Saturday Night
August 1985

Photo by William Coupon*

NELLIGAN'S LEAPS
   BY URJO KAREDA

AS AN ACTOR, Kate Nelligan has repeatedly thrown herself off cliffs, abandoning sure footing to leap into the unknown. Her latest act of faith is taking her to the top rank of international stardom.

KATE NELLIGAN is seated comfortably, one leg tucked under her, on a pink sofa in her rented Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. Her remarkable beauty speaks for itself, and so she has paid it no special attention. The dark hair, the large, searching eyes, the exquisite cheekbones and sensuous mouth are givens - an actor's working tools - and, at home, she can dismiss them with a casualness that only heightens their impact. Slim and graceful, she reveals a funny, often rude and raucous girlishness which makes her seem younger than her thirty-four years. What makes her presence so arresting, quite apart from the elegant authority of her looks, is the Nelligan voice - low, throaty, urgent with ideas and passions. In the early stages of her career, when she was conquering British theatre, the voice was impeccably English in its rhythms and inflections; now that she has built a second career, as a star in the United States, Nelligan has allowed her Southwestern Ontario origins to reenter her speech, reserving the dark, theatrical tones for the message on her answering machine. Kate Nelligan, after a determined assault on theatre and films on two continents, seems close to being home.

"Everything here is mine," she says, referring to the room around her." I live here, and when I spend money I spend it on my home. It's where I spend most of the time. I can't perch anywhere. If I live somewhere for a week, I'll be painting the walls." The apartment, like Nelligan herself, mixes elegance with practicality. The furnishings reflect her life in England and European travels - tables and cabinets from England and France, a sculpted head she found on a film location in Spain, small archaeological artifacts from Greece, an antique clock that insists on chiming midnight every hour. A large, low marble table holds an art book, an enormous pine cone, and a well-worn copy of a script she is trying to work into her system. But perhaps the most personal and touching details in the apartment are the dozen snapshots of her family, sisters, nieces, nephews - that are stuck everywhere, leaning against glass cabinets and tucked into the frames of antique mirrors.

This is Kate Nelligan's sanctuary, the most recent refuge in a career that has taken her far afield from her first home in London, Ontario. In some ways, that career has been swift and impressive, but its path is also broken. A decade of study and stardom in England was followed by a year of personal hell in Los Angeles, which was followed by a move to New York, which is now, together with long summers in Connecticut, her home base. She is very much a presence in New York now: she is represented by Sam Cohn, the most powerful agent in show business; important producers such as Joseph Papp seek out projects for her; and this fall she will star in the title role of an $11-million film, Eleni.

In exchanging the old world for the new and reversing her original direction, Nelligan found that she had to build her reputation once again from the ground up. And she managed that, with her characteristic determination - but not without a measure of panic and self-doubt. "It amuses me," she reflects, "that everyone thinks I'm so straight-arrow in my determination. The reality is so haphazard."

She has moved with apparent decisiveness and observable triumph, but she is as likely to turn her back on what she has just achieved, both questioning her success and also looking for something a little further off. Nelligan’s greatest challenges are the ones she sets for herself. Both as an artist and as a woman she has repeatedly thrown herself off cliffs, abandoning a secure footing to leap out into the unknown. Anguish and anxiety are the price of such daring, but she appears to know what she wants to do with her life. "I'm a runner" she says, firm and clear-eyed, "and I want a chance to be in the final race of the Olympics. And I want to win. I always saw it as a world market, with world standards."

"Who the hell am I? I bet you don't even know my second name.
KATE NELLIGAN IN DAVID HARE’S KNUCKLE

SHE WAS BORN Patricia Colleen Nelligan, the second daughter in a Catholic working-class family of six children in London, Ontario. Her father, Patrick, works for the public utilities commission, but the dominant force in her youth was her mother, Josephine, an independent woman who had left her own home at thirteen and then put herself through high school and college, becoming a teacher and, later, studying for a graduate degree. Josephine Nelligan developed a fierce vision of excellence for her children, who were given the opportunities that she had had to create for herself, and she placed upon Patricia Colleen, who, from infancy, seemed advanced, the burden of exceptional attention and expectation. The young girl was programmed to be an achiever: I.Q. tests, dance lessons, coaching in tennis and track-and-field. Nelligan's intelligence grasped both the taut intensity of her mother's ambition, and its troubling effect (Josephine Nelligan was a tragic alcoholic), and the girl soon realized that she had to get out. By the time she was sixteen, she had won a scholarship to York University's Glendon College in Toronto, and left home.

