Maclean's
February 14, 1983

By Val Ross

From the doorway sanctuary of her midtown Manhattan apartment, Kate Nelligan bolts into the back seat of the limousine. Somehow she enters profile first, a patrician nose, lips full with erotic, ironic promise, a sculpted, oval chin-the same haunting profile that wise directors used to introduce the actress in Masterpiece Theatre's TV drama Therese Raquin and in the movie thriller The Eye of the Needle. In the limo interior, the shellpale profile does not waver from its direction as Nelligan settles carefully back. She has the broad-shouldered, leggy charisma and careless grace of a 1940s movie star. But as much as she suits the setting, she is not at ease; her arms are crossed protectively, as if she feels cold. Eventually, she loosens up enough to talk about her current Broadway smash, Plenty.

The British play, which has just opened at Broadway's Plymouth Theater, marks the first major North American stage appearance by the Ontario-born Nelligan. And it has been an unmitigated triumph. Time magazine described her performance as Susan Traherne-Plenty's savagely witty and passionately disappointed antiheroine, the wife of a British diplomat-as "flawless." Commented The New York Times- "Only a fool would hold his breath waiting to see a better performance this season."

Nelligan has already proven her ability to dominate a stage through both sexuality and intellect with the world's toughest theatre critics-in London's West End. There she was "Most Promising Newcomer of the Year" in 1974 and "Best Actress of the Year" in 1978. Though Nelligan has not appeared on the British stage since then, Sheridan Morley, drama critic of Punch and arts columnist with The Times, still considers her "the foremost English actress of her generation."

But Nelligan seeks more than mere raves. She wants the right raves. "At last," she sighs as she peruses recent clippings in the limo's gloomy interior. "Here's one who understands the play." Nelligan's voice is husky, sexy, with a nasal Manhattan twang. It does not resemble the plummy throb she uttered on the London stage. Nor does it reveal her working-class origins in London, Ont. Like the woman herself, Nelligan's voice establishes images and then stands on guard to defend them. Still, it is obvious from her voice and body language that the shy, masked, professionally absorbed woman is profoundly uncomfortable-that she is only chancing another potentially hazardous interview because the craft she loves demands it.

Her distrust of the press is not surprising. Reviews aside, commentators have not been generous. Last month Arthur Bell, show business columnist with The Village Voice, complained that she was cold and aloof and that she had snapped at him "like Dolores Del Rio and I had just asked her age." That was only the latest barb from North American writers who have felt intimidated by Nelligan. Part of the problem arises from the parts that they have seen her play. Her performances as a naive young woman are perfectly heartwarming. But she is most closely identified with such roles as Plenty's seething Traherne or Susan Selky, the awesomely strong-willed Columbia University professor of her latest film, Without a Trace, which was released last week to enthusiastic reviews. Another part of the image problem is that Nelligan, who can quote the poetry of Auden and Hardy, is more literate than many of the paparazzi who define her public image. "Why shouldn't I talk in sentences?" she yelled, after one interviewer too many- complimented her on her way with a phrase. "Who do they think I should sound like? Morgan Fairchild?"

One of Nelligan's major irritants is the Canadian press. According to Nelligan, it has created the impression that she considers herself too talented to work in Canada. But the real problem is not with Nelligan but with a dearth of good parts, explains Robert Sherrin, the CBC drama producer who cast her in the 1976 production Bethune. "We have only had one part big enough to offer her since then, and she just couldn't fit our schedule," he says. Still, Nelligan says, bad publicity hurts her family. Soon after early successes in Britain she returned home to see her younger sister, Mary Jo, and her 20-month-old niece. "She spent the visit walking round and round the block with Emily, playing Lego, and putting her buggy together," says Mary Jo, "and forgot that the Free Press had asked for an interview. After she left, they printed a horrible, sarcastic thing about her being too good for London. That was like a knife in the heart."

