Cosmopolitan
April 1994

Ring, ring. In midmeal, with a plate full of pasta and a tremendously plump shrimp on her fork, Kate Nelligan pulled back from the dinner table and answered her telephone. As she remembers the call of a year ago, on the other end of the line was her agent, reporting that director Mike Nichols has made an eleventh-hour offer for her to play a major role with Jack Nicholson in his upcoming film, Wolf . Would Nelligan consider stepping in on short notice and replacing Mia Farrow, who dropped out in the midst of the ongoing Woody Allen fiasco? Nelligan spent about two seconds considering the opportunity before agreeing to leave behind Robert and Gabriel Reale (her songwriting husband and their son, a year old at the time) so that she could be in Hollywood within forty-eight hours.

The chief breadwinner in her nuclear family, Nelligan, at forty-two, found herself in no position to turn down the work. The early joys of motherhood could be put on hold while a nanny looked after Gabriel, and Robert, Kate's junior by six years, spent his days in a midtown Manhattan music studio. "The first thing I did was stop eating," says Nelligan, whose once-rigid workout regimen had been derailed by the birth of her son. "The meal was delicious-my husband is an excellent cook-and I wanted that piece of shrimp so badly. But I had no choice. In two days, I'd be fitted for a costume."

Last-minute opportunities and offers to step into the breach when somebody else drops out have marked much of Kate Nelligan's quirky career. Maintaining that this next-best status bothers her not a bit, she says, "In life, I've got to be somebody's first choice, but in Hollywood, it's a whole different thing. You find out that nobody is anybody's first choice." In the process of making that discovery, she has achieved remarkable success without ever really playing the stardom game. According to Garry Marshall, who directed her in Frankie & Johnny and conceived the Brooklyn wheeze she adopted for her character, Nelligan comes to life when she's working. "I saw her portraying a very sexy character off Broadway," he remembers. "Backstage that night, she was extremely shy. But when she came in to discuss the movie role I'd told her about, saying I needed somebody hot, she dressed hot, with a miniskirt and high heels. Rather than dancing at parties and table-hopping at fancy restaurants, she really acts. That's where her energy goes. Kate is purely talented."

An introverted anomaly in Hollywood's personality swirl, where schmoozing and socializing routinely lead to contacts and contracts, Nelligan operates with the awkwardness of a wallflower at Spago. "I came up in the seventies, in England," she recounts. "You just had your ability and an agent back then; acting was a small world that was a lot less competitive. Today you read about Demi Moore and walk away believing she can run the Federal Reserve. I, on the other hand, am afraid of telephones. If I get invited to dinner parties with high-powered people. I always find a reason not to go.

On the morning that we meet without a power broker in sight Nelligan appears simultaneously askew and elegant. Laden down with a couple of extralarge envelopes (about to be mailed to her relatives in Canada), she toddles into a rustic-yet-ruffly restaurant near her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Her reddish brown hair, alabaster skin, black cotton flare-bottoms, and spacey delivery combine to give her the demeanor of some early-seventies hipster who'd just cabbed her way up from the Village. The boho personal. however, is effectively offset by a soign6, bone-colored silk shirt underneath a Jil Sander blazer. "Isn't this the best?" she marvels, pulling at the diamond-patterned jacket as if she can't believe it's hers. "I love Jil Sander, and I bought this in Berlin a couple of years ago, before everybody over here knew who she was." Dropping her packages, she revels in sartorial one-upmanship, flags down a waiter, and orders a cappuccino--all with the seamless economy of a harried New Yorker who's always doing more than one thing at a time.

Judging from her cinematically sparse resume, however, it's clear that multitasking does not cross over to Nelligan's film work. The loopy, fragile-boned actress has charmed us recently in Frankie and Johnny (as the wise-cracking, seen-it-all/done-it-all waitress who gets to bed Al Pacino before Michelle Pfeiffer), not to mention The Prince of Tides (director Barbra Streisand cast her as Nick Nolte's mother for her ability to believably age forty years on-screen) and the fairly disastrous Fatal Instinct ("I do a send-up of Barbara Stanwyck in a send-up of Double Indemnity"). Come June, we'll see her portraying Jack Nicholson's burned-out, unfaithful wife in Wolf, a modem-day werewolf tale set in Manhattan publishing circles. "Meeting Mr. Nicholson is not like meeting Olivier," she archly declares. "Jack makes you laugh. I told him it would be the greatest coup of my acting career if I could kiss him and make people believe I was kissing a husband with whom I'm bored." She hesitates for a beat, then launches into a dead-on imitation of Nicholson: "'I can see your problem, Kate,' is what he told me."