At Glendon, Nelligan made an important discovery. She auditioned for a college dramatic production and, in her first play, found herself cast as Gertrude in Hamlet. "I was all of sixteen," she says, "but I never had a second's doubt that this is what I would do with my life. It was a very intimate form of contact with people and with my own imagination, and yet it was utterly safe. It was a way of handling feelings that didn't have direct consequences in one's own life."

The experience of acting, of discovering within herself the emotions of another person and then attempting to communicate them in the theatre, released something in Nelligan. The furtiveness of her adolescence was replaced by a public forum in which she could still escape - by becoming someone else. Nelligan resolved to follow her discovery to its ultimate conclusion, and went about it in the most difficult way possible - not by continuing to study drama in university, or even at Canada’s National Theatre School, but by concluding that, if she were destined to be a classical stage actor in the English language, then it was from the very source of this drama that she must learn. She auditioned for London's Central School of Speech and Drama, whose graduates include Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft. She told the examiners that she was going to England no matter what, and if they could provide a place at the school then would they please do so. In September, 1969, at eighteen, she left for England.

In London she supported herself with odd jobs in a fast-food outlet and a biscuit factory and with teaching at the Arthur Murray dance studios ("I taught some very strange men how to tango"). When funds ran out, she wrote to several businessmen in London, Ontario, asking them for help (one family paid her tuition). But she now dismisses the school that she struggled so tenaciously to attend: "Schools only shelter you," she says. "I spent three years in one of those great British acting schools, learning how to sword-fight."

The importance of her training and apprenticeship years in England was that this closed country, locked in its own traditions, provided the crucible in which Nelligan was able to transform herself. It quickly became clear to her that to work regularly in the English theatre, competing for roles with English actors, she would have to become English. Mingling with a new generation of politically. and socially aware young actors, Nelligan realized the corrupt, stifling order had to be changed. This visionary stance informed much of her best work in England. In addition, she acquired the British affection for language, a passion for the English landscape, and a flawless English accent. Somewhere, too, Trish Nelligan changed into Kate Nelligan.

Her disguise worked. "Once I abandoned my native speech," she recalls, "nothing was closed to me. For me to pass as one of them for ten years, as I did, required me to become one of them." But turning one's back on upbringing, education, and home must have created tensions which can only be judged in retrospect: "There are people who wouldn't do that," she has reflected. "I'm not sure I should have " As with her first acting experience at Glendon, Kate Nelligan had thrown herself into a void, and found a new self upon landing.

By the time she was twenty-one, Nelligan had finished at the Central School and found a place - as many gifted young English actors do - in one of the regional theatres. She was taken on at the respected Bristol Old Vic where, at first, ironically enough for an actor who had gone to London to immerse herself in the English classics, she was cast in American plays such as Nell Simon's Bare foot in the Park and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

Her first important break came late in 1973, when she got her chance to work in London. At twenty-two, she won the female lead in the West End premiere of a new play by David Hare, one of the new generation of distinctive young British playwrights that had sprung up in the late 1960s. Knuckle was Nelligan's first significant departure from the classics, her first opportunity to create a high-profile role untouched by a performing tradition. "I know that Kate came to England thinking that, in order to be a real actor, you had to come and do the classics," says David Hare. "But I think that Knuckle taught her that she didn't need to do the classics - or what she calls 'long dresses plays' - or spend years saying 'Yes, Father' in a masterpiece. Kate doesn't have what Peggy Ashcroft, for instance, does - a desire to play her way through the great roles. And when Kate did play the great roles, I don't think she was always very happy."

Her first collaboration with Hare sealed their professional and their personal fates for almost a decade; they continued to work together on several stage and television plays. "It was the accident of total identification of an actor with the voice of the writer," says Hare, now an associate director of the National Theatre. "Kate was the absolutely perfect voice for my work." Nelligan, too, acknowledges the impact of their collaboration: "I started working with David Hare when I was twenty-two, and for many years he shaped my standards for my own work."