Now, however, Nelligan needs the media. After scaling the peak of theatre, she has set her sights on the summit of a second triumphal career in film. But she has discovered to her amazement that her English achievements cut little ice with Hollywood producers. In fact, they scarcely know her name. She is 31; and her time is running out. She also wants to return home. "I couldn't have a film career in England. The world there is so small and shrinking. In my last years people were getting very bitter; there weren't enough jobs. Now, here, I'm happier than I have been in a long time. I love working with North Americans - they're so generous, so unthreatened." Nelligan reflects: "Maybe if you had been cut off from your accent, if you had been an undercover agent for 10 years, then you would feel at peace here, too."

Game: So far, film success has not been easy to achieve. Of her seven films and TV movies, most have been mediocre showcases for her talent. She was smothered in hoop skirts and curls in The Count of Monte Cristo and Dracula and overshadowed by the older Glenda Jackson in The Romantic Englishwoman. She made the most of a wimpish woman-as-victim role in The Eye of the Needle. But then, her game performance as a sexy and warmhearted nurse in Mr. Patman (aka Midnight Matinee), a Canadian Film Development Corp.-backed dud, has yet to find a general release. As for The Victims, a rape movie made for U.S. TV, Nelligan protests: "Oh my God. Ho ho ho. I'd rather you didn't screen that."

Nelligan does not mention the role that got away. That happened when producer Fred Zinneman, a fan of hers, lost his option to make The French Lieutenant's Woman. Her part went to an actress with whom Nelligan, as far as she is concerned, is all too frequently compared-Meryl Streep. "They're very alike," says Joe Papp, Plenty's producer in New York, who has also directed Streep. "They both bring intelligence to their work, very precise analysis, and they both have what's called 'high temperanient.' But I don't know how Kate would handle a knockabout comedy, which I have done with Meryl [in The Taming of the Shrew]," he adds. "British-trained actors move in a smaller space than Americans; they refine that space; their work is sharper and more subtle. But I wonder, can their work take them into as broad a range?"

Now Nelligan is hoping that her seventh film, Without a Trace, will give her the break she so badly wants. It is the story of a beautiful and impressive young professor whose world collapses when her six-year-old son disappears, and who will not abandon faith that he will one day return. While not profound, Without a Trace is an authentic and well-developed tearjerker. Moreover, it is produced and directed by Stanley Jaffe, an influential and respected former president of Paramount Pictures. Jaffe has proved his ability to spot a commercial success in his own past productions, particularly Kramer vs. Kramer, and in such projects as Love Story and The Godfather, which he helped Paramount develop. "For the moment," Jaffe acknowledges, "movies that interest me interest the audience. And whether audiences know who Kate Nelligan is before they go, they're going to discover an extraordinary actress."But for the next two months, Nelligan's film campaign is on hold. She is committed to playing Plenty's Susan Traherne to hushed crowds at Broadway's Plymouth Theater. Every night she transforms herself from a radiant 17-year-old courier for the French Resistance into a middle-aged human minefield, flaring at the indulgent and hollow life of plenty in postwar Britain. Every night Susan emasculates her working-class lover, wrecks her diplomat husband's career, trashes her Kensington house, explodes an arsenal of wonderfully mean and funny lines, and ultimately burns herself out. It is an incandescent, meteoric metaphor of the West's guilt and self-loathing.

The role of Susan has been called one of the great female roles in modern theatre; it was dedicated specifically to Nelligan by her friend, the playwright and director, David Hare. Nelligan interprets her character as a thwarted moral force, a flawed Jeremiah. Her movements are both delicate and aggressive, like a finger thrust at an oncoming tank. But she works with her brain, too. No one strives more than Nelligan to stress the structure of a script, to analyze a character strategically, to shape and aim the words.

Not waiting: Joe Papp dreams of making the play into a film with Nelligan in the starring role. But after her stage run is over, she is not waiting around. As her limo delivers her to a photographer's studio on Fifth Avenue, she emphasizes, "What I want to do next is any good movie role with a good filmmaker-anybody good." Then she uncrosses her arms, climbs out, and heads purposefully for the cameras.

Kate was the cuckoo-and sometimes the swan-in her family's nest. The Nelligans are a rollicking clan of fourth-generation Canadians who revere their Irish-Catholic roots. Her father, Pat, is an ace dancer; her brother, Joe, a priest; and her Aunt Corky can do party-piece imitations and accents at the drop of an aitch. Most of them live near the house at 160 Briscoe St., in working-class South London where she grew up. Alone among them, Kate -- Patricia Colleen she was then-felt she "had to get out, away from that neighborhood, those little houses, that country."