Discussion of Nelligan's role opposite the ultimate mate from hell-the Nicholson character spends his nights prowling for fresh victims and his days walking around with severed fingers in his sport-jacket pocket--leads, quite naturally, to questions about the actress's own experiences in the dating netherworld. To put it bluntly: How bad did things get during her single days? "I can't talk about that," she insists, draining her cappuccino and signaling for a refill. "If I dare to reveal anything, the people I'm talking about will recognize themselves."

Reminded, however, that she's been married five years and the statute of limitations has expired, she allows to having "had some very bad relationships. I chose terrible men. I had a thing for very beautiful, unpleasant men." And what drew her to them? "Well, beauty-that's easy to understand. And the unpleasantness wasn't an essential-it just seemed to end up that way. I tended to alternate between very good men and complete schmucks. I'd use the good men to recuperate, then get bored and go back to the schmucks. You always think you'll reenact the drama of making somebody love you who's incapable of loving you. You're going to force him to love you by being generous and good. You're going to make the sun come up and save his life. That's what was so compelling about those terrible relationships."

Did the unpleasant men tend to be actors? "Oh, no," Nelligan says. "I seldom went out with actors. I went out mostly with writers, and they can be tough on relationships. Writers are ruthless. They'll sell their grandmothers for stories. I wouldn't get involved with writers again, and I advise everybody not to consort with them. Also, I only dated people who couldn't speak English. One man I saw was French. Completely beyond foreign, he was incredibly chic-very, very stylish. The low ebb of my dating years came when I opened my apartment door to him, to this unbelievably attractive man. He looked me up and down, then said, 'Eeeew, Kate, yuh look sooo old."' And how did she respond? "I changed my outfit," she says, letting loose a howling laugh that rolls on and on in what seems to be an endless curlicue.

The laugh sounds far too freewheeling to be coming from a woman who could have been so vulnerable, but that is the contradiction lurking within Nelligan. It's a contradiction that surfaces from time to time, as it did twenty or so years ago when she first met Mike Nichols to discuss The Last Tycoon, which neither of them ended up working on. "Kate came to see Sam Spiegel, Harold Pinter, and me in Sam's London apartment, and she was absolutely the most self-possessed person I'd ever met," is how Nichols puts it, recalling that Nelligan described in detail a horrible car accident she had witnessed on the way over. "I said to her, 'But you're right on time. How could you have stopped to watch this accident?' She said, 'I gave myself an extra hour.' We talked for a few minutes, then she stood up, thanked us for meeting with her, and left. We were completely thrilled, knocked out. I remember her wearing a black sweater with no shirt underneath; I thought this was the most beautiful, self-possessed woman I'd ever seen. Harold and I talk about that meeting to this day." What Pinter and Nichols don't know, according to Nelligan, is that she was completely terrified of meeting them, allotted the extra hour because she frequently got lost in the London streets, and grabbed that sweater from her play's wardrobe room because she had nothing appropriate in her own closet.

Having grown up poor and blue collar in London, Ontario, Nelligan was hardly born to the actress's life. Her father worked long hours in a machine shop, her mother was an alcoholic who wound up on the street and died in her forties, and most of her childhood friends looked forward to lives of domestic repetition. Not Kate Nelligan. She maintains that she first began studying the train schedule when she was three years old, positioning herself for a quick escape. An inveterate bookworm, she knew that words would be her ticket out of town, into college, and on to a world of glamour.

At the age of sixteen, while studying at Toronto's York University as an early enrollee, she fell into acting. A couple of years later, a drama professor encouraged her to attend the prestigious Central School of Speech and Drama in England. "But my family couldn't afford to send me there," she remembers. "So I wrote letters to all the wealthy, cultured people I knew in London, Ontario--all three of them-requesting that they sponsor me. Each person sent a little bit of money, and I made my way to Europe." After school, Nelligan blossomed into an actress of serious repute, appearing alongside Great Britain's top Shakespearean thespians. Yet her success on the boards hardly led to confidence in her personal life: "I was so afraid of the streets and of being lost that I wasn't able to find my way to work."

