When it comes to playing tortured heroines, the
ethereally beautiful Jessica Lange has no equal. Not bad
for someone whose first role was as the love interest in
1976's King Kong. Here, as she returns to the
London stage, the Oscar-winning actor talks about
tattoos, emotional men and why she's drawn to
'characters who walk the edge'
She has a riveting presence, a nervous energy, yet she
looks as if she's made an effort to be nondescript.
Non-fashion jeans, blue baggy top, coloured hair, soft
and clean but not in a particular style. She has a
pussycat nose and feline smile. She's looking at a
manicured image of herself that will be used in the
first posters to sell the play The Glass Menagerie.
She's a little disturbed. She twitches and says in a
plaintive voice to the avuncular theatrical impresario
Bill Kenwright: "Why do we have this big picture of me?
What about the rest of the cast?"
Can it be that she really doesn't get it? That she's the
star. She's the sell. She seems self-conscious and I
wonder if she's going to be brittle, fragile, snappy.
But then there's also a softness to her and a warmth.
Kenwright says, "Most actresses would be demanding their
picture was made bigger. With her it's the opposite. No
razzmatazz, no chauffeur-driven cars. She's very much
jeans and T-shirts to the rehearsal, committed to the
project."
As she reaches for her water. I see a
tattoo on her wrist. It seems incongruous. Jessica
Lange, femme fatale, Tennessee Williams ethereal
heroine; the last person you'd expect to have a tattoo.
Much later on, when she's more at
ease, she tells me randomly that Aperture magazine is
publishing some of her photographs. "The camera affords
me a kind of anonymity. I like being behind the camera,
watching. I've always liked that. I don't like being
observed much... and do it for a living." She has a long
easy laugh at this admission. Is it because you're not
confident in your looks, I say - and instantly wish I
hadn't. She was, of course, delectable, gorgeous, and
it's not to say that she isn't striking now. But maybe
this is all about lost youth. "No, it's not that. You
get a period where your face really begins to change.
It's one of those transitions and it takes a while to
get used to and then you are used to it. I'm going to be
58 in April."
The walk up to Kenwright's office has
wall upon wall of theatre posters. Jessica with a
Twenties marcel wave and haunted eyes peers out of many
of them. This London revival of the Broadway production
of The Glass Menagerie will be the fourth time
she's worked with him. The first time was when he put on
A Streetcar Named Desire. It was Lange's second
incarnation of Blanche. Dangerous and vulnerable,
Kenwright says: "She was mesmeric. If there are two or
three better actresses than Jessica, I've yet to meet
them. I'm also very aware that she could be doing movies
instead of the London stage, so I'm very grateful."
Perhaps, I suggest, theatre has more
range and is more interesting for women in their
fifties. "I'm not sure it's to do with my age or the
age," Lange says, "but yes, theatre affords much more
interesting roles. In movies, if you look at what's come
out this year, there's only been Volver, Notes
on a Scandal and The Queen that have had
interesting parts for women. Fifteen years ago there
were many more women's roles that were great. So I'm not
sure if it's a natural kind of evolution to do with
one's age or whether something has shifted in films, but
I can't just make a decision to do a film now because I
haven't worked for a year."
She says this with a hollow laugh
because in the past this is what she has done. In her
film roles she has shone brightest playing neurotic,
sexy sirens on the verge of self-destruction. Sometimes
they actually destroy themselves, as with Frances
Farmer; sometimes they are flecked with a little more
sexy survivor spirit. She was nominated for an Oscar for
her portrayal of the tragic country singer Patsy Cline
in Sweet Dreams (1985). She won her first Oscar
in 1982 for Tootsie: she played the sweet-faced
love interest of Dustin Hoffman, who spent most of the
movie dressed as a woman. Her second was for her role as
the super-stressed military wife of Tommy Lee Jones in
Blue Sky (1994).
Goldie Hawn famously quipped that
there are three ages for actresses: the babe, the
district attorney and Driving Miss Daisy. She
laughs. "There's definitely an element of that. And the
district attorney has never interested me too much, not
unless they have a dark secret..." She shakes her head,
remembering with amusement, not bitterness: 'There are
so many things I shouldn't have done. I mean, quite a
few movies.' Like what? "Just, wooh." A warm, gurgling
wooh is what she says when she doesn't want to be pinned
down but she doesn't want to be brittle or cold.