Knuckle uses the detective-story genre to continue Hare's ongoing examination of the moral dubiousness and decay of contemporary England. The leading role went to the hot English actor Edward Fox, but critical attention searched out - because she was so new and so exciting - Kate Nelligan. She was required to serve not only the decorative thriller aspects of the play (Knuckle's most famous image is of Nelligan in a bikini standing on Fox's shoulders) but also the articulation of the play's moral "I didn't know her before Knuckle," says Hare. "She was cast by the director, Michael Blakemore, who had heard of her work in Bristol, and I was merely asked to come in, meet her, and check her over. I knew she was right. As a young actor, she was very desperate to entertain. At the first rehearsal of Knuckle, she was extremely rococo: there was lots going on. Later she developed the apparent effortlessness which is achieved by great craft, and now, of course, she quite resents it when people say how effortless she seems." For Hare, it was the integrity of Nelligan's personality that made her so potent. "Her work had a moral force," he says. "She could make the moral tone of our work palatable. She was believably good. And also very romantic as an actor, which is important because my plays are very romantic."

Kate Nelligan tasted her first English triumph with Knuckle, little more than four years after leaving Canada. She won the Plays and Players Award for Most Promising Newcomer that year and her success was so great that it was even reported in Canadian newspapers. The papers carried a photo of Nelligan in her bikini. The headlines didn't quite say "Canadian bimbo makes it in London," but they might as well have.

"I'm always expecting something. I don't know what it is; but life must come to a point sometime."    KATE NELLIGAN IN BERNARD SHAW’S  HEARTBREAK HOUSE 

THE SUCCESS of Knuckle led directly to an invitation to join the National Theatre acting company, one of the two prime theatrical establishments in England. In 1975, she made her debut as Ellie Dunn in John Schlesinger's production of Heartbreak House. Ellie was a role coveted by many young actors, and Nelligan's swift rise - in only her second London appearance - was testimony to her distinctive gifts. Once again, her performance was highly praised; Nelligan's Ellie Dunn, coming so soon after Knuckle, gave critics and audiences a glimpse of what a resolutely contemporary actor could achieve in the classical repertoire. Her Ellie was magically still and inward: there seemed nothing petty or trivial in her person, only a fire of idealism that nothing could stop. Her beauty - of appearance, manner, and voice - dominated the production, and it was clear that the National Theatre had a major new star in its midst.

A similarly powerful performance in her second National role, in a production of Od6n von Horvath's Tales From the Vienna Woods, consolidated her position. The theatrical buzz in London changed from what Kate Nelligan might next do for the National Theatre to what the National Theatre might wisely next do for Kate Nelligan.. Just three years out of drama school, Nelligan had achieved what she had set out to achieve: she was a leading member of a major classical acting ensemble, which at the time numbered among its performers such legends as John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Peggy Ashcroft. Kate Nelligan, with another challenge wrestled to the ground, found herself restless and dissatisfied.

"I did not want to be one of the leading ladies of the English theatre," she acknowledges. "I didn't have the appetite for it. About 1976, 1 began to realize that film was the biting need, the how out of London. I'm not a theatre person, I'm more a film person; I've loved watching films more than anything. Yet with so much good theatre coming my way, it was awful not to be satisfied. People thought it was tragic."

Nelligan had begun to take her first steps into other media around the time of Knuckle. In 1975, she had a small role in Joseph Losey's film The Romantic Englishwoman. She had done some work in British television ranging from a romantic adventure epic to an adaptation of The Lady of the Camellias. She even returned to Canada - working professionally for the first time in her own country - to co-star with Donald Sutherland in the CBC drama Bethune, and to appear in a turkey sponsored by the Canadian Film Development Corporation, Mr. Patman. (She looked at this discouraging era in Canadian filmmaking and decided that, although she was desperate to get into film, she wasn't that desperate. "The Canadian film industry is a joke and we Canadians should be ashamed of it," she was quoted as saying at the time.)

She may have planned a stage career for herself as preparation for a shift into films - a pattern that had worked for such English actors as Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Christie, Maggie Smith, and Glenda Jackson. And it may also be that she saw film work as the means by which she would be forced further into focusing her will, the final test of herself, the biggest cliff.

"I know now," she says, understanding what she didn't quite grasp at the time, "that I stayed in England too long. I had so much ambition to make it in film, and so little possibility. Nobody's launched a major film career out of England since Glenda Jackson. I had so much anger. I spent five years with everyone telling me, 'If film is going to come, it'll come.' And it didn't. it never did, there."

What did come, however, was the stage role of her career. David Hare's Plenty, which opened at the National Theatre in April, 1978. is the work with which she remains most clearly identified. Hare's epic play is an astonishing metaphor for British postwar disillusionment and moral deterioration. The role of Susan Traherne was one of the most challenging and complex parts written for a woman in more than a decade. Susan starts out as an eighteen-year-old Englishwoman helping the French Resistance in 1943, and ends as a lost, desolate woman in 1962, having broken herself, her husband, his career, and their world on the cruel wheel of her idealistic determination. The ferocity of Traherne's moral tone makes the play challenging; her refusal to compromise either her own life or her national vision brings about a martyrdom part heroic, part destructive. The play does not unfold chronologically, but juggles decades, leaving the audience with a final, heartbreaking glimpse of the young Susan at the end of the war, with a shining vision of an open, hopeful future.

