TV Guide
February 14, 1987
"WHEN KATE NELLIGAN GOES TO WORK, EXPECT…PASSION!"
The Canadian actress seems to take on one strong role after another.
By Andrea Lee*
It's always best if a writer whose job includes interviewing actors
has little interest in psychology. Confronted with egos often convoluted and fragile, with
heart-rending stories about the way to the top, and Maw and Paw abandoned in Texas, an
interviewer may be tempted to adopt the jovial, probing tone of a therapist on Central
Park West. It 's a mistake on several counts, mainly because the writer doesn't get paid
the going rate for a 55-minute hour in Manhattan. Sometimes, however, the most hard-boiled
interviewer encounters a subject who forces him or her to work as hard as any psychologist
does to discern a bit of personal information in a thicket of what might politely be
called evasive tactics. Such a subject is actress Kate Nelligan, in Rome on the set of
"Control," her new television movie for HBO.
Star of screen, stage and television in England and America, a 35-year-old Canadian
actress with a reputation for uncompromising high quality, Nelligan doesn't want to talk
about herself. The only thing she talks about willingly, volubly, as she perches on the
front steps of Cinecitta's Studio 8, is basketball. "You're from Philadelphia?"
she asks me. "Philly! The Sixers! Julius!" For my benefit, she runs over the
high points of Julius Erving's career, and then proceeds to the slam-dunk competitions of
the last three years, all this with a manic grin worthy of a high-school class clown.
Indeed, she has just finished giving me--as a loosen-up gesture toward a poor humorless
writer--the zany rumpling with the knuckles that some high-schoolers call a Dutch rub, and
others call a noogie. Perhaps it was intended as a placating move: Nelligan, who clearly
does not want to do the interview she agreed to do, has kept me standing around for hours
while she laughed and chatted with cast and crew members during breaks, assuring me that
she was too busy to talk. When she finally joined me, she chose these front steps,
apparently for their lack of privacy: they are 2 yards from a parking lot where easygoing
Roman truck drivers shout to each other and gun their motors deafeningly. All during our
conversation, Nelligan exchanges merry greetings with them, and with anybody who happens
to pass by even a stray dog. ("A publicity hound! Get it?" she says.) It's a
relief, at least, that she does not have one of those prefab personality profiles that
some actors bestow like calling cards on the press. But she is not about to let me see
very much of Kate Nelligan. "I talk about basketball all the time in
interviews," she says, looking at me brightly. She is in costume for her role as
Sarah Howell, an English disarmament activist and one of an international group of
volunteers who agree, as an experiment, to live for 20 days in a nuclear fallout shelter
in West Germany. She looks right for the part: face handsome, intense, without makeup,
below a short thatch of light brown hair; a sweat shirt that reads "Women for
Peace" over a dowdy flowered skirt. "It pays off," she continues.
"When I go to see a game, I get to meet a lot of my heroes. I have season tickets for
Philly, and season tickets for the Knicks. This is a very serious obsession. I mean--you
see 10 guys running up and down in their underwear. Tell me how it can't be an
obsession!"
Perhaps it is the atmosphere of the set that has her keyed up like
this. After five minutes spent in the mercilessly accurate re-creation of a contemporary
bomb shelter where most of "Control" takes place, I myself feel about as cheery
and outgoing as the Phantom of the Opera. "Control" is what publicists call a
"timely- drama," a sort of antinuclear "No Exit," in which a group of
Europeans and Americans headed by scientist Dr. Herbert Monroe (Burt Lancaster) explores
the realities of life underground. The conclusion, after '80s political discussion meets
World War II-style bunker drama, is, not surprisingly, that such an existence is agony,
and that it would be healthier all around not to have nuclear war. The 15 actors who play
the subjects of the experiment—The cast is international and high quality, including
Eriand Josephson, Andrea Ferreol and Ben Gazzara- have for five weeks been condemned to
spend nearly every waking moment in a stifling sound stage crammed with the drab bunk
beds, ventilation pipes and just-in-case anti-radiation showers typical of real fallout
shelters in Europe. To complicate things further, although the script is in English (by
Brian Moore and Jeremy Hole), Italian director Giuliano Montaldo speaks next to no
English.
