Sally Kirkland has never been one to shy away from intense emotions. In Anna she gave one of the seminal performances of the 1980s as a middle-aged actress trying her best to return to the New York stage. She has a unqiue fire in her eyes and her commitment to the character is such, that it was easy to assume that Sally was merely playing herself. It's this commitment between putting herself completely at the service of the character and her passion for the craft of acting itself that makes her so compelling to watch. In Sharon Greytak's Archaeology of a Woman (opening in theaters September 12) she once again proves why she has more than a hundred characters under her belt. She plays Margaret, a woman with a dark past, who finds herself sinking into dementia, trying to protect her daughter Kate (Victoria Clark) from uncovering the many secrets she's been trying to hide.
Miss Kirkland was gracious enough to talk to me about the film, as she recovered from knee surgery, and talking to her I couldn't help but notice how she lights up a room the same way she does the screen. She's willing to share wonderful anecdotes about her legendary life, but once she talks about her craft and the movie she's promoting, you can see a seriousness take over her that proves how much she respects the team effort required to make a film. We talked about her brilliant performance as Margaret, her Method training and her endless committal to making the work of other female artists be seen and heard.
I felt that you brought many of the same qualities from your early work, like in Anna for example, to your character in Archaeology of a Woman.
Yes, that is accurate. It’s not normal in my life to get a role like this and both women, Anna and Margaret, have breakdowns in their own way. I did a movie called The Haunted, that got a Golden Globe nomination for me, which dealt with something similar. So I would put these three movies together in a category of “I completely drain myself emotionally” in them. I gave my heart and soul and guts and the reason why I was attracted to this was that when I was a kid, my favorite actress was Kim Stanley. I used to see her on Broadway, and whenever I would leave the theater there would be tears streaming down my face and I’d be so moved by Kim. I always wanted to be an actress like her, and now I’m reading a book about her called The Female Brando.
How were you cast in the part?
Sharon Greytak wrote the role and when I read it in Los Angeles, I said “what do I have to do to get this role?” I went on Facebook and I looked up Sharon, I found her and sent her a friend request. I didn’t mention the movie but I knew that the following Monday, she and her casting director Adrienne Stern and my agent were going to communicate, so when my name came up, Sharon said “she just requested me as a Facebook friend, I couldn’t believe it, why me?” Sharon was in New York, I was in Los Angeles, so there was no way of doing a proper audition, so she spent 45 minutes on the phone with me and asked me everything there was to know about the character and by the end of the call she said “you’re hired”. It’s an amazing role too, when you get to be that angry and that fearful and in my case demented, it gives you so many colors to work with and that’s what every great, as opposed to good, actor wants, the ability to show you the audience a huge range. One reviewer called me “unnerving” and for two days I sat down thinking “what does that mean?” I guess I wanna keep the audience completely involved emotionally.
I kept thinking of Joan Crawford movies like Mildred Pierce when I was watching your performance…
(Laughs) Wow, that’s so great!
...and I was wondering what elements of classic Hollywood acting, if any, you’d brought to this part, given that you are well known for being a Method actor. Was this performance a marriage between these styles?
I have been a Method actor since I was 17. I studied with Lee Strasberg for 20 years and I taught for him for years. I’m completely Method. My favorite actor in the world is Michael Fassbender and we talk all the time about Method acting, about how no matter what you’re doing, whether it’s Shakespeare or whether it’s contemporary, you find that the personalization, emotional recall for something that could’ve happened to you, “as if”, thinking what would you do in situations similar to your character’s...just a little piece of trivia, I taught Kathy Griffin, I taught Sandra Bullock when she was 22 or 24, I coached Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli and Roseanne...and many, many people over the years. I don’t know how to act anymore, unless it’s truth and Method acting is truth, I don’t know how to fake anything, so if I’m forced to do an emotion that is not in my normal daily life, I do one of those things: emotional recall, personalization or “as if”.
What happens when you’re not shooting a scene then? Do you stay in character?
The minute I get the role I start becoming the character. As I learn the lines I become the character more and more, how does she dress, how does she talk, what does she see and hear, all the sensory awareness. When I do the role, I stay in character all through the shoot so usually crew members think I’m a nutcase because I’m so intense. Intense is to put it mildly...I don’t socialize because I’m holding on to the inner life of my character and I stay that way up until the very last line is delivered and then I totally shake it off. I become Sally Kirkland.
Is that ever pleasurable or is it scary?