Susan Traherne's many facets - her blackly glittering wit, her anger, her yearning, her confusion and determination - were so completely absorbed into Kate Nelligan's performance that it became difficult to separate the actor and the role. It was commonly believed that the part of Susan Traherne had been tailored specifically to Nelligan's extraordinary strengths; but Hare neither wrote Plenty for her nor wanted her to act in it initially. Hare (who was directing the play as well) had wanted an older actor, Diana Rigg, for the role. When Rigg dropped out to spend more time with her baby, Hare's agent persuaded him to cast Nelligan in the role.

That was in 1977. Nelligan had left the National Theatre to join the Royal Shakespeare Company (the other prime acting ensemble in England) to play Rosalind in a disastrous production of, As You Like It. Hare went to visit her in Stratford-upon-Avon. "We read through the first act of Plenty," she recalls, "and he said, 'I don't think you can play it '." She persisted, sensing rightly that it was a great play. "It didn't take that long," says Hare, "for me to see that she was a much better idea than I'd ever had."

Plenty, which opened in 1978 at the National Theatre, was the climax of the David Hare-Kate Nelligan collaboration. It was also the last theatre work she was to do in England. Her performance won her the Evening Standard Award for Best Actress, and a critic in The Times called her "the foremost actress of her generation," but many reacted less enthusiastically, finding her work chilly, hard, self-absorbed. Some assumed that Kate Nelligan was Susan Traherne, and disliked the actor for the violent edges of the character. Nelligan's performance was a challenge to the audience because of its dangerous lack of compromise. Nelligan knew this was the role of a lifetime: after the play opened, David Hare remembers her dismissing her career up to that point with a shrug, saying, "Well, that's the theatre for me." In November, at the final performance of Plenty, a performance that was greeted with a cheering, standing ovation, Nelligan made an impromptu curtain speech, thanking those who had supported the play and David Hare, "who has come from among you." Her words had the ache of a farewell.

"There will be days and days and days like this."
KATE NELLIGAN IN DAVID HARE’S PLENTY

"IN ENGLAND, after Plenty," says Nelligan, recalling the final years of the 1970s, "it got painful. I didn't know how to achieve what I wanted to achieve without going over a cliff. Which is what I did eventually. In England, I now realize, I never felt English, I never had the inner restraint. I just wasn't English: I missed basketball and people talking too loud."

She did more television work, including the title role in a memorable adaptation of Emile Zola's Therese Raquin, in which she portrayed an almost shocking erotic hunger. Typically, she dismissed her achievement at the time: "Lots of people do very good work, and it ends up on PBS, where it's watched by 400 high-school teachers." She made further forays into film. She disappeared in John Badham's film version of Dracula, with Frank Langella, but then so did Laurence Olivier. She was reunited with Donald Sutherland in The Eye of the Needle, Richard Marquand's film of the Ken Follett best seller, but the script was weak, and Nelligan played one of those put-upon women to whom she has little to bring. Both films were mediocre and, though film fees boosted her savings, the results did little for her morale.

Nelligan retreated to her rented cottage in the Cotswolds, where she could be by herself, safe in a small community where she wasn't known. "It was murderously difficult to live all the time in the city. I needed someplace where I could find peace. If you live in England, the landscape is there, and you have to fight hard not to surrender to it totally."

After a long period of stocktaking, she concluded that, if she were ever going to establish her presence in front of the cameras, she would have to act quickly. Leaving everything behind, with no contacts set up for herself, she flew to Los Angeles in January, 1981, to make it in the movies. She had gone over her cliff.

"It was a radical decision," she recalls, "like coming to England as a student in the first place. Not clear-headed. I went to L.A. and wasted ten months of my life in absolute agony. You can't do what I did. In England, if you're gifted, you get a chance to do what you want to do particularly in the theatre, where there isn't much money at risk. But in America, and particularly in films, where the expenses are so enormous, a lot of really gifted people don't ever get the chance to do it."

