Linney adroit at being able to transform roles
On-screen, Laura Linney rarely enjoys the more obviously transformative roles that so many actresses clamor for – the kinds that require wigs or prostheses or bulletproof bracelets.
She’s the nameless prosecutor, the cool FBI supervisor, the long-suffering wife, but never Marie Antoinette, Virginia Woolf or Wonder Woman. And in “The Savages,” now open in limited release, she’s a lowercase being again, an emotionally immature daughter trying to find a nursing home for her estranged father.
But even though Linney’s characters tend to show up for grunt duty in the real world rather than blaze a path through it, they’re transformative in other, equally powerful ways. Story details that may sit indifferently on the page become – in Linney’s hands – defining moments. In her subtly transcendental way, Linney embodies Thoreau’s “quiet lives of desperation.”
Her subtleties are hard to capture in words, but on-screen they’re writ large. Listen to her tremulous cadence as Sammy Prescott – the tightly wound single mother having an extramarital affair in 2000’s “You Can Count on Me” – as she asks her priest: “What is the church’s official position on fornication and adultery?” And as the soon-to-be-divorced Joan Berkman in 2005’s “The Squid and the Whale,” there’s her flustered but determined sense of purpose as she stashes her favorite books under her son’s bed, determined her husband won’t take away those aspects of her identity.
Asked about her methods, Linney seems to default to a familiar playbook in her answers. It’s a matter of researching the characters, she says, then being improvisationally available to her fellow performers, no matter what they do.
“You don’t know where it’s going to go,” says Linney, 43. “You have no idea. And that’s exciting and that’s fun.”
Linney, her associates agree, delights in the acting process with an academic, almost Talmudic intensity. This is hardly surprising, given her background. Daughter of prominent playwright Romulus Linney, she was the hardest-working student in her Juilliard class, according to former teacher Michael Kahn. (“She wasn’t always the flashiest but I think she absorbed and profited the most.”) And even now, she carries recordings of acting guru Michael Chekhov on her iPod, ready to access anytime, even handing over the ear buds to a reporter, encouraging a listen.
The theater “taught me much of what I believe. My belief system. It taught me about problem solving and honesty and discipline and creativity and imagination. About true and false. It taught me all the things that I hold really dear,” Linney says.
Linney, whose parents were divorced when she was an infant, was raised in Manhattan by her mother, a nurse, who always told her “to never be afraid to be myself. As hokey as that sounds, it’s slogans like that that do give you a bit of a backbone.”
Her father was always available for dramaturgical consultation during her college years. “I could call him on the phone and say, ‘I do not understand Ibsen.’ And I would get these gorgeous, fantastic lectures on the other side of the phone.”
After graduating from Juilliard, Linney assumed she’d work an apprenticeship in the sticks before returning, one triumphant day, to New York. But when she was offered the role of understudy for Tess in John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation” on Broadway, she stayed in her home town. And after getting minor parts in 1992’s “Lorenzo’s Oil” and 1993’s “Dave,” Linney realized a film career – particularly the sort of character-driven indie movies built around performance – was possible, too.
“It’s been very strange that film has become such a big part of my life,” Linney says. “Because that is time I thought I’d be spending in the theater.”
Whether on the stage or the screen, one part of the acting craft Linney often returns to in the interview is the crucial nature of “connection,” the process of give-and-take between performers.
“There’s a connection made when you’re working in the arts, as an actor, dancer or musician,” Linney says. “When you’re interdependent on one another, you become close in a way that you don’t in any other profession. You just don’t. You rely on each other and you’re vulnerable with each other. You’re kind to each other and you’re harsh.”
And the secret to this connection? “Simple. Just listening to each other, because, if you’re truly listening, any decision you make is the right one. You usually get about 10 seconds of this feeling, if you’re lucky,” she says. “But the moment you think about how connected you are, you’re not.”
Linney is often categorized as an actor’s actor. Respected, revered within the trade. And yet her many awards don’t include an Oscar, though she’s been nominated twice (for “You Can Count on Me” and “Kinsey”) and has two Emmys. Perhaps she’ll get to grip that golden statuette if she ever chooses to work from the outward in, rather than the inside out. That would mean considering those exclamation point roles – an alcoholic, perhaps? Or a prostitute. Or anyone in a big, flowing gown.
Source: Washington Post
