Magazine / March 1, 2001
BY: Amy Wallace
ALEC GUINNESS USED to say that he built his characters from the shoes up. Laurence Olivier began with the nose often reshaping it with putty. Al Pacino insisted on the elegant camel-hair coat he wore in The Godfather, Part II. Externals matter, he explained.
BUT WHAT OF THE INTERNALS — the invisible tools an actor uses to make the made-up real? Compared with the surface details, the inner workings are hard to parse. Some actors fear that to deconstruct their talent is to risk its loss. Many clam up when asked how they do it. Or worse, they talk in gauzy platitudes.
WE DECIDED TO SPEAK TO actors about not their own work but the work of others. We asked Joan Allen and Ed Harris — who just turned in what many believe are their finest film performances — to name a few movie scenes that have affected them. Then we popped the scenes into a VCR and let them talk.
HARRIS RECENTLY COMPLETED a ten-year quest to bring the life of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock to the screen. He directed co-produced, and starred in Pollock, which opened around the country in February. Allen starred in last fall’s The Contender, a political thriller about a U.S. senator whose nomination as the first female vice president is almost derailed by scandal.
WE SELECTED ALLEN AND Harris because they are actors whom actors admire. Like the 16 others in the photo gallery that follows, they are known for disappearing into their characters. We remember their performances even if we don’t always remember their names. They are actors’ actors.
JOAN ALLEN: LET GO OF VANITY. EMBRACE LIFE’S MESSINESS, AND BALANCE WILL BE THE REWARD
JOAN ALLEN ANSWERS HER BELL BEFORE THE elevator in the hallway can shut its doors. She is wearing jeans, a sky blue pullover, black leather slippers, and no makeup. She is tall — five feet ten — and delicate, with long, slender fingers. Her wavy blondish-brown hair is still wet from the gym. Her eyes, what most people remember about Allen, are big, expressive, and the color of slate, and they stand out against her pale, clear skin.
Allen invites me into the Upper West Side apartment where she lives with her husband, actor Peter Friedman, and their six-year-old daughter, Sadie. In the kitchen, Midnight, a small green parrot, squawks from a wooden perch. Her husband’s allergies, Allen says, prevent them from having a dog or a cat, and “a fish you can’t hold.” She slices a few cherry tomatoes for the bird, pours some water for us, and heads for the living room.
Sheepishly, Allen admits she has agonized over what she calls her “assignment.” Before settling on three favorite scenes, she says, she considered and rejected numerous films: Being There, starring Peter Sellers (“I loved his whole performance and couldn’t pick just one scene”); Glengarry Glen Ross (“It was a scene about listening, with Al Pacino”); A Streetcar Named Desire, with Marlon Brando (“When I first saw it, I thought, ‘Who knew this existed?’”); and Klute, starring Jane Fonda (“It had a big impact on me — her sessions with the shrink, and in the end, when the camera is just on her and she’s cornered and the tears are just falling down her face”).
Allen has always been drawn to tortured characters, two of whom — Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible and Pat Nixon in Nixon — earned her Oscar nominations in 1996 and 1997. So it is not entirely a surprise that the first scene she feeds the VCR is a monologue from the 1962 film version of Long Day’s Journey into Night.
Katharine Hepburn plays the dope-addicted wife of a pompous actor (Ralph Richardson), and she is telling her maid about how she and her husband met. Reclining in a rocking chair, an addled Hepburn turns suddenly girlish as she recalls her own beauty and her husband’s charm. Then, just as suddenly, she falls to her knees. “What’s so wonderful about the first meeting between a silly, romantic schoolgirl and a matinee idol?” Hepburn asks bitterly.
“I was probably 15 or 16 when I saw this, and I just couldn’t believe it. I just said, ‘Whoa. Not everything is fine,’” says Allen, now 44. “I grew up in a family that was very loving and wonderful but had a very traditional, authoritarian structure. So I probably wanted to express more than I felt was acceptable. This movie opened up a whole new world.”