Nelligan's sense of her own destiny was critically tested in California. If she had been wrong in thinking that British theatrical stardom could lead to a British film career, then she was even more gravely mistaken in thinking that British theatrical stardom could open doors for her in Hollywood. The American movie capital's antennae don't really take in theatrical reputations, particularly those with a British classical tinge. Nelligan discovered that her gilt-edged British stage reputation meant nothing, and understood quickly that she would have to start from the very bottom. "I had had very little practice," she smiles, "in being at the bottom." But having leaped, she had to wait to land.

"I wanted very much to play American," she says, "and nobody wanted me to be American. They had seen me in Therese Raquin on PBS and expected me to be something exotic. Nobody knew who I was or what work I had done. I remember being absolutely crushed by all the blondes. I'd come with no address book, no friends, no money. I was so afraid to go back to England, because I was afraid that I'd end up living there."

Eventually, she did find some work, did make some money - in an abominable made-for-television film called The Victims. She spent an hour a day at the Hollywood Y, running to keep in shape and to maintain some morale. And, as in the difficult final years in England, she sought out sanctuary. A friend offered her his cabin in the Kananaskis Mountains in Alberta, and she found herself commuting regularly between Los Angeles and Calgary. "I maintained my sanity - whatever little sanity L.A. left me with - in the mountains," she remembers. "I was there in the winter, which was pretty primitive. I found the endless sky and plains terrifying, but I was very grateful to that place."

After almost a year, she was on the verge of abandoning acting forever. She was about to buy some land at Bragg Creek, near Calgary, when two unexpected things happened. Joseph Papp, the producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival and probably the shrewdest entrepreneur in American theatre, telephoned to ask whether she would like to appear in a production of Plenty at the New York Public Theatre for $230 a week. He was interested in the play but would not consider doing it without her. And a few days later, film producer Stanley Jaffe offered her the lead in his new film Without a Trace, which was scheduled to shoot in New York just before the rehearsals for Plenty. Shocked and relieved, Nelligan bolted again, moving from Los Angeles to Manhattan.

"I want to move on. I do desperately want to feel I'm moving on.
KATE NELLIGAN IN DAVID HARE’S PLENTY

IN NEW YORK, she was much better able to make a connection with the image of the New World she had wanted to return to. "I knew that I had to live back on my side of the ocean," she says. "I can't see being an old lady in New York, but you can live here and be in touch with an enormous industry. Plenty saved me by bringing me to New York."

She started optimistically on Without a Trace, a film loosely based on the story of a small boy who sets off to school one morning from his parents' apartment in New York, never to be seen again. But the script let her down, never really exploring the implications of the material. Without a Trace proved a middling movie and another commercial flop and, although Nelligan's performance is perfectly accomplished, it doesn't begin to suggest the range and power of her talent. Her first big American film merely repeated the disappointing pattern of her English film career.

The New York production of Plenty, however, established her as a major stage actor in North America. "I didn't expect that success here," she admits, "and I opened the play very relaxed. That was quite different from London, where my expectations had been so great, and we got neither the reviews nor the audiences. "The play itself was much more highly praised, and understood, in New York. Nelligan became an overnight star, and on the power of the response to her performance Joseph Papp transferred the production from the Public Theater to Broadway.

Yet even in New York, Nelligan’s performance as Susan Traherne was controversial, too thorny perhaps for the eager-to-please dynamics of Broadway. "I could feel the audiences' hostility," she remembers. "It's curious to work so hard and be hated. And I knew that the majority of people who saw it just hated her guts." (She was delighted, however, that her father was finally able to see Plenty; she expected he would find it inaccessible and was moved when he told her that he loved it.)

The security of New York critical approval, however, was accompanied by a troubling transformation in her own attitude to the role that had made her famous. "I stopped admiring the woman," she confesses. "I really wanted to pummel her. I would come to the middle of the second act, and I would just withdraw my consent from that woman. I don't think the audience ever knew, but I was very worried about it." 

The separation of Kate Nelligan and Susan Traherne seems to have come from a mellowing in the actor herself. Vindicated finally in her decision to quit England, and having survived the miseries of Los Angeles, she felt, for the first time in a long time, that she was in the right place at the right moment. Susan Traherne keeps battling whether she wins or loses; Nelligan, with some considerable victories at hand, called a truce for the moment.

"I wasn't so angry any more," she says. "I had left England with such immense anger, and yet, when I went back for a summer, I didn't feel it any more. It felt like a different country to me, but then I understood that, no, it was I who was different. My anger in those years would always have found a target, but it was gone. I don't know why the anger had been there. And I don't know why it had gone."

