Source : Toronto Star
Date : 1999 / 04 / 02
Loving the dead brings career to life
Dewey-eyed Molly Parker played a dreamy embalmer
who had sex with dead white males in her first starring movie role, and
her career took off, but not as she imagined.
All then then Vancouver-based Parker hoped for when
that movie, Kissed, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 1996
was that producers and directors in Toronto would offer her parts.
Some did.
Director Bruce McDonald and his long-time collaborator
Don McKellar, for example, saw comedic possibilities in Parker. They
cast her as McKellar's love interest in their offbeat six-part TV series,
Twitch City, which CBC aired last spring.
She moved to Toronto, but in the past two years
has spent. by her reckoning, only a total of 74 days in the city.
She's now back here, filming the seven additional episodes CBC will broadcast
next season. Her character will have a meatier role.
Meanwhile, Kissed took on a life of its own,
playing to generally good reviews around the world. And the mighty
William Morris Agency snapped up Parker as a promising talent.
Parker most recently filmed four movies in a row
- in Budapest, London, the United States and Toronto. All of them
are due to premiere this year.
Hungarian director Istvan Szabo, an award winner
at the Oscars and the Cannes Film Festival, chose her to play the wife
of Ralph Fiennes in A Taste of Sunshine, filmed in Budapest.
It's a sweeping drama about three generations of
a Jewish family which takes place in the decades before the Holocaust.
Fiennes has three roles the grandfather, father and son.
In the middle of section, Fiennes is a champion
Olympic fencer unconcerned about the Nazi's rise to power. Parker
is his intelligent, supportive wife and mother of their young son.
She warns him of the escalating threat and urges him to let the family
flee to Hungary, to no avail.
A Taste of Sunshine, produced by Toronto's
Robert Lantos and Alliance Atlantis, is rumoured to be in serious consideration
as an entry in the official competition at the Cannes festival next month.
For Parker, the biggest thrill was working for Szabo,
whose award-winning films include Mephisto and Colonel Redl.
"Without insulting other directors I've worked for,
which I don't want this to sound like," she says, "working with Istvan
was like I've never been directed directed before.
"We would go out for dinner many nights after shooting
and he taught me about being simple on camera; that's something an actor
needs to know. And he taught me about European and Jewish history
over 100 years."
Two of Parker's other movies, also dramas, are strongly
rumoured for premieres at either, or both, the Cannes and Toronto film
festivals.
They are British director Michael Winterbottom's
Wonderland and Toronto director Jeremy Podswa's The Five Senses.
Wonderland focuses on a shattering weekend
in the life of three working-class sisters (one played by Parker) in south
London, where the film was shot.
Wonderland, Parker, reports, had an improvised
script, was shot with a documentary look by an unusually small crew of
10 "and there was no makeup or special hair on the actors."
Secrecy blankets the plot of The Five Senses
(also from Alliance Atlantis). In the American drama Waking the
Dead, set for released Oct. 14, Parker plays the political girlfriend
of co-star Billy Crudup. His character wants to be a U.S. Senator.
It takes place in the 1980s when the politicians were only slightly less
suspect than now.
Parker returned to Twitch City "because the
scripts were so amazing. It's dark and funny and I'm the straight
woman."
She has not appeared on television since completing
the first six episodes and, she says "I'm not interested in doing television
right now. Most of my work is subtle, not huge like TV situation
comedy demands.
"But Twitch City gives me the freedom to
be so silly, to be such a geek. I was terrified before doing the
first six because I'd never done comedy and was unsure how to do it.
Now I feel confident. Don wrote the next seven with me in mind.
And for the six weeks of filming I can go home and sleep in my own bed."
The movies she and her agents in Los Angeles, New
York and London have selected for her "all have really good scripts," she
adds.
"My American agents are awfully respectful of what
I do.
"I'm not interested in taking everything I'm offered,
and that's been a lot, or in becoming the next hot thing because that doesn't
last."
Parker plans to rest at home for a spell before
taking on another movie.
And she marvels, "What happened to me because of
Kissed still blows my mind."
- Sid Adilman
Eye on Entertainment