Her mother's influence was the reason. Born poor, Josephine Deir married Pat Nelligan, a millwright, when she was 18. She had five children and adopted a sixth. Meanwhile, she put herself through university and teacher's college by cleaning other people's houses and finally made a career for herself teaching at London's Notre Dame elementary school. She was a frightening, exhilarating, exhausted woman, ambitious for all her children. She enrolled the slower ones in her own classroom to prod them along. But on Patricia Colleen, the gifted, beautiful second daughter who looked just like her, she imposed special expectations. "When Trish started walking at eight months, she was marked for greatness," jokes the third daughter, Mary Jo.

IQ tests: Family humor aside, the young Nelligan did stand out. While the others stuffed themselves with ice-cream cones from Cundick's Corner Variety, Trish, the serious one, gave hers away to a weeping young neighbor. While the others screamed from the tree fort out back, Josephine administered IQ tests to Trish at the kitchen table. While the others fought over who could ride the sisters' shared bicycle, Trish had to practice ballet and tap-dancing. Says Mary Jo: "We assumed, because she was so good at things, that she was having a great childhood like the rest of us. Now we are finding out that she didn't." Nelligan agrees. "I don't have very good memories," she says carefully. "I always felt isolated from the others by my mother's definition of me. I don't know what she wanted me to be, but she wanted me to excel."

In her early teens Nelligan excelled as a tennis fanatic and swatted her way to the Canadian Junior Finals. Then she won a scholarship to York University's bilingual Glendon College in Toronto and tried out for its dramatic arts program. Her professor, Michael Gregory, still marvels at the power and control that she displayed from the start. She wanted to play Ophelia; Gregory successfully cast her as Gertrude. She was 17. "Trish was very demanding," recalls Gregory. "She demanded an enormous amount from herself. So if others required a lot of prompting, she could get cross. She also had a great sense of humor, bursting out laughing, putting donuts in the other actors' helmets so they sat too high on their heads. She could be quite wild at parties, quite frenetic. But I think there was a shyness about her, a mask, as if she were not yet at ease with herself."

After Nelligan's second year, Gregory urged her to try out for one of two places made available to North Americans at England's respected Central School of Speech and Drama. Determined to study at the alma mater of Sir Laurence Olivier and Dame Peggy Ashcroft, applicant number 647 informed her startled examiners: "No matter what happens at this audition, I am going to London to train. It would help me if you eased the process." They did.

Tough-talking: In September, 1969, Nelligan flew to England. Chilled by her bleak student poverty, she came down with bronchitis and missed a month of school. To survive a second year, she turned to the same reservoirs of single-minded resourcefulness that had characterized her tough-talking audition. She wrote 150 letters to businessmen in Southern Ontario, asking for their financial support. One, London insurance millionaire Richard Ivey, came through-he provided her with 6 pounds a week ($15 at the time) to finish her studies.

By graduation, Trish Nelligan of London, Ont., had truly gone "undercover"-changing her name to Kate and "lying just barefaced about my background." It fooled Punch's Sheridan Morley. "Kate always gave me the impression of an aristocratic spikiness," he told Maclean's. "One knew she came from the right side of the tracks." Meanwhile, the rigors of Central's speech-training classes had transformed the voice of the Canadian Eliza Doolittle into what one Daily Telegraph writer described as "a dark, foggy voice whose vowels sound like a cello made by Stradivarius." The conversion left Nelligan more British than the Brits, says Joe Medjuck, a friend from Toronto. In 1973 he saw her in her first starring role in a Bristol rep theatre production of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park. "Of all the actors," said Medjuck, "Kate had the most trouble doing an American accent."

