Big-screen greats love Laura Linney, writes Barbara Ellen
KEY POINTS:
There are those people in the public eye who like to pretend they are "private" and there are those who really are, such as Laura Linney. Maybe it comes down to the fact that, after a lengthy career as an acclaimed Juilliard-trained New York theatre actress, Linney came to movies relatively late - international stardom later still. Her breakthrough film was Kenneth Lonergan's 2000 hit, You Can Count on Me, a dry, beautifully observed drama for which Linney was deservedly Oscar-nominated as Mark Ruffalo's uptight sister.
Since then, Linney has somewhat cornered the market in tense, textured blondes - seemingly unglamorous, delicate as china but with eyes that spit fire, ice and everything in between. Of men who've heard of Linney, it is difficult to find one who isn't wild for her. Clint Eastwood is a long-time fan, as is Richard Gere: both cast Linney in their movies (Eastwood in Absolute Power and Mystic River and Gere in Primal Fear) before she hit big.
You can see why they rated her: Linney has one of those deceptively bare faces - classically beautiful - that can switch through emotions (harassed, soft, hurt, reflective) as easily as a child's flick-book. She also exudes a patrician quality, in common with other stage-reared thoroughbreds such as Joan Allen and Meryl Streep (Linney cites Jessica Tandy, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith as major influences).
All of which could explain why, in person, Linney often radiates a kind of coiled tightness and a primness that lends itself to long pauses and agonisingly careful answers.
Linney rarely does interviews and hates having her photo taken. As she says of herself at one point during our conversation: "I don't think I'm exactly gregarious, you know. I'm not usually known as the loud person in the room."
When she shies away from the more personal questions is it just because she thinks people have no right to be so damn nosy.
"There have been times when I'm incredibly awkward and uncomfortable," she says. "When I ask myself, 'What am I doing here?'. But as I see it, it's your right to ask and my right to respond how I feel it's best to respond. The good thing is that I'm always honest."
All that said, at other times, Linney, 43, is warm and friendly, with exquisite manners.
We're here to talk about her latest film, The Savages, a blackly humorous family drama. Directed by Tamara Jenkins, it stars Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a brother and sister who have to care for their father (Philip Bosco) who didn't treat them well as children, but who is now dying from dementia. Linney's character is a frustrated playwright, constantly bickering with her father and brother, and emerging as something of an irritating, self-absorbed fantasist.
Linney tells me she loved the script and jumped at the chance to work with Hoffman.
"We're both theatre people, we both grew up in New York and we're both story-first people. We had a lot of fun." Linney's character is difficult, prickly, even unlikeable at times; are these complicated women becoming her forte?
"I don't know," says Linney, looking puzzled. "Although I'm definitely capable of doing that." She pauses for a moment. It's odd sometimes, she explains, to realise the ways people perceive her in the public eye.
Laura Leggett Linney was born in New York in 1964. Her mother Ann, a cancer nurse, and father Romulus, a respected playwright and professor, separated when she was small and her mother's long shifts meant that Linney had a fair amount of "alone" time.
Her earliest memories revolved around being a "theatre rat". "When your father is in the theatre, it's everything and everywhere, from the songs you sing as a little kid to where you spend your downtime." What was Linney like then? "As a kid, curious, articulate, vivacious, but also cautious.
"It's amazing when you're old enough to get some perspective: you see how being alone, all that fantasy thinking, turned out to be helpful, the earliest training I had. I had a good imagination and I still have one; a child-like imagination that hasn't gone away."
Although Linney was drawn to theatre "like a homing pigeon", she first became a teacher for deaf and autistic children but soon realised she was unsuitable. "Working with special needs children is hard," she says, ruefully. "I'd love to say I could be one of those people who could do that for a lifetime. But I realised I couldn't."
Linney studied theatre at Juilliard, where she met her first husband, actor David Adkins (they divorced in 2000). After conquering horrific stage fright, there were the routine humiliations for a young actress. At one audition, for a cook-in-sauce ad, Linney was obliged to dance around the room like a chicken. She laughs: "It was, [in a haughty tone] 'I didn't go to Juilliard to dance around the room like a chicken'. But I did it."
It wasn't long before Linney was garnering recognition and awards on the New York stage. Screen roles came less easily to her, or perhaps it was that Linney came less easily to them.
She says initially she was so intimidated by film and television she was relieved to "find her feet" in small parts. And small they were: in one of her first films, Dave, she played a woman lying underneath the president as he suffers a stroke in bed.
Was there an element of snobbery - the New York theatre queen reluctant to sully her craft? Linney shakes her head. "I never had a snob factor. It was more, 'What do I know about film or television; I don't belong there'."
Coming from the theatre, how does she feel about the general quality of female roles in movies? Linney's "fake wife" opposite Jim Carrey in The Truman Show was, ironically, more textured and "real" than a lot of the wives or girlfriend roles Hollywood throws up. Linney is silent for a long beat. "It is a little empty," she says eventually. "Not to mention a waste of a great resource."
Linney feels that Hollywood has always been hard on women. "And it will continue to be hard on women. How much they choose to participate is a whole other issue.
"Actresses like me have to be careful not to get distracted by this stuff. It's not who I am and it's not who I ever wanted to be. I have to keep my belief and my faith about what's important."
Linney shifts a bit in her seat. Normally, she says, she never thinks much about these things - it's generally journalists and the media who make her think about ageing. "The subtext seems to be: 'You're 40. Be afraid!' Many high-profile actresses complain that they get to a certain age and there are no roles. There's some truth to that," she says. "But I don't think the answer is to be afraid, give up, surrender to it. I mean, go do a play, do a radio play. You're not going to be an ingenue forever."
Linney pauses. "It's hard for me to say because I'm in such a privileged position. There are so many women out there who don't get to work, who put in just as much effort and have such a rough time. No one is going to be an A-list movie star and make millions of dollars forever, you're just not. But," she adds, "it's also about the fact that I think we're lucky we got to be 40. There are so many people out there who die way too young, so all of this, 'Boo hoo, we're getting older!' I'm like, 'Well, there is an alternative'."
LOWDOWN
Who: Laura Linney
Born: February 5, 1964, New York
Key roles: Tales of the City (TV, 1993), Primal Fear (1996), Absolute Power (1997), The Truman Show (1998), You Can Count on Me (2000), The Mothman Prophecies (2002), The Life of David Gale (2003), Mystic River (2003), Love Actually (2003), Kinsey (2004), The Squid and the Whale (2005), Jindabyne (2006), Breach (2007).
Latest: The Savages screens at the Academy Cinema as part of the Auckland International Film Festival on Tuesday, 11am and Wednesday 8:30pm.
- OBSERVER