So she is known for her dark-edged,
fragile characters. "Those are the only characters that
interest me, those that walk the edge." She's said in
the past that she's suffered bouts of depression
herself, so maybe connecting to these characters with
their exaggerated sense of tragedy is some kind of
therapy for her. She once said, "Every time I think
about Frances, Blanche and Mary, I think: there but for
the grace of God go I." She says, "Yeah, there has been
black stuff in me, but I don't allow myself to go
there."
She has in fact a couple of films
coming up. One is Cheri, an adaptation by the
brilliant Christopher Hampton of the story by Colette
(which is incidentally being produced by Kenwright).
It's about an ageing courtesan and how she tries to hang
on to her young lover. Next up will be Grey Gardens,
which is the story of the Beales - a wealthy society
mother and daughter who were aunt and cousin to Jackie
Kennedy. Drew Barrymore is set to play the daughter to
Lange's mother in the film, which spans 40 years. Lange
ages from 37 to 77.
Lange's movie presence has always had
a sweetness and a sadness and Jack Nicholson, who worked
with her in 1981 in The Postman Always Rings Twice,
has described her as 'a cross between a fawn and a
Buick'. She screws her nose up. "That thing's been
floating around for 26 years. The Buick's solid survivor
spirit and the fawn's... well..." She does an impression
with her arms in front of her as a graceful shy fawn,
maybe because she can't bring herself to describe
herself as a fawn. So is she in touch with her inner
Buick or inner fawn? "Inner Buick, definitely. There are
extremes in all of us, aren't there?"
It seems that Lange feels comfortable
in extremes. She lives now in New York, in the city, but
grew up in rural Minnesota. She went to college in
Minneapolis, then to New York and then Paris on a
pilgrimage to bohemia, a rebellion against her homespun
roots. At 20 she married photographer Paco Grande. They
had met in an art class in Minneapolis. In Paris she
studied mime and dance. She looks dreamy as she recalls
it. She came back to New York to be shaken up and down
in the paw of the gorilla in the first remake of King
Kong. Deeply uncomfortable in bimbodom, she dug
herself out of it. A few years later, in 1979, Bob Fosse
cast her as the angel of death in his memoir All That
Jazz. She was ethereal and he fell in love with her.
Next was Mikhail Baryshnikov, the greatest dancer of his
age. Then in 1982 she met Sam Shepard on the set of
Frances. It seems she was always attracted to genius. He
was then mostly acting, but has since become revered as
a writer and director.
They are still together but have
never married. In fact she has only been married once.
Was one husband enough? "It just didn't seem necessary.
Sam and I have been together 23 years, so it's not like
I don't feel married. The legal thing never seemed
important. The commitment is to Sammy. The average
marriage lasts seven years. I've done well."
She has only worked with Shepard a
couple of times. More often she has acted in plays that
he has written. They are usually dark. Exactly the kind
of play she likes. She has said before that Frances was
her most emotionally demanding role. Beautiful Frances
was gorgeously self-destructive, compellingly so. Was it
hard to have such a demanding role and have what must
have been an emotionally demanding love affair?
"Yes," she laughs. "It was a very
vulnerable time, very emotional. There was a lot going
on, let's put it that way." She laughs a little more
feverishly and you get to sense a bit of the cauldron
that must have been going on. She looks to the side as
if she's looking at her former self playing it out; a
movie of her life, a woman that felt things so acutely
but who seems to have grown a thicker skin.
So which was more emotionally
demanding? "Playing Frances was definitely more
demanding than meeting Sam. Frances was a huge thing to
jump into. The affair was fun. A great love affair is a
great love affair. They are wonderful." She tosses her
hair back. And terrible, I say. "I guess," she says, but
not really seeming to identify with that, or at least
not choosing to. I had read that, in the past, if her
life was too peaceful she liked to use a metaphorical
Magimix to mix things up a little. I read that she
enjoyed any extreme of emotion as long as it was
passionate - either negative or positive, that's how she
knew it was love. When I remind her of this she laughs
extremely loudly, maybe embarrassed, maybe relieved,
maybe just joyful as she conjures that part of herself.