Nelligan's efforts to become English also refined her sensitivity to social nuances. Even in relaxed moments, says friend Canadian broadcaster Patrick Watson, "I don't think Kate can ever stop sniffing out the social tone, as actor's material, so she can retell it to an audience later." But the subtle environmental antennas that equip her to play professors, French murderesses and diplomats' wives to perfect detail betray her to fellow undercover agents. Milton Shulman, the London Evening Standard's drama critic and another ex-Canadian, says: "She's a cerebral actress noted for her intelligence. But like most Canadians, I think, she thinks a lot about the impression she's making."

Above all, Nelligan showed that she was an actress for whom words matter supremely-who could take one single syllable, underline it by a swiftly raised eyebrow and a twitch of the lip and make it as persuasive as a soliloquy. She was a crafter of words or, as she says, "a writer's actress." Her close friend David Hare agrees enthusiastically. "She has an instinctive understanding; she brings a clarity to my work," says Plenty's author. "She found it so effortless to speak my words, I think, because emotionally we're rather similar. It's a moral view of the world-we're both rather passionate people, and my work deals with the repression of the English, their cruelty to one another."

Cutting wit: Her first work in a Hare play, in Knuckle, won her the Standard's "Most Promising Newcomer" award. Hare gave her early drafts of their next project together, a TV play called Licking Hitler, which showcased Nelligan's cutting wit. Then he wrote Plenty and once again directed Nelligan in an award-winning performance. But Hare suspects that interpreting the role of a woman who was "withholding consent from English society" sharpened the doubts Nelligan herself was beginning to feel about her life in Britain. "Kate could see that if she lived her life in constant rebellion here, she could pay the price that Susan does," he says. "I think it had a profound effect on her."

But certainly the exhilaration of playing the lead in a play as sharply and deftly written as Plenty left Nelligan with the same ashen-mouthed depression that the French Resistance had bequeathed to its heroine, Susan. After it, there was nothing left. Her work as Rosalind in the Royal Shakespeare Company's As You Like It had brought rave reviews that she felt were too cheaply earned. "What do you have to do to get a bad review at the RSC?" she commented at the time. "Burn the theatre?" Several seasons starring at the National Theatre had also earned her the best reviews Britain could offer. As for television productions, such as Therese Raquin, she complained, "There are so many actors doing wonderful work-and 400 high school teachers watch it." The only remaining challenge, she felt, was film. "If you're an actor in the 1980s," she told an interviewer from the Toronto Globe and Mail, "film is the medium you want to be in."

Still, the work left her feeling thwarted. The director of Dracula, John Badham, seemed more interested in technical effects than in making the most of Nelligan as Lucy Seward. The Eye of the Needle was a marginally better experience. It reunited her with Donald Sutherland, with whom she had made such a marriage of minds during the production of Bethune that scene after scene was pure improvisation. "We had some good times on Needle, too," Nelligan concedes, recalling an incident when she went out on the moors on the island of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland, to practice shooting a gun for the film's final showdown. Each time she fired into space, she was appalled to see a dead bird plummet from the sky. Finally she realized they were being tossed from behind a barn by the hidden and giggling Sutherland. "But it wasn't all a happy experience," she says. "The director wouldn't let Donald change the script. He was deeply frustrated. And there was only one scene where Donald and I sat and talked, where I could take the ball and run with it."

Shortly after Dracula and Needle, Nelligan sent a letter to Patrick Watson. "I got the impression that she was really confused and thinking that acting wasn't for her. I had the impression that she was taking a hard look at herself," says Watson. She disappeared into the English countryside to think. Then in the fall of 1981 she packed up her possessions in her London flat - books and a few primitive paintings - turned the key, and left for Los Angeles.

There, to her shock, the foremost English actress of her generation found that she was unknown, that she would have to start from the bottom. Says Joe Medjuck, who was working as associate producer with Ivan Reitman in Hollywood: "She got a bigger reaction after PBS TV showed Therese Raquin than with all her British awards. Nobody cared. Out here you're better off with one bad movie behind you than with credits from the theatre." Her high-powered agent, Fred Spector, did not seem to be helping; they angrily parted company."I would have taken any part," she stressed at the time and, indeed, she proved that desperation by delivering honorably professional performances in such less than excellent projects as the Canadian clunker Mr. Patman and a gruesome made-for-TV movie, The Victims. But most of the time she waited by the phone for good parts that never came. As the weeks in Los Angeles wore on, Nelligan spent many of her afternoons at Disneyland.

