Toronto Life Fashion
March 1992
Kate Nelligan
Just as two memorable roles have made this actress hot – again,
she’s warming to a new real-life role as a mother.
By David Evans
Kate Nelligan has a charming, infectious laugh. It bubbles up
out of her throat, tilting back her head and wrinkling her nose. It's a lovely thing to
see, if only because Nelligan has a reputation for a steely, cerebral reserve that makes
the odd giggle rather surprising. That's not to say that there's no truth to the
reputation: In conversation, Nelligan is precise, frank, a little impatient. Most of the
time, her humour tends to the sardonic-precise ironies, tight, knowing smiles. But every
now and then she laughs out loud, and makes you glad you were there to see it.
Here, for instance, is a story that makes Kate Nelligan laugh: Last
winter, when she was in California making Frankie and Johnny, the Al
Pacino/Michelle Pfeiffer romantic vehicle, director Garry Marshall introduced her to the
guests on the set in this way (You will just have to imagine Nelligan's nasal imitation of
Marshall's deese-and-dose Brooklynese):
"This is Kate. She is very respected in her field."
Nelligan thinks this is hilarious. It's an inside joke, of course:
Nelligan has been fated as an actress, you see, to be respected-by her peers, by the
critics. But respect for her craft has yet to make her a full-fledged star; sometimes all
that respect hasn't even been enough to get her steady work.
For most of the last six or seven years, in fact, work of any kind has
been hard to come by, thanks to the arcane, cruel politics of Hollywood. Back in 1985,
Nelligan had the title role in a movie called Eleni, an adaptation of the Nicholas
Gage book, that was supposed to make her a star; instead, the picture was gang-tackled by
the critics. In retrospect, it's hard to recall why the picture stirred such enmity, but
Nelligan remembers vividly her sudden realization in the middle of making it that "Eleni
wasn't just going to be unsuccessful-I knew it was going to bury me." Her
lips curl in a sarcastic grin. "I must say, I thought years in obscurity was a high
price to pay for a failed movie. I thought there had been greater cinematic transgressions
than mine. Turns out I was wrong." Nelligan's exile-relieved only by a handful of
short-lived plays in New York, the Canadian miniseries Love and Hate and her 1989
marriage to the American composer Robert Reale-lasted five years, until supporting roles
in two high-profile movies put her back into play: as Cora, the promiscuous, gum-snapping
waitress in Frankie and Johnny, and as Nick Nolte's repressive, controlling mother
in Barbra Streisand's The Prince of Tides. Nelligan still has all the respect she
needs, but now she's working again.
At least she would be, if she weren't pregnant with her first child.
So, two pieces of good news cancel each other out. This is the sort of perverse fate Kate
Nelligan knows rather well. She gives one of her small ironic smiles. "My husband
said to me, ‘You know, there's only one thing we can do: We just have to
laugh.’"
On a mild mid-winter New York afternoon, Kate Nelligan is sitting in
the rear of a comfortable, unpretentious restaurant on New York's Upper West Side. Her
booth, partially obscured from much of the rest of the restaurant by a convenient wall,
has the feel of an oasis reserved for VIPs. This was probably the staff's idea; Nelligan,
dressed in an oversized grey sweater and invariably cordial to the waiter, is hardly one
to demand star treatment. After praising the restaurant's food, she orders a simple
farmer's omelet for lunch.
New York has been Nelligan's home for more than a decade now. The route
that brought her here was somewhat roundabout. Raised in London, Ont., the child of an
alcoholic mother, she left her troubled home at 16. Smitten by the stage during a turn as
Gertrude in Hamlet at the University of Toronto, she decided that if she was going
to be an actress she wasn't about o halfway. She took off for London, England, and the
Central School of Speech and Drama, where she set about deconstructing herself--sanding
off the rough edges of her colonial accent, immersing herself in classical technique. She
made her debut in London in 1972 in Barefoot in the Park, and never looked
back, collecting parts from all over the repertoire, from Tales of the Vienna Woods
to Heartbreak House. By the 1980s, she had settled into the warm embrace of Britain's
National Theatre; she was respected, accepted, on her way to being a star.
Nelligan could have comfortably lived out her career within the British
system; certainly, she admits, she would have worked steadily, collected plum roles, even
("My God!") become an institution. But Nelligan was not yet 30, and there was
something closeted and claustrophobic about the British theatre. "They are
wonderfully creative, yes, but they are not a notoriously happy group," she says. A
starring role in the Second World War thriller, Eye of the Needle, opposite Donald
Sutherland, had given her a taste, however distant, of Hollywood. So with alarming gall,
Nelligan abandoned her beachhead in London and headed for Los Angeles, where, she admits,
"I knew no one and no one knew me."
In Hollywood, the success of Needle garnered Nelligan a good
agent and enough momentum for her to walk around. But, she says, the Hollywood
establishment was disappointed when they discovered she wasn't actually English. Without
that cachet, this tiny, fine-boned actress in her early 30s didn't fit easily into
anybody's game plan. "People would say, 'You're not American, but you're not anything
else either."' She made a TV movie or two, went to countless auditions, finally
scoring Without a Trace, a domestic drama about a missing child. It was the
production of Without a Trace that brought her to New York for the first time; the
city hit her with the shock of recognition. The movie would flop but she had found a home:
in New York, "I knew I would be all right. I knew I could live here."
