Movies

Mary Steenburgen can be quite contrary. Really, she can

In new locally shot movie, actress known for her vulnerability plays wicked

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER
Saturday, May 13, 2006

We tend to think of actress Mary Steenburgen as pink-cheeked and wholesome, her winsome girl-next-door smile and blushing Southern manner completing an aura of scandalous adorableness. We consider her in Jonathan Demme's "Melvin and Howard," Woody Allen's "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" or Ron Howard's "Parenthood" and see a fragile porcelain bird — twittery, high-pitched, fine-boned, breakable.

"We" can mean you or me. Or this fellow, who spots Steenburgen on the treadmill at the gym in a tony Austin hotel. He opens his mouth and says, "You're the one who plays straight women, right?"

Steenburgen, in town recently shooting the feature "Elvis and Anabelle," has no idea how to answer this. Instead, her mind leaps to the fact that she and Alicia Silverstone played lesbians last winter in the David Mamet play "Boston Marriage."

"Straight" — what could this mean?

"It means he probably saw 'Ragtime' or 'Cross Creek,' but he didn't see 'Miss Firecracker' or 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape,' " says Steenburgen, sitting in the cafe of said hotel. She wears a forest-green denim Izod jacket (the little alligator still looks hungry) over a floral spring dress. She places a black Prada backsack on the floor. (Too bad she declines to be photographed — her "hair and makeup" guru isn't on hand — because she is heart-stopping.)

People watch some of her 50-plus films and think they know the Steenburgen style, she grouses, softly. But there isn't a Steenburgen style.

"I think that's why I only see my movies once," she says in that girlish, sometimes cracking, sometimes laughing voice. "I don't want to know my screen persona. There's no constant thread."

Still, flipping through Steenburgen's performances summons reductive, pre-cooked ideas about what kind of actress she is. Let's free-associate adjectivally: sweet, offbeat, ditzy, jumpy, vulnerable. She is one of those yeoman actors everybody recognizes — oh, her — because she's worked for seemingly ever. At a beaming 53, she is all over, a classic.

"Hopefully what I've avoided is being put in a box," says Steenburgen, who lives in Southern California with husband Ted Danson and their children from previous marriages. (Steenburgen was married to Malcolm McDowell for 10 years.) "Some people think I have (been put in a box), but I haven't. One would only think that by looking at one or two of my films."

She suggests we revisit roles in which she plays self-absorbed and condescending ("Miss Firecracker") or wantonly adulterous ("Gilbert Grape"). Or, better, that we see her as Marienne Hotchkiss in the uplifting dramedy "Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School," which co-stars Robert Carlyle, Marisa Tomei, Danny DeVito and native Austinite Rachel Winfree. (It ran for only one week in Austin in April.)

She plays the head of the titular school, a "bizarre character" into which the actress sunk her (spotless, perfectly aligned) teeth. In the "very odd, very sweet" movie, Steenburgen dances with Donnie Wahlberg. This required her to take a dancing crash-course, even if she did win the cha-cha championship at charm school in her native Arkansas when she was 13.

Then she points to her role as a destructively domineering pageant mother in "Elvis and Anabelle," the Burnt Orange Production filming in Austin. Co-starring Max Minghella and Blake Lively in the young title roles and Joe Mantegna as a hunchback mortician, the fairy tale romance by writer-director Will Geiger allows Steenburgen to untie her inner "wicked queen," she says.

Steenburgen feeds on the craft, not the fame. She is the odd celebrity harboring "actual physical fears" of crowds and a constitutional dread of the spotlight. When she won the best supporting actress Oscar for "Melvin and Howard" in 1981, she fled Hollywood and didn't work for more than two years.

She thrives on the chameleonic demands of acting, the constant transformations that mean there are no constants. She is not "the one who plays straight women." She's the one who plays straight women, crooked women, hurt women, feisty, lustful women. She contains multitudes, each one a slice of herself ready to be coaxed into the open.

"Each character I play is certainly me, a part of me," Steenburgen says. "So in the course of playing them, I have to look at all kinds of scary truths about me, some of which I probably never, ever would have looked at.

"I have a visual for it. You know those Chinese cabinets with lots of little drawers? That's me. There are thousands of drawers, and every time I go to play somebody, I open a combination of drawers. I take out what's inside and say, 'That's me.' "