"Yeah. I think there was that part of my life, but
hopefully that era has come to an end - of wanting
everything at high pitch all the time. As you get older
the last thing you want is an emotional hurricane, being
in the eye of the storm all the time." Did she mix
things up on purpose or subconsciously? "I don't know,
but certainly mixing things up, although I don't think
I've ever been self-destructive."
She says she's never been interested
in bad boys, attracted to that kind of damage. "Let's
say I've always been interested in very big men. Not big
physically, but big emotionally." She's still laughing
as she's recalling her own big emotions, a real
vicarious thrill from her own past.
You had some great boyfriends, I say.
"I sure did." Are you friends with your exes? "Very
close. We spend time together. We see each other." Even
when you were with one and you left that one for another
one? She just giggles. "The main men in my life I'm
close with." By this she means her husband Paco Grande.
She still refers to him as "my husband." And
Baryshnikov, who is the father of her daughter Shura,
25. "I love them dearly. They are good people."
Why do you think things didn't work
out? "Oooh,' she says. What she means is: don't go
there. "Things change, and when you're young you're kind
of careless." Have you changed? "I think, a lot. My
children changed me." She has two more with Sam -
Hannah, 21, and Walker, 19. "It gives you a perspective
that you didn't have before. You are no longer the
centre of the universe. It really opened my heart, made
me a different person. Every decision you make, every
move you make, is with someone else in mind. I never
worked when the kids were young, and then they were
always with me. Literally on the set, in my dressing
room, in the trailer being tutored, always there."
In the beginning of her acting career
she felt completed by it. Then she felt completed by her
children. At the time when there were the most juicy,
sexy roles was the very time she wasn't particularly
interested in acting. 'I was always happier when I was
with my children. Ninety per cent of the time I'd rather
be with my children.' She once said she only wanted one
word on her tombstone: "Mother".
When in your life were you most
happy? She pauses to give it real thought. "So many
different extremes. Those years of living in Paris and
being completely free and young, so romantic and
exciting. That was a very happy time. And being home and
with the family, having my children. That was sublimely
happy in a different way. This Christmas I had the whole
family together in my cabin in Minnesota and I thought:
"I can't remember when I've ever been this happy."
Everything about it felt so natural, so pleasurable.
Your ideas about happiness change."
So what is your current concept of
happy? "Today was a good day. We did good work. We began
rehearsals. It's exciting, the beginning of a project.
It's pretty simple stuff that makes me happy now. To
know that my kids are well and safe. To be with the
people I love. And now I think of travelling more and
more. I can envisage that now my kids have left home. It
allows me that space."
Was it a sad space when they left?
"This year was a hard year." There's a sudden change of
mood - you feel her inner sadness as opposed to her
inner Buick. "My last child went to college, and for the
first time in 25 years my day did not revolve around a
child. Even when they grew older I was always thinking:
'I've got to get home to cook dinner.' I felt horrible,"
she says emphatically, as if this is the thing she's
most certain about and she somehow enjoys the intensity
of this certainty. "It was a huge loss. At first I
didn't know what I would do. But I'm getting there. I'm
getting better."
The children will come to visit in
London and Sam will be directing one of his plays in
Dublin for part of the time. His work is often very
dark. Is it easy to live with someone who has such
darkness, or is he only dark in his writing? "I wouldn't
call Sammy easy-going and funny, but everybody has their
dark side, and he always does it with a sense of humour.
He isn't a dark presence in the home." Maybe she likes a
man to be a little brooding? "Yes, a little brooding is
all right. But not someone who broods all the time. In
recent years I've tried to get to grips with the idea
that you can actually choose to be happy. Not if there
are extraneous circumstances, things that happen that
make you really sad, but you can choose not to let
things affect you negatively. I've always had such a
quick temper. I realise now it's such a waste of energy.
You can actually choose to let things roll off you a
little more."
From time to time she dips into
Buddhism, from where, no doubt, some of these ideas
stem. "It's been a discipline that makes sense more than
anything because it's like a science. I've never been a
religious person. I've always looked for some kind of
spiritual meaning. I didn't grow up going to church. My
mother's family were atheists and my father's side was
confused. He had been raised Catholic, but did not
practise it. His mother converted to Mormonism very late
in life, so there was no set religion."
