What lies beneath
Her layered portrayals have won Laura Linney two Oscar nominations and a well-deserved reputation as an 'acting machine'. Now, as she takes on dementia and Philip Seymour Hoffman, the former special-needs teacher is forcing Hollywood to rewrite the script for fortysomething actresses.
Barbara Ellen
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 sleeper 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 similar formality, a kind of coiled tightness, and, past interviewers have noted, 'primness' that lends itself to long pauses and agonisingly careful answers. When there is a question Linney clearly considers too personal, there is even an 'aghast' raising of the eyebrows, straight out of a French farce.
Not that this comes as any great surprise: 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 nosey? '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. She is extremely nice when, settling down to talk at a central London hotel, both my tape recorder and my back-up machine malfunction. 'Oh no,' she cries, running over to the window with me, as I miserably decant batteries and stab at buttons. 'Perhaps you have a poltergeist!' She couldn't be sweeter, adjusting her day so that I can come back later.
Armistead Maupin, the San Francisco-based author who was instrumental in getting Linney cast as the jumpy ingenue Mary Ann Singleton in the 1993 television adaptation of his urban saga, Tales of the City, and who now counts the actress as a close personal friend, says this may be Linney's southern side coming out.
'Laura grew up in New York, but she was raised by southerners, so she has that gentility and courtesy that often comes with a southern upbringing,' Maupin tells me over the phone. 'We had that in common, and it means that sometimes we bury our thoughts to smooth things over.' Maupin chuckles dryly. 'The reason we're friends is that we liked each other first of all, but there was this other thing - how we also both understood the burden of being a good little boy or a good little girl.'
Later, returning with a new recorder, I bump into Linney in the hotel lobby, herself returning from a shopping trip with her PA, and someone who could only be described as a tall, dark handsome hunk, whom Linney introduces quickly and quietly as 'my fiance'.
The PA and The Hunk melt away as we make our way back up the stairs. 'Don't worry about it,' says Linney, as I burble out some apologies. 'I really felt for you, I have days like that. We all do.' Linney points out her carrier bags, grinning mischievously, as she shrugs off her coat: 'And now I can blame you for all the money I've spent.'
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.
Settling down on the sofa, 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 in The Savages is difficult, prickly, even dislikable 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 different ways that people perceive her, in the public eye. 'It just shifts and changes all the time.' What's the best one? 'Oh, there have been several,' says Linney. 'A revolving door of descriptive titles.' She smiles. 'But so long as it keeps changing, that's fine by me.'
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. Alone doesn't necessarily mean lonely? 'No,' agrees Linney. 'There's a big difference.'
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.' Self-protective? 'Yes.'
Do you look back and think: what a strange little girl, even feel a bit sorry for her? 'No,' says Linney. '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 ('At one point it was as if I couldn't go on stage at all') 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, [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, in productions such as Hedda Gabler, Six Degrees of Separation and The Seagull. Screen roles came less easily to her; or perhaps it was that Linney came less easily to them.
These days she has a varied film oeuvre: everything from thrillers (Breach and The Life of David Gale), comedies (The Nanny Diaries; Love, Actually), through to more off-centre fare (The Squid and the Whale; The Truman Show).She has even done mainstream 'spooky' films (The Exorcism of Emily Rose). Intriguing, then, that Linney says initially she was so intimidated by film and TV 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 to all this - 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.'
Maupin disagreed. He says he wanted Linney for the role of Mary Ann Singleton from the moment he saw her audition tape.
'Mary Ann was such a central character - the Alice who led us into Wonderland,' says Maupin. 'But a naive girl from Cleveland can be extremely annoying if you don't see the wheels turning all the time. And you do with Laura.' Maupin recalls that, on the Tales of the City set, Linney was 'an acting machine. We knew what we had from the day she walked on to the set: what she always brings - a combination of innocence, intelligence and steel.'
Kenneth Lonergan, the New York playwright and writer-director of You Can Count on Me, says he was attracted to Linney's 'unusual combination of power and vulnerability'. He recalls her as 'the consummate experienced actress. She was great fun, always lovely, but she took the work very seriously. There were times when I'd look at her script, and there'd be all this writing in the margins. I'd be: "Whoa! You've done more work on this movie than I have, and I'm the one who wrote it!"'