No, it’s only scary when I can’t get the emotion (laughs) but so far that hasn’t been a problem. I’m a very emotional person and I have tremendous empathy for people with handicaps, in the case of Margaret she’s dealing with Alzheimer’s and dementia and when I’m not an actor I’m an ordained minister in the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness and I was a caretaker for patients with Alzheimer’s and AIDS, so I’ve been around it and have tremendous compassion and felt like the movie would teach the audience to have some of that compassion. We took the film to Houston and all these people came up to me and wanted to kiss me and hug me and share their stories. They felt like they were family because of the compassion in Sharon’s script.
How was it to work with Victoria Clark?
I loved working with Vicki. Someone told me that we look alike. I’m a New Yorker, so I was really happy to get a Broadway actor to act with me, because if I have a choice that’s what I always want: a stage trained actor acting with me.
You have always been very vocal about how much you admire other people’s work. What have you seen recently that you’ve absolutely loved?
I’ve been spending a few weeks laid up, because of my knee surgery, so I haven’t been able to see anything. Michael Fassbender is a friend of mine and so I saw Frank his new film and loved it. That’s the only film I’ve seen since the middle of June. I love Frank and Fassbender is my hero. Now we have Macbeth to look forward to! Marion Cotillard is wonderful too!
You’ve also been known for feeling very comfortable with your body onscreen and onstage. I read somewhere that you were the first actress to appear nude in the New York stage…
I was. 1968, Terrence McNally, Sweet Eros...and that was before Hair, before Oh! Calcutta! Terrence called me and asked me if I would do this for him and I had been in the La Mama troupe, so I’d been nude in their shows, golding up gossamer veils in a play called Changes by Megan Terry. Clive Barnes in the Post said the nudity was done tastefully, so I felt pretty good about it. My mother was the fashion editor of LIFE at the time, here she is telling people to put clothes on and I was telling them to take them off, so the New York Times called me up to ask why I was doing this, and I said “because I’m opposed to the Vietnam War and you can’t carry a gun on a naked body” and that went into the history books.
But more than physical nudity, this means that you’re willing to have your characters look unattractive onscreen, you’re willing to take them to a place lacking in any vanity…
In this movie, I’ve put on some weight compared to back in the day, and Sharon said there would be nudity and I went “OK...but can you shoot me from this angle and this angle?”, then we got to one of my favorite moments in the film in which we see Margaret put her bra in the refrigerator, and I could see my roll around my stomach and I thought “oh Sally, what are you doing? You’re letting the audience see you’re fat!” That was tough for my vanity yeah, but Sharon was very determined to have her be a real person.
What would you say was the most challenging part of shooting this film?
I think when you’re doing an independent film with a limited budget and you know you only have a few weeks to finish it, you just trust the director’s vision totally. I also talked to Vicki about what the scenes were about, and a lot of times we did our scenes in one take and it was really intense. Keeping the emotion going between scenes was tough, I used everything in me, from a former love affair with Bob Dylan to my dog of 18 years, who just died before the movie, to my hate/love relationship with my mother…it was important for me not to get distracted by what was around me.
Did you find that the limited time you had to make the film helped your performance or did it cause stress?
A lot of times I would say to Sharon “shoot the rehearsal”, because I’m a stage actress and I like to do it in front of an audience - the crew in this case - and I like that when you do this you catch them by surprise, if you’re doing several shots then you know what I’m going to do.
This is a film directed and written by a woman that focuses on two female characters and since you've always championed the work of other women, how would you say this film ties into that?
Feminist is a word I haven’t used in many years but I’m a woman who’s pretty much been independent and lived my life alone. I never depended on a man for my livelihood, men are in my life for sure, but I’ve always fiercely been an independent woman. My mom was fashion editor of Vogue and LIFE at a time when women didn’t have as much weight as she did, so I learned from the best, her boss was Henry Luce and she would tell him what to do. At a very young age my mother was a very strong figure, my dad worked from home, so my mom was the one who went out and made money, so it was natural I would follow in her footsteps. At the age of 17 I was working in theater making money, and I’m happy to say I became a member of the Screen Actors Guild, Equity and AFTRA when I was 17, so my whole life has been about teaching other women that they too can be independent, that they don’t have to depend on men or be subjugated to any abuse. I had some sexual abuse as a child and of course I have tremendous empathy for anyone who’s gone through that. It’s funny, I was told by an astrologer when I was a kid “one of the reasons you’re on the planet is to teach other women” and I didn’t know what that meant. I seem to have a joy in standing up for women and Sharon, being a writer/director/producer is an anomaly, I’ve worked with some women directors but they haven’t had all this control over their projects, so how could I not have so much respect for her? She writes about women with tremendous heart and soul. I want Sharon to be heard.
Read our interview with director Sharon Greytak here. Archaeology of a Woman opens in theaters on September 12.