Her father seems one of those men
with big emotions. He threw her off the dock to teach
her to swim. Was he drunk? "No, it was his way of
teaching me. It was scary, but it wasn't like he
endangered his children." He gave her the sink-or-swim
mentality, the survivor bit, the Buick? "Probably." He
certainly gave her an adrenalin rush. "The first time I
rode a horse he gave it a smack on the ass and the horse
ran off and he expected you to hold on, and I did. Years
later I was a pretty good horsewoman, but it wasn't
because of that." She laughs, throws her hand up for a
stretch and I ask her about the tattoo.
"It has to do with the circular
nature of life. I have another tattoo on my hip of a
crescent moon. I got that when I arrived in Paris. I
went to Bruno's in Pigalle. That was when Pigalle was
really Pigalle, you know, sailors and rough trade. You
could have the last supper or crucifixion or ships
sinking. It had no special meaning except it was the
smallest on offer and I'd arrived in Paris and it was
great. My oldest daughter has the same Celtic knot." Was
it a special bonding? "No, she asked me to come with her
because she needed parental approval and that was her
way of getting a tattoo without written permission, as
she was only 16." So something that was completely
random is permanent. She laughs hard in acceptance.
I leave Lange with a great feeling of
warmth. She's created an illusion of intimacy. I have
the feeling that I know more than she's actually told
me. That she has in some way revealed herself, that she
has been vulnerable. Kenwright confirms this when he
says, "One of her greatest assets is her warmth, the
feeling of intimacy that she can create in a theatre."
It's not just her fragility or her strength or a mixture
of the two that makes her mesmerising, it's her ability
to create intimacy on stage and off.
___________________
Jessica Lange is back in the West End, reinventing her
Broadway role in A Glass Menagerie. But she's
more keen to talk of her family and her despair over the
Iraq war.
"I'm amazed how many films some
people have done," says Jessica Lange, tossing back her
tousled blonde hair and stretching out on a comfortable
sofa in the residents' bar of the Covent Garden Hotel in
London. "I mean, I've only made 25 films in 30 years. So
I now realise there's an awful lot of stuff I didn't
do."
This is one way the twice
Oscar-winning actress - for the supporting role of a
soap-opera star in Tootsie with Dustin Hoffman in
1982, and for the mentally unstable wife of Tommy Lee
Jones in Blue Sky in 1994 - rationalises her
status as a leading lady and an active mother. And she
won't itemise the films she missed out on. Because the
actress who took the role went on to win an Oscar,
right? "Right!" Cue guffaw and sexy curling-up act on
the comfy sofa.
You couldn't imagine Lange behaving
this way at the Dorchester or Claridges. She's one of
those stars who retain their allure while appearing to
be just a little low-maintenance. She lives in the real
world but travels with a chauffeur. An on-the-record
enemy of Botox and all the deceptive wiles of cosmetic
surgery, she is now an irreducibly attractive snub-nosed
57-year-old with the fewest of facial lines and the
post-middle-aged bonus of an interesting neck and
character-marked hands.
She has good taste, too. For a start
she's married to Sam Shepard, the playwright and actor
who makes even Brad Pitt look a bit of a dog. And she
knows - and likes - Bob Dylan (Sam's a big rock and
blues muso buddy of Dylan, and an honorary north
Londoner)whose latest album is her constant companion:
"It's uncanny," she says, "how each album absolutely
connects to that exact moment in your life, whatever
your age or experience. He's my idol. So is Che
Guevara."
Whoa there; this might be too much
information already. Next stop, George Bush - but he's
definitely not on the dinner-party list: "Being at the
mercy of that President for the next two years is going
to be really frightening."
A passing West End producer calls at
our table and pays suitably deferential respects. Lange
is utterly charming with people she doesn't know. Then
the minder arrives, the chap who's been ferrying her
around London to look at apartments. She sends him away
with a lovely smile. She thinks she will end up in
Kensington, but Shepard is always going on at her about
Hampstead, where he lived in the early 1970s to get away
from a New York flop, drugs and his nearly ruinous
affair with the high priestess and poet of punk Patti
Smith (they remain good friends, for the record).
Lange is missing New York and her
three grown-up children, but she seems comfortable for
the time being in the West End, where she opens in
Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie next
week. But where - and why - did all that movie work go?
The actress spent a great deal of
time with the children as they grew up. Parading down
red carpets is not really her designer bag. Even more
unusually, she has of late relaunched a not-very-packed
stage career that began (and more or less finished) in
Paris 30 years ago in a festival of new work at the
Opéra Comique ("And I don't even sing, for God's sake").