In Lonergan's opinion, the key to Linney lies in her theatre background: 'She got her break after she'd been in the trenches for a while,' he says. 'What tends to happen [in Hollywood] is that you become an instant celebrity, and that seems to be the end of the development of the artist. Laura, on the other hand, keeps working, keeps developing, keeps acting.'
One wonders how the serious-minded Linney feels about the other side of her job - the celebrity, the glitz and the awards, of course. Linney has been nominated for around 40 awards, including Tonys, and has been up for Oscars twice (she was also nominated for 2004's Kinsey, opposite Liam Neeson). Is there a part of her that enjoys the full-on red carpet schmooze? Linney smiles: 'It's very nice. I'm a little wary of all of that, to be honest.' It's too easy to become corrupted? 'Let's just say it's very easy to buy into stuff that couldn't be helpful to you as an actress, or a human being.'
Might it have been a different story had Linney been younger, more impressionable, when she entered Hollywood? 'Then I don't think I would have had a life in film. I wouldn't have handled it well, I was never really an ingenue.' Could she have lived, say, Lindsay Lohan's life? 'Absolutely not,' says Linney. 'I didn't even know what I was doing until I was 24, 25. I was at drama school until I was 26. And I could never have done that. I had no desire for it.' Not your thing? 'No,' says Linney, a wry smile playing on her lips. 'Too distracting.'
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/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.' Linney's talking about appearance, image? 'All of it. There is an enormous amount of pressure.' ...
Does Linney ever feel it? 'Sometimes. A little bit. I try not to.' From the outside, it seems to be a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. 'It's certainly live by the sword, die by the sword. Enter with caution, that kind of thing.' Linney shrugs. '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, checks herself: '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. It's really about being realistic. 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!"' Linney shakes her head, wonderingly. 'I'm like, "Well, there is an alternative."'
In the past, Laura Linney has half-jokingly referred to herself as a workaholic, and she's certainly had a busy year, with stints in London, Budapest, France, Argentina (for the Merchant Ivory production City of Your Final Destination), and then back to London again.
'I can remember when I first started working,' says Linney. 'I had an agent who said to me, "Is your passport valid? You're going to need it." I had no concept I would be travelling around the world like this. None at all.' As it happens, Linney's future projects may include appearing in London theatre, though right now, she stresses, nothing is confirmed.
When she is not working, Linney divides her time between Manhattan and her other main base, the Rocky Mountain town of Telluride in Colorado. This is where she lives with the hunk I saw her with in the lobby - fiance Marc Schauer, whom Linney met when he worked as a volunteer at the local film festival. Schauer is not connected to Hollywood in any way, though that's about all there is to know about him, as true to form, Laura Linney elegantly stonewalls all my personal questions.
'All I can say is that I'm in a good place,' she says. 'The best place I've ever been.'
Might she try for children?
'Who knows!' The eyebrows arch, the 'aghast' smile is back. 'We'll have to see what happens.'
Linney is more comfortable discussing the extreme differences between her two homes. So, which suits her personality better, Manhattan or Telluride?
'I think I need them both now actually,' she muses. 'I love what living in a remote, beautiful place does for me. I feel that it's important to be around nature. It's very healing to watch the animals walk by, to see things die, to watch flowers come and go. You know, see the changing of the seasons.'
And what does she get from Manhattan?
'Intellectual stimulation. Fantastic people. All the performing arts and culture.' Linney grins. 'I'm definitely happiest when I have both.'
The interview is winding down, and Linney bustles around collecting her things. Later that evening, she is to be guest of honour at an Oxford Union debate on foreign aid. 'I feel very complimented to be asked. The President of Ghana will be there.'
What does fame really mean to someone like Linney? Does she feel like a product, a brand, the proverbial can of soup on the supermarket shelf? 'You can feel like that,' she says. 'You try not to. You just have to not go there.' Do some people actively set out to be a brand? 'Yes, they do,' says Linney carefully. 'And that's fine for them, but for someone like me that would not be good. I'm just not... comfortable.'
Would Laura Linney describe herself as driven? 'I'm driven in my own way. I'm not conventionally driven - to succeed, to conquer. It's not anything like that. I'm driven to... I guess it's out of a sense of delight, really: what do I get to do next? Who do I get to be around? I guess it's just this deep curiosity about the next thing. You know... what do I get to learn this time?'...
· The Savages is on general release from 25 January
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