"I have a beautiful soul, you mean?"
KATE NELLIGAN IN EUGENE O’NEILL’s A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN

After Plenty, in 1983, a young English director, David Leveaux, sent Nelligan a script, A Moon for the Misbegotten, which he was going to stage for the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The slender and glamorous Nelligan was an odd choice for the play's one female role, the giant farm girl Josie Hogan, described in Eugene O'Neill's exhaustive stage directions as "so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak - five feet eleven in her stockings and weighs around one hundred and eighty.... She is more powerful than any but an exceptionally strong man, able to do the manual labour of two ordinary men. But there is no mannish quality about her. She is all woman."

Leveaux felt that Nelligan could do it. "Josie has absolute vulnerability and forthrightness," he says. "She is a childish spirit with enormous strength. The key to casting Kate was temperamental - to be able to see the change from a brutish woman to one who becomes almost a happy woman, wiser and even more vulnerable." In addition to the unlikeliness of the casting, the revival was up against the history of A Moon for the Misbegotten in the U. S. where it had been made famous by a 1973 Broadway revival in which the great Colleen Dewhurst had created a memorable, mythic, earth-mother Josie.

Neither of these disadvantages was lost on Nelligan who, typically, flew in their face. After Plenty was finished, Nelligan, exhausted by the strain of the role and her own conflict with it, turned down work for nine months. She had come to the end of the road with Plenty. Papp had tried to get together financing for a film version of the play, to star Nelligan, but, by the time the film project had come together, the role of Susan Traherne had gone to Meryl Streep. Nelligan is able to laugh about it now. "Actually," she smiles, "it was offered to me. For seven days. During a time that Meryl, who'd had the offer for two months, didn't want to do it. But I had told David Hare that I didn't mind Meryl playing it. She would be very good and, with her in it, they could raise the money in thirty seconds. I was hurt most because I never heard the final decision from David. My agent knew long before he told me. I felt totally patronized."

And so Josie Hogan came along at just the right time: "I was very glad to do it because absolutely nobody believed that I could. People would say, 'She can't play an Irish peasant; she plays up market intellectual women.' I had to escape the definition - and also a self definition - of myself taken from David Hare's plays. And Josie gave me a physical vocabulary, and used things in me that I'd never been asked to use before."

She took herself off to Cambridge, where she had to live again in small rented quarters ("That was not easy for me"). The production was troubled by delays and illnesses and, during a performance, Nelligan discovered that one of her vocal cords was hemorrhaging. But she worked zealously at lowering her voice, developing a new physical authority onstage, and making the transformation - externally by padding, make-up, and a matted wig, internally by all the skills of her understanding from a beautiful, fine-boned young woman to a coarse, slatternly farm girl who finds tenderness and wisdom during the course of the play. "I had made a guess," says David Leveaux, who first conceived of her in the role, "that Kate's temperament was a bit more giving than she had been willing to show. Having worked with her, I'd say that the two key factors in her work are, first, an absolute diligence and honesty to the thing she's dealing with; and, second, a natural ability to throw herself off a cliff to see if she can fly."

Nelligan did fly in Moon. "It was great," she says, "to play the life part of myself, and not the death part, as I had in Plenty. Everybody believed - and I believed, too - that I lived only from the neck up. I loved using my heart so much, and discovering what a powerful organ it is, and what strength it gives. I have had so much experience being paid to suffer. I've never found it painful to suffer; it does ease up a lot of things. But in Moon, I was paid to make people laugh, to make them feel love. It didn't worry me that it didn't do well commercially - as long as you don't lose your love for the part."

It was during Moon that Nelligan tentatively reached out for a reconciliation with her own roots. She gave a remarkable interview to The New York Times in which she spoke publicly for the first time about her mother's destructive alcoholism and its effect upon her own youth. She had last seen her mother when she committed her to a mental home in l972, where she died two years later. Twelve years afterwards, the power of O’Neill’s drama about forgiveness was allowing her to start making peace with that troubled memory. (Aware that she must have hurt her family by revealing this story, she now prefers to remain silent about it, as she also maintains silence about her own private life.)

Today, she is closer to members of her family than ever before. She frequently visits them in Toronto. And she has rented a summer home, near Gilford, Connecticut, so that they can all be together - on her own territory. "It's a beautiful house," she says proudly, "big, very O'Neill, 1890s, all wood, 150 yards from the Sound, and I'm there, when I can, from May to October. My family comes there. Then it’s sisters and nieces and nephews day after day, really hokey and really nice. It's tumble-down and kid-proof and I feel really happy there. I read and sit on the porch and build fires and swim and stuff.

