Published July 5
- 11, 2000 - the Village Voice
One Woman in Her
Time Played Many Parts
Nancy Marchand, 1928 - 2000
by Michael Feingold
The headlines,
of course, said that Livia Soprano was dead; the obituaries that ran
below spent much of their space pondering how her loss would alter the
tangled plot of the HBO series preparing to enter its third season.
The inevitable fantasies were spun: of flashbacks, of material shot
and waiting to be used, of new footage with stand-ins and voice-overs.
Among the mawkish, misspelled, heartfelt condolence e-mails piling up
on the message board at the official Sopranos Web site, one fan
wrote, "My heart goes out to the writers." And a surprising number came
from Italian Americans who identified Nancy Marchand with their own
mothers or grandmothers, sending prayers, poems, blessings, and farewell
messages like "Ciao, Nonna."
Despite what
cynics may say about Americans' cultural amnesia, however, the passionate
fans probably spoke for viewers in general when they drew a clear distinction,
in Marchand's case, between the performer and the role. Livia Soprano
had become an icon to them, but they knew, by and large, that Nancy
Marchand was not Livia Soprano. Most obviously, they knew because so
many of them had first encountered her as Lou Grant's Mrs. Pynchon,
a forceful, maternal figure as different from Livia as Livia was from
the Nancy Marchand her theater colleagues knew and loved. And Mrs. Pynchon,
through Nancy's incisiveness and magnetism, had captured the public
imagination to the same extent as Livia; even collective amnesia can't
wash away, without considerable effort, a performance popular enough
to win the Emmy four out of five seasons running.
In addition
to Mrs. Pynchon, Marchand's video fans were aware of the flurry of movies
she'd made in the early '90s: Sabrina was frequently mentioned,
and one e-mailer celebrated the surprise of seeing a "younger" Nancy
turn up in 1988's The Naked Gun. How would he have reacted, one
wonders, to the sight of a truly young Nancy, fidgety and wistful, opposite
Rod Steiger in the original 1953 TV version of Paddy Chayefsky's
Marty? Only now, looking back across a career that spanned half
a century, can we realize that Nancy Marchand accomplished one of the
near-impossible feats of American acting: She made even the technological
media, home of typecasting, perceive her as a repertory actress, cutting
across class and ethnic lines as easily as she traversed the generations.
That the viewers,
and her TV colleagues, responded to this approach may be the best praise
our videocentric civilization will ever get. It made reporting her death,
in effect, a challenge that entertainment-news journalists handled honorably
for the most part: They acknowledged her theater career and noted the
names of her movies; readers and televiewers in a remarkably large number
of cities were informed that Marchand had won two Obies. (One Jersey
paper called her "star of stage and Sopranos.") The L.A. Times,
home paper of a city not famous for its obsession with theater, went
so far as to include her Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards.
Ironically, the only print media to confine Nancy's career to her TV
roles were our own New York Post and Entertainment Weekly.
And only Marvin Kitman, in his Newsday tribute, committed, albeit
gracefully, the solecism of confusing actress and role: "I don't want
to speak ill of the dead," he wrote, recounting Livia's outrageous acts
of malice as if they had been committed by Nancy in real life.
That life,
as most theatergoing New Yorkers know, was one in which the outrageous
acts were acts of artistic risk and artistic clarity, committed onstage
out of a wholehearted passion for the theater. Majestically tall, long-boned,
and elegant of profile, Nancy was an actress for whom no role that interested
her was beyond accessibility; technique merely meant a readiness to
find the part of herself available for any such role; and the only reason
to demand more was that you weren't being used by the theater to your
fullest extent. She belonged to the post-World War II generation that
vitalized the early Off-Broadway movement. Her 47-year marriage to the
actor Paul Sparer, who died last November, ran on an overlapping track
with her artistic career. They were among the founders of the APA Repertory
Company, where I first saw Nancy, playing everything from Lady Sneerwell
to a low-down procuress—a range so extensive that I was never startled,
later on, by her revelatory capacity. (When she played Ann Whitefield,
in Man and Superman, Rosemary Harris played Violet; in later
performances they exchanged roles.)