Finally, she packed it in. She joined a boyfriend at a hideaway in the Rockies. She even bought some land, at Bragg Creek in the foothills near Calgary, and decided to quit acting. Then, just before she set off for her new home in Canada, she received two telephone calls. The first was from Papp, founder of New York City's Public Theater, popularizer of Shakespeare in the Park and the entrepreneur behind Hair, A Chorus Line and The Pirates of Penzance. Papp asked, "How would you like to do Plenty at the [off-Broadway] Public [Theater] for 230 bucks a week?" Right after Nelligan said yes, she was offered the lead in Jaffe's Without a Trace, with production to begin within weeks-before Plenty's rehearsals.

Painful joke: Jaffe compares working with Nelligan to working with Dustin Hoffman. "The same work ethic," he says. "And she's not going to roll over and take orders. She's not 'difficult' but she wants you to have done the same mental work that she has." From their daily debates on Nelligan's interpretation of the character of Susan Selky, the professor whose son disappears, Jaffe credits Nelligan with developing one of the most interesting scenes in the film. Susan's estranged husband, a womanizer who desperately wants to regain Susan's respect, has just been hospitalized for cracked ribs from a beating he got trying to follow a lead on his missing son. "Does it hurt?" Nelligan-Susan asks solicitously when she visits the heavily bandaged man in hospital. "Only when I laugh," he admits. So Susan tells him a painful joke.

In that joke she reveals a world-the shared play of an old marriage; the warm and corny side of an intimidatingly intellectual woman; the revenge-tinged affection she feels for her husband which she only dares show as mischief. "That joke was Kate's idea," acknowledges Jaffe. "She combed the set for a doctor joke, a hospital story. There are bits and pieces of her throughout the whole movie."

She has made the same attempt to humanize her character in Plenty, which moved from the Public to the Plymouth in early January. "I was too young to play her before," says Nelligan. "Now David [Hare] and I have made her more accessible-light and humorous in the early scenes. She seems to me to be one of the most deeply sympathetic people in the world." Indeed, Nelligan's own world seems to be mellowing with her return to North America. In her tiny white dressing room she muses on the new turns of her life while popping a rosary of soothing Halls wild cherry cough drops.

To an outsider it sounds like a lonely existence. Each night after the play she returns to her quiet, borrowed uptown apartment alone, unfreezes a Stauffer's frozen turkey casserole, and curls up in a rocking chair with the biography of Somerset Maugham. On her rare afternoons off, she picks out chintz wallpaper and antiques for the apartment of a friend (she will not name him; she will just say he is "someone with whom I have been involved for some time"). What makes her happiest is to be working again, to feel her career once more in motion.

Family life: According to her sister, she is also preparing for family life. "It would be a terrible pity not to have children," allows Nelligan. Says Mary Jo: "She had all of us down to her place in Connecticut right on the ocean last summer, and Danny Corkill [the child-star of Without a Trace - they're good buddies. Trish kept calling my kids 'Moonies' because they were so obedient-don't you think Trish is a scream?-and I was 'the Rev. Moon.' She played hide-and-seek with Martha up and down the stairs so much I thought Martha would throw up. She's so intuitive with kids." When Nelligan plays the aunt, she does it as she does all her roles, completely and with all her heart; there is no trace of the woman who intimidates journalists, enthralls London with a husky New York twang or who has a voice like a Stradivarius cello. Says Mary Jo: "Trish told me, 'With you around, I sound like I never left Briscoe Street.' "

The woman who inspired her to accomplish it all, Josephine Nelligan, died eight years ago. Nelligan describes her death as "an implosion-she fell apart mentally." For Nelligan, the wounds are hard to heal. "I'm only just sorting out what I want from life from what she wanted for me-she had such an appetite for living." But there is a happy ending to the familiar story of a loving mother's heavy burden of expectations. If anything, Kate Nelligan has surpassed them. As she acknowledges, unfolding her arms and radiating a big grin, "Thank God I had a gift."