"It's the strangest movie," says Nelligan, who, on the studio
steps, has finally decided to talk about something other than sports."It's certainly
been more stressful than anything I've encountered, anywhere. I know now I could never
live in a fallout shelter. If I were faced with that choice, I'd be willing to buy a gun
and shoot myself."
Her voice is resolute, and her face has the set of features that one
associates with a natural heroine. People who attempt to describe Nelligan usually fall
back on the word "passion"; a glance over her past triumphs confirms her
reputation as an actress whose forte is strong roles. There is Eleni, the heroic Greek
mother in the 1985 film of the same name; in theater, there is Josie Hogan in O'Neill's
"A Moon for the Misbegotten," and, above all, Susan Traherne in the London and
Broadway productions of David Hare's acclaimed "Plenty." "She radiates
something, a kind of magic," says executive producer Denis Heroux, who initially
pushed for casting Nelligan in "Control." "I felt that Kate could combine a
human point of view with a kind of passion. You see this on the set. She is very tough on
herself, and asks the same of the other actors. But when she laughs, she laughs with all
her heart."
Nelligan's character in "Control," Sarah Howell, was
envisioned as a focal point for the group in the shelter. "She's a middle-class,
liberal Englishwoman, and she's truly, deeply, nice; that's the thing about these
women," says Nelligan. "It's interesting to see a deeply English character
surrounded by people who aren't; she reacts as nice English people react to foreigners,
which is basically to think that they're from Mars."
Nelligan had somewhat of a reversal of the same experience when she
left her native Canada at the age of 18 to study at the Central School of Speech and Drama
in England. Born into a Catholic working-class family in London, Ontario, Nelligan was a
child programmed for achievement in an environment strained by her mother's alcoholism.
There were dance lessons, coaching in track and field, and in tennis. By early
adolescence, Nelligan was touring with the Canadian tennis team with an eye toward
becoming a professional. Then, at 16, she escaped the intense atmosphere at home by going
off to York University's Glendon College in Toronto. There she discovered drama, another
form of escape. of which she said in a 1982 interview: "It was a way of handling
feelings that didn't have direct consequences in one's own life." And after that, she
went off to London, England, the setting of her first stage successes, where she decided
that if she wanted to work in English theater, she would have to shed her Canadian
identity and accent and become English.
It was a choice that seems in keeping with the idea of escape, and also
with Nelligan's extreme resistance to revealing herself. And it was not without its
emotional toll. "I studied in England for three years, and I worked there for
eight," she says. "I lost my accent to the extent that when I came home to my
family for Christmas, I couldn't speak like they spoke. I spoke like the Queen of
England." Her voice tightens. "It was hard for my family, hard for me. But I had
to do it.... Everyone thought I was English. The people who worked with me never, ever
knew. Then I came to New York-I live there now-and everyone asked me: 'Why are you talking
like that?' It took a year for me to get my own speech back."
Her accent now, I observe, is almost aggressively North American,
verging sometimes (as when she talks about basketball) on self-parody. She interrupts
herself when a little boy comes up. It is Dean Magri, the 10-year-old actor who plays
Sarah's son Jamie in "Control." "Come on, it's an interview," says
Nelligan. "How would you describe Kate Nelligan?" Dean looks reflective,
then says: "A giggler. A nice person." "Your mother," says Kate,
laughing.
Several of the tough-minded heroines that Nelligan has played are also
mothers; it is clear that she has a particular, intimate rapport with children.
