Harper's Bazaar
October 1985
Kate Nelligan: serious, motivated and
more alluring than ever.
Looking trim, tanned and relaxed in jeans and a work shirt, Kate
Nelligan admits that this ultracasual appearance is partly a reaction to her Harper's
Bazaar photography session. "After those five hours of glamour and narcissism,
how do I go back to real life? I've sort of gone on strike."
It's similar to the way she comes down from her stage and film roles,
including her Tony-winning lead in Plenty on Broadway, in which she played a broken woman
haunted by her efforts for the French Resistance years before, and her upcoming portrayal
of the title character in the movie Eleni, about a tradition-bound Greek woman who
rebels by sending her children away from that country's civil war in 1948. So far, Kate's
important parts have all been passionate, tortured, intense women.
She laughs as she explains that "I'm hired to suffer. As a
producer's son once said about me, 'Well, Dad, she does sad great.'
"I've had it!" she continues, in deliberately exaggerated
frustration. "I'm dying to do a comedy. I'm tired of playing women 10 to 15 years
older than I am, who wear no makeup and trudge through muddy fields. I want to do
something real pretty where I sit around and answer a white telephone!"
Kate acknowledges the image her roles have created and the difficulty
she'll have changing people's definition of her. Actually definition's been a bit of a
personal dilemma, too. This super-attractive, Canadian-born actress studied and gained her
first successes in England, where she purposefully attained a British accent, then moved
to Hollywood, where she spent an agonizing 10 months, and next moved to New York City,
adopting an American accent and a new name-she had been Trish-along the way. "I used
to feel that I had to deny one part of me to make sense of the new part, and so on. Now I
know that you must live with a continuity of self, if not of place. I'm much more
comfortable now that I can accept that I'm the sum of all those parts."
Her current existence, anchored in her antiques-filled Upper West Side
apartment and an old house near the water in Connecticut, is almost determinedly
non-showbiz. "My best friends, with the exception of Linda Hunt, aren't 'name
people,' and I don't go out to trendy places. I don't have a manager or a lawyer, though I
do have a good accounting firm." This means paying her own bills, doing the cooking
and cleaning for a continuous stream of houseguests at her country retreat, even doing her
own ironing.
However, recent trips to Los Angeles to research a new agency to
represent her for film work, plus the hours she's spent sifting through documents
detailing her apartment building's co-op plan, added to the prospect of completely redoing
her Rolodex because she spilled coffee all over it, have convinced Kate that she might
have to hire an assistant. "I could really relax then. I'm real tired."
Asked if growing acclaim and achievement are easier to handle as a
single woman, Kate uncharacteristically reveals that she ended a three-year live-in
relationship last Christmas. "In terms of couples, my experience has been that you
must be very, very careful to find someone whose own work is emotionally important to him.
And he can't be a failure at it. Nor is it up to the more successful person to apologize
all the time.
"I think it would be very difficult for a man to be with me unless
he could not just accept but be really turned on by what I do. It's not a hobby and it's
not frivolous. I've seen very little real sharing of the joys of one person's
success."
Motherhood without marriage is not in the cards for Kate, but if
and when she marries and has children, "It'll mean not working some of the time. And
taking the kid(s) along a lot. I can't imagine doing my career full-time and managing a
family. I'd have to give up the ironing!"
Her feet-on-the-ground approach to life applies to her good looks, too.
A runner since childhood, Kate takes a stretch/aerobics class on the days she doesn't jog.
"Otherwise, especially now that I'm in my 30s, the whole deal would fall apart."
She's less devoted to skin treatments, however: "The skin is an
organ! You wouldn't put mud on your liver. I think a good complexion is a matter of eating
well, exercise and maintaining a less-than-heart-attack level of stress." Her one
concession: sun block.
Her taste in fashion runs to good clothes-"in the sense that they
look great on me"-particularly in loose, flowing silhouettes and fabrics. There's
been a recent change in that Kate likes looking sexy these days. "I used to find it
very conflicting to wear clothes that say, 'Well, here I am and there you are and I'm so
clearly a woman.' I realize my style used to be rather androgynous. Now I love being
whistled at. I guess I have more physical and sexual confidence."
And why shouldn't she? She's a great-looking woman in her prime, with several highly
lauded, serious acting jobs to her credit. "I have to be cautious not to repeat that
suffering-woman role, though. I'll do almost anything decent, as long as it includes
funny."