Yet she is undoubtedly an elite American actress, right
up there in the same class - in my view - as Joanne
Woodward and Meryl Streep.
How dressed-down she is, how
ordinary, and yet how oddly appealing; and what a
remarkable bundle of paradoxes. She's a reluctant star,
a shy siren, a maternal bohemian, a sensual ice-maiden
of Polish and Finnish descent, a political and
metropolitan sophisticate rooted in the woods and
farmlands of northern Minnesota.
She'd pitched up in Paris with her
first husband, the Spanish avant-garde photographer Paco
Grande, who kindled her enthusiasm for wielding a
camera; she is soon to publish a book of photographs
that she describes as "mysterious and emotional". Until
then, she had worked in New York as a waitress and
model.
She married Grande in 1970, had an
affair with Bob Fosse, the director of her first film,
All That Jazz, in 1979, and was divorced 1981. That was
a crucial period in her life, as her career took off in
The Postman Always Rings Twice and she had her
first child (with the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov) in New
York. In the following year, she played the distraught
and destructive Hollywood legend Frances Farmer on film,
meeting Sam Shepard on set. She has been with Shepard
ever since.
They have two teenage children, both
now in college. They have made films together, most
recently Wim Wenders' generally reviled Don't Come
Knocking, but he has never written a stage role for
her. "I tell him it's about time he did, but he never
gets round to it. I guess he will one day..." and she
trails off in wistful laughter. Shepard keeps a farm in
Kentucky - he's really a cars and horses kind of guy -
and the couple have recently moved back to New York
since Lange's mother died in Minnesota.
The family had lived in Minnesota
after prolonged stretches in New Mexico and Virginia. "I
made a decision," Lange says, "that I was going to raise
my children outside of the industry. I didn't want them
inundated with that entire thing about film-making." She
so loved child-rearing that a few years ago, in her
early fifties, she tried for another pregnancy with the
help of fertility treatment. The attempt failed, but
she's happily compensated by her first daughter's two
little girls.
The tea and fruit scones arrive and
she tucks in with gusto. She's about to re-invent the
character she played on Broadway two years ago, Amanda
Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie. The play was
Williams's first success and his most directly
autobiographical play. Amanda is a genteel remnant of
the old South, trapped in her memories and trying to
manipulate her gauche daughter into a romantic liaison
with "a gentleman caller". The play is recounted in past
and present tense by Amanda's son Tom, the character
based on Williams, who is on the brink of an escape into
the artistic life.
In New York, Lange's performance met
with mixed reviews from the local critics but was much
admired by a few London reporters, including this
newspaper's Paul Taylor, who described it as "an
exquisite study in the drawling self-deception and
oppressive nostalgia of a faded Southern belle". The
production by David Leveaux, which overcame the
last-minute replacement of the actor who was to play Tom
(Christian Slater stepped in), was impressively muted
and poetic. Lange's Amanda was steely, self-absorbed,
dream-like, floating on a sea of lace jonquils, casually
cruel.
The production at the Apollo Theatre
in Shaftesbury Avenue may see a new take on the drama,
as Rupert Goold is now directing and Lange was unhappy
with the New York reception. Indeed, her publicists in
London are trying to pretend that New York never
happened: "It's a new production," snaps one
apparatchik, as if we were all now supposed to forget
that the producer Bill Kenwright had invited London
critics across the pond in the first place. But it is
hard to see how Lange can alter her initial performance
too much without damaging its special, febrile delicacy
and its bottled dynamism, qualities that eluded even the
excellent Zoë Wanamaker when she played the role for Sam
Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse 10 years ago.
"I love London, and I love London
audiences," Lange says, a little pointedly. "I've had
two great experiences in London..." - those were her
visits here as Blanche DuBois in Williams's A
Streetcar Named Desire in 1996 and as Mary Tyrone in
Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night in
2000 - "... and two not-so-great experiences in New
York." She doesn't really know why this should be, but
she is wearing the same lucky piece of jewellery she
wore as Amanda in New York in this version, and the same
Parisian perfume that she has worn for all three great
roles.
These Williams and O'Neill characters
are all to some extent delusional, injured creatures, a
temperamental strain that Lange has gloriously
encompassed on celluloid in her performances as the
iconic showbiz victims Frances Farmer and Patsy Cline.