By that time,
she had already won her first Obie, for creating the role of Madame
Irma in the New York premiere of Genet's The Balcony, establishing
the niche of "imperious" roles in which the typecasters would like to
leave her. But even imperiousness has its nuances, and Madame Irma is
a long way from the ironclad, alcoholic mother in Gurney's The Cocktail
Hour (her second Obie, three decades later); Bessie Berger in Awake
and Sing!; or Christopher Durang's Sister Mary Ignatius. And there
was nothing "imperious" about the work for which she was probably most
loved by Broadway audiences—the fluttery, scatterbrained matron of Morning's
at Seven. She had the great artist's gift for letting the opposite
quality seep into her most decisive choices. I am probably one of the
few people who remember seeing her, in Chicago, make a rare venture
into musical theater as the soigné, hardheaded Vera of Pal Joey;
she's the only performer, out of hundreds, whom I've ever heard sing
"Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" as if she actually were all those
things, making the worn-out old song fresh and dramatic.
Typically,
when I told her this years later, she brushed it off. Unassuming, as
well as insecure in many ways, she thought she "couldn't" sing, just
as she thought she couldn't pronounce foreign languages. I was directing
her at the time, in a short play in which she had to speak a few lines
in French. I wrote them out phonetically; she spoke them with such assurance
that friends visiting from Paris asked me if it was her native tongue.
(This rehearsal exchange should show how easy it was to direct her:
"Nancy, I need you to cry during this speech." "All right. Would you
like that at the beginning of the speech or near the end?" The tears,
arriving on cue, always seemed real and unbidden.)
Two juxtapositions
sum up Nancy's range: the Lincoln Center season in which she played
Dol Common in Jonson's Alchemist and Queen Elizabeth in Schiller's
Mary Stuart; the two segments of Jon Robin Baitz's End of
the Day, in which her roles were a dotty English aristocrat akin
to Bea Lillie's madder caricatures, and a tough, no-nonsense California
nurse. In the latter role, hands on haunches, staring voraciously, she
seemed to bulk twice as large. When I asked her later how she had made
her elegant hands seem so big and meaty, she grinned and said airily,
"That's acting."
It was like
her to say something fast and funny. Sharply observant and devoid of
vanity herself, she always had a clean needle ready for the pretensions
of others, and her timing, offstage as on, was unerring. A guest presenter
the one year the Obie Awards were broadcast on WNET, she finished her
stint by turning to the camera and saying, "I think we should thank
PBS for putting so many American actors on the air—for a change." She
had no shame about it because she had no fantasies about a television
career. Her stardom came, ironically, despite her basic lack of regard
for the medium. For her it merely meant financial security at home and
a wider audience for her artistry. Far from tempting her to trade the
Upper West Side for the West Coast, Lou Grant's thunderous success
barely prevented her from dashing out, as she sometimes did, in her
housecoat and mules to pick up a few groceries.
The columnists
and condolence-senders who praised her bravery in continuing to work
on The Sopranos after she was diagnosed with lung cancer didn't
know the half of it. Her cancer had been diagnosed, and treated, long
before the series was on the drawing boards. Apart from the irresistible
temptation of a great role, her main reason for taking it was that chemotherapy
had impaired her ability to remember lines. She struggled painfully
with this as Lady Bracknell in the Irish Rep's Importance of Being
Earnest, and abandoned her next project, a tour of the one-woman
show Full Gallop. I imagine it is the only thing she ever gave
up on; only a life-threatening medical crisis could have made Nancy
Marchand give up.
Nor did she
see any reason to conceal her condition, which as well as cancer included
chronic pulmonary obstruction: She's said to have arrived at the gala
screening to inaugurate the second season of The Sopranos wearing
an oxygen mask. True and total theater artist that she was, she naturally
understood the effectiveness of a mask worn properly in public. If we
had a generation of actors and actresses with her acumen, her passion,
her wit, her simultaneous sense of artistic dignity and the unabashed
openness that art demands, we would have a theater for which Americans
might even turn off their TVs. But in Nancy Marchand's case, we have
to concede that the theater and its followers did not make as much of
her as she deserved. She gave us her best, but it was the televiewers
who saw her greatness. Their taste, in this case, was better than ours.
As we start to face a theater from which she will be absent, we should
think about that.
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