Nelligan considers this for a moment, trying to explain her fear of operating without benefit of a character for emotional armor. "I had further to come than a lot of other actresses," she says. "I read about Meryl Streep and how even at Vassar she had star quality. Even at Vassar. I came from a bowling alley in London, Ontario. That's a far distance to travel, and you don't travel it with the grace of people who grew up in more comfortable circumstances."

Following her stint on stage and a few screen roles (1975's Romantic Englishwoman, Dracula four years later, and Eye of the Needle in 1981), Nelligan sold her London, England flat and, using the money as a stake, relocated to Los Angeles, hoping to get into the movie business full-time. It didn't take long to realize that "the stage tradition of playing many types of characters doesn't translate to film," she says. "That's one reason why I'm not a movie star. I didn't get into this game to reveal myself--the way somebody like Jack does. I got into it so I could hide behind many different characters."

Just as her savings dipped perilously low, salvation came from the ever-faithful stage: The late producer Joseph Papp called with an offer for Nelligan to appear on Broadway, reviving the role she had established in the West End production of David Hare's Plenty. The post War II drama went on to become 1982's surprise hit, and unbidden fame suddenly transformed Kate Nelligan into an unlikely star. Not only was her career poised to take off, but so, finally, was her life.

The dreamiest men in Manhattan popped backstage, paid their respects to Broadway's newest find, and courted her favor. She fielded phone calls from celebrities' assistants (who were aiming to set up dates for their bosses) and found herself surrounded by bouquets of freshly delivered flowers. On the one hand, Nelligan was flattered; on the other, she was petrified. It was as if she continually feared she'd be found out, branded a fake, and shipped back to her dreary Canadian hometown. The fear manifested itself in bizarre behavior that is epitomized by her first date with director Martin Scorsese. "I was so nervous," she remembers, "that even though I don't smoke, I lit a cigarette—right in front of him. He turned away and walked out of the room." Because he was offended? "No," she says, once again breaking into a laugh, "because he couldn't breathe. The man has terrible asthma."

Through the 1980s, Kate Nelligan’s professional life seemed likely to become as befuddled as her personal life. After starring in a pair of flops (Eleni and Without a Trace), she decided to give up acting completely. In search of a new life, she found herself working in a volunteer program to help New York City's disadvantaged children. And it was under those auspices, while stuffing mushrooms for the group's benefit dinner and recovering from yet another disastrous relationship, that she first made eye contact with Robert Reale. "He gave me an enormous smile," she remembers, becoming all quivery at her recollection of the meeting that led to a three-year courtship, their wedding in 1989, and the birth of a son three years after that. "My initial reaction was that this man makes me feel so good. Of course, that immediately ruled him out as a romantic possibility. But he pursued me until I realized I didn't have to do the other thing-run around with emotionally abusive, unpleasant men. For no reason at all, he loved me and didn't want anybody else."

The happy ending to Nelligan's story is made even happier by the encouragement she got from Reale to return to acting, which sparked her latest string of movie roles and rejuvenated her career. It's given Kate and Robert the financial wherewithal to purchase an enviable apartment in Manhattan (loaded with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French antiques) and a country place in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. When she's not working-which has become increasingly infrequent-Nelligan devotes her energies to filling the house with flea-market finds and English country furniture. "if I wasn't an actress, I'd be an interior decorator, an insane decorator," she says, explaining that "enhanced aesthetics" have become her number-three passion-family and acting occupying the first two slots. "It's conscious suffering to not have beautiful things. Even as a little girl, I'd glance through magazines and know there were beautiful things in the world, that young eyes don't have to be neutral."

She looks around the restaurant and takes in the room's soothing, Laura Ashley-inspired details. Cradling her face in her hands, Kate Nelligan prattles on for a bit about beauty. Then she recounts a special moment in the tone of a once-reluctant virgin detailing her deflowering: "The first time I saw beauty was in England. The English countryside became my standard of what was beautiful. Then someone took me to Italy. There I saw the sun hit the side of a terra-cotta wall. That moment was a very big one in my life. It made me realize that one of the important things was to find beauty, to journey farther and farther in that direction."