But she has also plugged straight into hard-core
sensuality, not only in that breakthrough performance in
Bob Rafelson's The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1981) opposite Jack Nicholson - who famously said: "Few
are the men who do not want to fall at the feet of
Jessica Lange" - but also as Tamora, Queen of the Goths,
in Julie Taymor's brilliant and bestial Titus
(1999).
When she's finished with Williams, she hopes to continue
working with Kenwright on a Christopher Hampton film of
a novel by Colette. She will then return to Hollywood to
make Grey Gardens, a bizarre domestic story of
the ruined aristocratic cousins of Jackie Kennedy
Onassis, a mother and daughter who were both called
Edith Bouvier Beale and were discovered in
self-destructive squalor and poverty at the ends of
their lives. The material has yielded a Broadway musical
hit, but this project predates that. Lange is to play
the old crone, opposite Drew Barrymore.
What will this tell us, I wonder,
about her country and its role in the world? In a way, I
wish I hadn't put this question. She's off - and she's
not toeing any PR line. "George Bush really has whipped
up the most poisonous scenario of neighbour against
neighbour over the war in Iraq. It's disgusting. I can't
tell you." But she does. "There were times when it was
really lovely to be out there and against the war. But
then I had anti-war stickers on my car and some big
fucking pick-up with an American flag tried to drive me
off the road. It was scary and I was scared."
I suggest that her mood was the
result of her rather soft, hippie-liberal Democratic
anti-patriotic fervour, and that perhaps she would be a
whole lot worse off if President Bush wasn't defending
her "way of life" and "civilised" (read privileged)
values against the Islamic threat. The suggestion, I
have to say, does not go down well. "What? What are you
saying here? I thought you were a nice person. My
anti-war work started four years ago when the drums were
beating. The few of us who really spoke out at the time
took such a beating in the press - even the liberal
press - and on CNN; I was on a CNN news programme with
an arms inspector who had been in Iraq, and we were
treated like shit. Everything he said - and it was all
factual - has come to pass.
"There was talk at the time of
blacklisting - it was the McCarthy era all over again -
and a horrible, poisonous atmosphere. Now we are into an
escalation of the war, and it's Vietnam all over again.
It's gone beyond right or wrong. It's just become lunacy
and danger. Especially now they're talking about Iran as
the third front. You begin to wonder why we bring
children into this world. We're on the precipice. No
question."
Lange has worked for five years as an
ambassador for Unicef, joining a roster that has
included the likes of Peter Ustinov and Roger Moore, but
she is refreshingly honest about the impact she might or
might not have. "It all depends on when they call you up
and whether you can do something, or travel. I'm always
happy to do fundraising, press or field trips. I've
travelled to Mexico, the Congo and Russia; it's all
about when they call on you." On her most recent such
trip, she did some fantastic, highly personal work with
children infected with HIV.
Lange never wavers in her commitment
to family. "Nothing has changed the direction of my life
as much as having children," she says. Hers, of course,
are now let loose on the American campus system. "I am
in a cleft stick at the moment. My last child has just
left home. And we've moved back to New York. We've come
to a dangerous spot, in more ways than one. Everything
Al Gore is working for now [on environmental issues] is
worthwhile and worth paying attention to." Really? "Oh
yes. I don't have a car any more, for instance." She
arrived at the hotel, of course, in a chauffeur-driven
car.
Lange is an enigma, an actor who
teases with her mixture of seriousness and sexual
flippancy. Her role in the great Williams play is
similarly elusive: dominant, dependent, bizarre,
contained. Is that Jessica Lange? Will she come alive
again on stage? "It's you out there, and that's it. You
are much more responsible every night than you are on a
film set. You can't say, 'Oh, you should have seen what
I did!' That's why I love the stage.
"But I love my family more. Nothing
has changed my life as much as having children, and
nothing is as important to me as the place where I came
from, in those old Minnesota woods."
In spite of all her contradictions,
Jessica Lange remains touchingly from-the-heart. Amanda
in The Glass Menagerie is an offbeat eccentric in
some ways, but the actress playing her this time is no
less sentimental, if a mite more hard-headed, in a
wayward but emotionally centred sort of way. She would
rather be with her children any day of the week, even as
they grow into adulthood. "And I still really hate that
stupid bastard George Bush!" she cries.
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