Orange Coast Magazine
A flair for the dramatic | November 2007
By Tina Borgatta
One moment in Germany is all it took for Oscar-winner Marcia Gay Harden to fling herself into acting
When Marcia Gay Harden looks back on her first year of college, her mind is flooded with memories of spending long afternoons and evenings sitting just steps from the Parthenon in Greece, watching theater performances as day turned into night. She was a world away from the parties and sorority pledging so often equated with freshman year.
Harden, the middle child among four siblings, was 17 when the family relocated from the United States to Greece. As the daughter of a Naval officer, she was used to moving around a lot‹the family picked up roots every two or three years. Among the places they called home: California, Maryland, Texas, Japan and Germany. And Harden loved it‹she found being pulled into new environments exhilarating. Especially when the family moved to Greece.
"It was fantastic," Harden says. "I was hot off the plane, and my parents said, 'Go. Go get a translation book, and go explore.' It was a wonderful freedom to be able to do that."
While Harden stayed in Greece with her parents, her two older sisters headed elsewhere in Europe‹one attended school in Rome, another in Germany. Her younger brother and sister stayed with the rest of the family in Greece, and went to elementary and middle school.
They set up house in a village overlooking the Aegean Sea, outside of Athens. "But we would frequently go there to visit the museums, and we'd go to the Acropolis and climb all over those rocks," she says. Often, they¹d bring along a picnic, take a seat at the foot of the Parthenon and drink in some culture.
"We'd sit there in this 2,000-year-old theater and watch a play," says Harden. "As the sun went down, the play would already have begun, and the stars would come out, the lights would go up, and it was so dramatic and really beautiful. There's a grandness to it all, quite like opera. You didn't need to know the words exactly, but you could follow it and hear those great, gorgeous plays."
It ignited a passion within her. A passion that led to a successful career as a performer and earned her the top award in the industry‹that little golden man we all call Oscar. (He occupies a special place in Harden's Harlem home: on a shelf in front of a window, overlooking a street where the neighborhood children play.)
And now, at 48, this sexy, sultry actress seems to be in her prime, with at least half a dozen films in some phase of production during each of the last two years. Two of her most recent works hit theaters this month The Christmas Cottage, a film that also stars Peter O'Toole and takes a look at the inspiration behind the Thomas Kinkade painting of the same name, and The Mist, a tale by Stephen King about how people in a small town fight scores of blood thirsty creatures that emerge from the fog after a storm. Indeed, they are films that fall into two very different genres.
Perhaps it was her ability to acclimate to so many cultures growing up that has allowed her to flourish in such a variety of roles.
Harden certainly made the most of her time abroad. During those early years in college, for example, she studied all things Greek‹the language (she learned her first words from the wait staff at restaurants she frequented), the plays ("all those wonderful Greek tragedies"), the culture ("they are very family-oriented people") and the landscape ("the dry climate, there on the Aegean Sea, with all those gorgeous white rocks and white-washed buildings").
While that experience stirred her appreciation for the performing arts, she wasn¹t yet thinking about pursuing an acting career. Instead, she thought she¹d become a cultural attaché. But then she spent a year in Germany and took an acting class. Her instructor told her she had a gift.
"That was all it took," recalls Harden. "That positive reinforcement built up my confidence. ... So when we moved to Texas, I had to make a decision:
cultural attaché or actor."
Harden chose acting: "I thought it was the one area where I could explore my own voice and be unique in the field. And once I made that decision, there was no turning back."
She continued her college education at the University of Texas and earned her bachelor¹s degree in theater. But success didn¹t come quickly. To make ends meet, she waited tables. Then she followed her parents to Washington, D.C., and took jobs as a waitress at The Four Seasons and as a nightclub singer.
"I was miserable because that's the time in your life when you want to explore your world and explore yourself, and you're not going to be able to do that when you're living with your parents," she quips.
But it was a situation she wasn't afraid to change. After all, this is a woman with wanderlust. Her next destination: New York City. Although, she admits, it wasn't quite what she expected.
"I was like Dorothy coming off a bus from Kansas," she says. "There I was, carrying my photo book with me and thinking, 'Where are all the producers?' As if they'd be all over the place. Then the reality hit me, and there were three more years of waiting tables."
She did, however, get an agent and landed a role in an off-Broadway play.
And, hoping to further hone her acting chops, she attended graduate courses at New York University, where she earned her master's degree in fine arts and met acclaimed acting instructor Ron Van Lieu, who became her mentor.
"He's truly incredible," she says. "To this day, I will still call him if I need help."