The feeling was mutual, for within a few months of her arrival, theatre
impresario Joseph Papp offered her the lead role in the Broadway production of David
Hare's Plenty. Nelligan had already performed the part in London at 26--in fact, Hare had
dedicated the play to her. Nelligan was grateful to Papp for the opportunity to work. So
naive was she about the politics of the New York stage that she didn't realize the value
of the opening Papp was giving her. "I didn't have any sense of what Plenty
represented. I think you have to have grown up here in the business to understand when you
hit. I didn't know I was hitting. I knew I didn't know anybody and I would finish the show
and come home and eat macaroni out of the frozen package."
The day after the play opened, she spent the morning resting at home
with the phone off the hook. About noon, she put the phone back in its cradle; it
immediately began to ring. It would keep ringing all the rest of the day, and for weeks to
come: Plenty had opened to ecstatic reviews and Kate Nelligan was suddenly hot.
"Everyone was furious that they hadn't been able to reach me. It was
crazy," she remembers. "I'd be talking on the phone, and the operator would
suddenly break in to say that she had an emergency call from someone else. That happened
four times the first day!"
Some performers might have been swept up in the hyperbole. Not
Nelligan: She says her main reaction was bemusement "I thought, 'This is very
strange.' I was still used to thinking of what I did solely as an art. I had no idea what
all this fuss was about." In any case, she had only a little time to exploit it:
Three years later, Eleni would silence the phones for a very long time.
Now, five years later, Nelligan's comeback has been trumpeted-on Entertainment
Tonight, in The New York Times, even on the CBC-as the kind of story that
Hollywood loves. The potency of the story depends to some extent on the assumption that
Nelligan's attention-getting roles in Frankie and Johnny and The Prince of Tides were
clever strategic moves designed to put her back in the limelight. Nelligan takes a kind of
perverse delight in trashing that idea: "I just took the only jobs that had been
offered to me in years," she says.
In fact, her own agent advised her against taking the earthy part of
Cora. ("'Are you crazy?' I told him," remembers Nelligan. "'I can do
this."') Streisand only turned to Nelligan to play Nolte's mother when she simply
couldn't find two actresses who could convincingly play the same woman 30 years apart. And
Nelligan is unabashed about one of the main attractions of both jobs: "The money. I
needed the money." She knows this kind of talk puts her at odds with most of her
peers: "I never hear anybody say, 'Oh, I did that for money.' As if there's anything
wrong with that! As if everybody in the world doesn't have to pay their bills!"
Nelligan's frankness might be a political liability in someone younger
or more apparently fragile. But at 40, Kate Nelligan figures she can afford to tell it
like it is. No, that's not quite right: Her own integrity demands that she tell it
like it is. "I can't lie. Look, in some people's eyes, I'm too smart to be an
actress. I'm not supposed to be able to analyse things as well as I do. I'm not supposed
to be able to talk as well as I do. I'm not supposed to tell the truth as much as I do.
I'm not supposed to be the way I am." Has all that hurt her professionally? "You
know, there were horrible periods when no one wanted to hire me, and during those periods
I questioned many things. But I never questioned my ability to do the job.
"I am terribly devoted to my work," she says. "I work
harder than anyone I know: I'm prepared and I'm never late and I give myself entirely to
the work of the moment." That is the legacy of her British training: "it was a
meritocracy, pure and simple." But a decade on this side of the ocean has taught her
the raw truths of the American system. "It is unarguably the case," she says
with a half-smile, "that this is not a meritocracy. Many, many things will
help you to simply survive, and to have any kind of professional life. One of them is
talent. One of them. There are many other things: understanding what is important to do
when, understanding the role of public relations, understanding the role of your personal
appearance, understanding the role of your friendships. And it goes on and on and on. And
if you do not learn this, you can be Charles Laughton and you will sink without a
trace." How long did it take for Nelligan to get it? "Years. I have stories that
would turn your hair. You can't imagine the things that are said to you. The thing you
have to remember is that it's not personal. I would rather not have learned these things.
But had I not learned them, I would no longer be an actor."
With all this struggle, has her career made Kate Nelligan happy?
"No. I am happy, but it's not because of my career. I'm happy because my life
works, because my head is screwed on, and friends' heads are screwed on and my husband's
head is screwed on. And we have a rational, honest kind of life." Last year, she went
back to England to do a film for the BBC with her longtime friend John Malkovitch.
"While I was there I went to the National Theatre to see Dancing at Lughnasa. I
hadn't been in that building since the night I had left the last performance of Plenty--11
years had elapsed. And I went to pay for my ticket-and they went to get everybody who'd
been there when I was there, and I went backstage to talk to everybody I'd known. I was in
tears-the experience of being remembered for your work, for the years you've put into a
profession!"
Yet at that moment--or at any time before or since-has she never
regretted the choice she has made to leave? "Never," she says emphatically.
"Look, you compete at the races. You don't stay in the paddock; you get out there and
go to the races. I never want to wake up one day and realize that I didn't have the guts
to compete."
For the moment, of course, Nelligan has to sit out the races; her baby
is due in July, and Hollywood is notoriously skittish about pregnant actresses. Her best
hope is that the momentum from Frankie and Johnny and The Prince of Tides
can be nurtured and sustained until the fall. "I really feel that I know what I'm
doing now. I know that I can do it and so do other people--I don't need to convince them
so much of that anymore. Now I'm trying to make a living. I'm trying to have a life, all
the while being in this odd position of being a revered talent and being unemployed."
She pauses. "But I'm happy."
And she laughs..