(Unmarried, she has none of her own, and won't talk about this part of her private life,
but it seems likely that this affinity has its roots in her situation as the second
daughter in a large family.) "It's wrong to say that all children are natural
actors," she remarks now. "It's the last thing they're consciously 'good' at.
What they do is tell the truth, and tell the truth in a way that isn't direct, which
happens to be what acting is. Kids keep you honest. They never lie. It's also why
it's difficult for them to work. They think they have to act, and they're encouraged to
think that acting is lying, and what's wonderful is when you find a kid like this
one"-she gestures at Dean---"inventive. Intelligent ... and you can actually
tell him: 'No acting, please'."
Two days later, Nelligan, Dean, a driver named Mauro and I are in a car
returning from Cinecitta into the center of Rome. In the car, she fills the conversation
with as much distraction and laughter as possible. "Describe Kate Nelligan,
Mauro!" she says to the driver. Mauro hesitates. "A completely different type of
person," he says, finally.
Eventually the actress relaxes, and begins to talk about life in
America. She has lived in the United States since 1981. After a disastrous 10 months in
Hollywood, where Nelligan's image and classical British stage training just didn't fit in,
she moved to New York, where she quickly established her reputation in the United States
with highly praised performances in the film "Without a Trace" and Joseph Papp's
stage production of "Plenty." "I've become an American actor,"
Nelligan says with the odd forcefulness with which she earlier described
"becoming" an English actor, as if she is determined to be anything but
Canadian. "Life is definitely tougher for an actor in the States," she goes on.
"in England, it's not about being a star, it's about being a working actor. In
America, you're either at the top, or at the bottom. Where am I? I truly, truly don't
know. My name is not a household name. Oh, my God, I know that."
Nelligan pauses for a minute, as the car rolls through the garish
modern shopping districts on the outskirts of Rome. Then she begins to talk about the
growing political and cultural conservatism of her new home, the United States. She talks
vehemently, in a tone that suggests a natural tendency to chafe at the established order.
She says that acting in "Control" awakened her consciousness about nuclear
energy, nuclear war: "Before I did this, I had stronger feelings about other issues.
Racial politics, sexual politics, are far closer to my world, to my life."
For an instant, as at few other instants during my time with her, I feel that I have
had a glimpse behind her defensive laughter. In the next moment, she is swapping jokes
with Dean Magri. I ask what she was like at his age, and she says: "Not like Dean.
He's very confident. I was ... not confident." As we move into the green environs of
Via Veneto, where the company is going to do some of the few outdoor shots that will be
used in "Control," Nelligan begins to talk about her family in Canada. Asked if
any of them are interested in acting, she says: "Oh, gosh, no. I think they think I'm
crazy. They are proud of me, but they see how difficult the life is, and how I'm
constantly moving and working too hard-and you know for them-they want to stay home
and..." She stops, and looks out at the chaos of Rome's midday traffic. "They
are doing what they want to do," she says, in a voice that sounds as if she's trying
to convince someone. "They want to have families--they hate traveling--it's so
extraordinary that we have such different tastes. I don't know . . ." she says, and
pauses, looking out of the window. Watching her, I once again feel that I am being allowed
a glimpse inside the barricades that Nelligan puts around her real thoughts;
fortifications that rival those of the fallout shelter in "Control" "I was
always," she says softly, "not going to stay home."
* Footnote regarding the author of this piece: As I have
assembled this site I have solicited the advice and criticism of a friend who is a former
card-carrying member of the academic world. Here is what she had to say about Andrea Lee:
"I was impressed with this writer and would prefer her name credit at the beginning
rather than at the end. If you do this, you give the reader knowledge of gender point of
view. This Andrea Lee is not only patient, highly intelligent, but she is able to
subjugate her own ego when in pursuit of a cogent and meaningful interview with a
difficult subject. I intend to quote her ideas re: the role of writer when interviewing a
maddeningly recalcitrant subject when I provide some of my more impatient and volatile
journalist friends with some thoughts for the day."