"It's peace, just peace. When I was growing up, we never made any trips outside London to the country. I guess my family wasn't typical. I can't say that it's great to have a large family - from my own experience. I can't ever imagine having five children. You have to have a genius gift for parenting, or you have to give all your time, or you have to believe that the kids can bring themselves up, or you've got to believe you're God. I wouldn't have just one, I'd have two, in quick succession, to provide a built-in safety measure against your own parenting."

Another extension of her happy experience with A Moon for the Misbegotten was that she was seen by the director Peter Yates and the writer Steve Tesich, who were planning a film version of Eleni, the best seller by the New York Times journalist Nicholas Gage. The book is a moving memoir of Gage's mother, Eleni Gatzoyiannis, who was executed in 1948 by people occupying her village during the Greek civil war. Eleni was killed after she arranged the escape of her nine-year-old son, Nicola (later Nicholas Gage), and three of his sisters from their Communist-held village. She was an uneducated Greek woman, relatively privileged in her youth in the context of a hard, poor, village life. Left alone with her children during the war (her husband had gone to America to start a new life there in the hope that he could bring his family out to join him), she discovered extraordinary resources of strength and courage within herself. It is a remarkable portrait, and Yates and Tesich, seeing Nelligan in A Moon for the Misbegotten, thought they saw something in her unexpected impersonation of a tough-spirited yet tender farm girl that could contain the heart of Eleni.

For Kate Nelligan, the chance to make Eleni was the film break she had long hoped for: a strong script (by Steve Tesich), respected co-stars (John Malkovich and Linda Hunt), and an experienced, understanding director (Yates had recently made Breaking Away and The Dresser). "I knew," she says."I knew I had the script. I knew I wasn't going to have to patronize it. For the first time, I never had to worry, 'How am I not going to look like an idiot in this scene?' I knew we were going to be able to realize it, and not just camouflage it. It helped my state of mind that the woman I was playing had existed: that was a fantastic help with the work."

The making of Eleni was fraught with difficulties. Financing appeared and disappeared. After considering several locations (Greece not being among them, partly owing to the sensitivity of the subject matter), Yates and his art director chose Spain. Nelligan herself spent almost four months - last October until January - on location, traveling an hour and a half back and forth each day between the set and the Spanish coast, working almost entirely out-of-doors, even when the weather turned bitter.

"I loved doing it," she remembers. "It was nice being in the company of someone - Eleni - who was consumed with everyday domestic ways, and not intellectual. I loved being outside twelve hours a day. It was so difficult at first, because nobody spoke the same languages; I didn't speak any Spanish, so I couldn't approach the extras who were playing my fellow villagers. But because I was there so long, I had time to know the people.

"As for the role itself, there was always the danger that she'd become some sort of madonna. I fought not to play her heroism every second of the time, but to convey the truth that these people lived savagely hard lives."

As the biggest and most important film she had yet undertaken, Eleni pushed Nelligan to increase her stake in the film. In her past films, she had never felt that she deserved to be there. 'This time she says, "because it was by far the longest time I've acted in a film, it felt like my work - and not, 'Here I am pretending to be a movie actor.' I watched the rushes, all the rushes, so that I was able to see what I was doing wrong. Doing that, you can find out what kind of film you're in, you can make it known you'll be a full partner. You can't really do that without taking that stand. I don't know anyone in film who can survive without a very clear idea that you want it. It allows me to work harder: during the preparation for Eleni, there was no cost I couldn't bear, no sacrifice I wouldn't make."

Something tremendous about to happen.Something tremendous about to happen.
KATE NELLIGAN IN EDNA O'BRIENS VIRGINIA

THE KATE NELLIGAN who sits in her living room, one leg tucked under her on her pink sofa, is remarkably relaxed and self-confident. Last January, with the filming of Eleni behind her, she went immediately into rehearsals at the Public Theatre for Edna O'Brien's play Virginia, with David Leveaux again directing. She knew that the play, about the novelist Virginia Woolf, had its problems (it is virtually a long monologue, with shorter appearances by Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West), and she knew, too, that there was again a famous precedent production, Robin Phillips's Stratford Festival premiere version, starring Maggie Smith, which had gone on to London. Nelligan accepted that challenge. "I'd like the span of what I've done in New York in the past two years to be as wide as possible," she acknowledges. "I don't want there to be 'the thing that I do. ' I certainly don't want there to be book on me. The play is a challenge, certainly, but you can't not say 'yes' to its difficulties."

Having borne the trials of close identification with Susan Traherne in Plenty, she now seems insistent on transformations as remote as possible from her own self - an Irish farm girl, a Greek peasant woman, and perhaps the greatest English novelist of the twentieth century. David Leveaux, however, can see an identification of Nelligan with Woolf’s own sensibility: "Kate understands very well the desire to get away from the muddy world into a bright, ethereal one."

Joseph Papp was again the producer. Even though they were well into rehearsals before an actor to play Vita could be found, Nelligan stayed relatively calm. She isn't, she feels, one to lose her temper or show her anger, but Papp - who cherishes her delicacy with language, onstage and off - laughs in gentle disagreement. "Mind you, when Kate gets angry,' he says, "she pushes that language several degrees higher. She's a fast burner; you can see it in her cheeks. But she has a marvelous sense of humour, too, a little girl's humour, which would surprise all the people who think she's straight and aloof."

Nelligan held Virginia together with the sheer force of her personality. The critical response was poor, and there was to be no Broadway transfer this time, but her own performance again drew admiration and audiences.

One night in April, Nelligan was performing in Virginia. She was suffering terribly from the flu, and had come close to sending on her stand-by. She had placed glasses of water and piles of handkerchiefs on the set, and mopped her face as discreetly as she could. By the second act, however, her physical feverishness had been absorbed into her performance, and she was incandescent in the parts of the play that should have been the most difficult for her - the scenes of the aging Virginia Woolf moving into the bewildering borderlands between spiritual existence and madness. As Edna O'Brien has arranged Woolfs own words, the play ends, as it begins, with a vision of transcendence. As Kate Nelligan spoke the words "something tremendous about to 'happen" - spoke them with clarity and imagination and passion - the theatre rang with the actor's ecstatic readiness.

For Kate Nelligan, the time is ripe. Her new, relaxed assurance may be the result of having again built herself up successfully from the bottom. She feels at home in New York (and has finally achieved resident alien status. She was touched, returning to New York after Eleni, to be greeted at immigration with a recognition of her status, if not her name. 'This means you're an artist," said the official, "welcome back.") She still travels on a Canadian passport, and feels that she would like to comprehend her own country better: "I don't understand my own people very well. I left when I was too young to understand the national neurosis. They shouldn't be intimidated; they should celebrate. You can't keep going around like a disinherited brother. It's fucking boring, and it's not true." She says that she would like to work in this country again, but is also perfectly aware of the Canadian love-hate ambivalence toward one of its most celebrated prodigal daughters, the one who went away and became famous.

For the moment, New York feels comfortable. It's where Joseph Papp is on her side ("She commands," he comments, "and few modern actors have that capacity"); it's where her agent, Sam Cohn, looks after her interests. (It was Cohn who helped find new financing for Eleni at a crucial moment. It was Cohn who persuaded New York producers to bring A Moon for the Misbegotten to Broadway. As an agent not just for Nelligan but also for Peter Yates and Steve Tesich, he must have been influential in arranging their collaboration on Eleni.) "His power is awesome and frightening," she laughs. "Sometimes he represents people who are all up for the same part. You can't be a paranoid and be represented by Sam. You can't look for, or need, fathering; you can't call him at 2 a.m. to tell him you're nervous about some scenes. But I know now how to take care of many things for myself, and to know when something is not worth Sam's attention. I trust only my own judgment about what I take on, but on a business level it's hard to resist him."

Kate Nelligan is in charge of her own destiny as she always wanted to be. Eleni is crucial for her; if it is a success, she may never again have to use the theatre to rescue her career. She is in New York, but not of New York; she is a star not particularly interested in stardom. "Stardom can sway you," she acknowledges, "but it can't move you. If you lose yourself, you have nothing left to offer. It's like losing your talent. Being prepared for stardom is being prepared not to take it seriously. And stardom has never tempted me. Nobody can make me flavour-of-the-month. It's the work and nothing else, and for the rest, in my heart I'm not flattered. I don't go to parties after the opening night, I accept no invitations. The best belongs on stage, the rest belongs to me. "

Nor will she flinch from the whole question of her ambition. "It's not my ambition that makes people nervous. That's shared by a lot of people. But perhaps what's frightening about me is that I do direct my ambition. I have strong views and objectives, and I don't apologize for it. I have no guilt about wanting to do the best work in the world."

* Click here to view William Coupon's extraordinary photographic collection.