She landed a share of roles onstage, and in 1986, she took a small spot in a film called The Imagemaker. Harden followed that up with television parts in such productions as The CBS Summer Playhouse: In the Lion's Den in 1987, and an episode of Simon & Simon in 1988. But her break came two years later, when acclaimed writers-producers-directors Ethan and Joel Coen (who list Fargo; O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Ladykillers among their credits) cast her alongside Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney and John Turturro in Miller's Crossing, an Irish mob film set during the Prohibition era. She played the role of the boss' girl, Verna, whom she has described as "a gun-toting, cigarette-smoking, poker-faced moll." And she nailed the part. A Washington Post staff writer put her with the likes of other Coen femme fatales Frances McDormand and Holly Hunter: "fierce actresses who approach their roles with quirky zeal."
She assumed the persona of another steamy character two years later when she played Ava Gardner in the television biopic Sinatra. The next year, she garnered a Tony Award nomination for her role in the Broadway production of Angels in America-she played Harper, the wife of a closeted gay man.
In the years that followed, Harden averaged two or three projects a year, including bits on such television shows as Chicago Hope and Homicide: Life on the Street, and parts in such movies as The Spitfire Grill (she met her husband, Thaddaeus Scheel, while working on that film, which starred Ellen Burstyn), The First Wives Club (starring Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton), and Meet Joe Black (with Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins).
Her pivotal role, however, came in 2000, when she played painter Lee Krasner, the wife of tormented artist Jackson Pollock. The following year, her performance was acknowledged with an Academy Award for best actress in a supporting role.
She garnered a second Oscar nomination in 2004 for her supporting role in Mystic River, starring Sean Penn.
Since then, she's crossed paths with Penn and fellow Mystic co-star Kevin Bacon. Penn directed Into the Wild, a film based on the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who sold his possessions, donated his savings to charity and hitchhiked his way through Alaska. And she teamed up with Bacon in Rails & Ties, a dramatic story about a train engineer whose wife (Harden) is dying of cancer, and a little boy (played by Miles Heizer) whose mother was killed by the train Bacon's character was operating. Into the Wild, in which she plays McCandless' mother, was released in September, while Rails & Ties premiered in October, after making the rounds at film festivals.
Also interesting: Rails & Ties was directed by Alison Eastwood, the daughter of Clint Eastwood, who directed Mystic River. It was the younger Eastwood¹s directorial debut, and it received mixed reviews at the festivals. But Harden drew favorable notes for her ability to balance the intense drama of the story without tipping the scale toward melodrama.
And Eastwood she says was impressed with Harden's performance throughout the film:"You kind of never know until the whole film comes together. You'll watch someone do a scene, and you'll think, 'That was really great,' but you don't really notice everything until you edit the movie, and it wasn't until after the movie was done that I realized the whole performance was very special‹it wasn't just one scene specifically, but you could tell that from beginning to end it was special."
Harden demonstrated the same dramatic deftness in the film Canvas, which was released in theaters last month after garnering numerous film festival awards. She plays a wife and mother who suffers from schizophrenia. It's a story that comes from the heart‹the film's writer and director, Joseph Greco, watched his mother battle schizophrenia.
"It was so important for us that people see the film," she says. "And the fact that it¹s being embraced by the mental health community has been a great boon because they're recognizing the truth of Joe's experience. ... And people are being touched by that. After a screening, a woman came up to me crying and said, "You guys got it."
That's what happens when an actor has perfected her craft.
And while success may have been long in the making, her penchant for drama was present even as a very young child, even though she doesn't remember it. She heard it from a former neighbor whom she saw at the Emmy Awards in September‹the woman's son, like Harden, became an actor. She shared with Harden stories about the plays staged by her two older sisters and other children from their neighborhood in the San Diego County suburb of La Jolla. Harden was only about 7 years old at the time, but she was right there with the older kids. Not onstage, however.
"She said I'd go up and down the street, telling everyone 'Come on, we're going to do a show,' " Harden says. "I was the one saying, 'Who's got the popcorn?' and lining up all the chairs."
Harden says her three children-9-year-old Eulala, and 3-year-old twins Hudson and Julitta-are showing similar talents in acting and stage management. As a toddler, Eulala frequently made up stories that she acted out with her mom, handing out very specific direction.
"She'd say things like, 'Mommy you're going to be over there by that tree-no, Mommy, you¹re standing over there. And when you see me, you're going to shiver and say, "Oh, my, little girl." So I'd say something like, 'Oh, little girl,' and she'd stop me and say, 'No Mommy, you say "Oh, my, little girl." ' And she'd go on like that for hours."
Now it appears she's following in her mom¹s footsteps professionally, too. Eulala has already appeared in two films with Harden-the 2005 television movie Felicity: An American Girl Adventure, which takes place in 1775 New England (the lead role was played by Shailene Woodley); and Home, a drama thriller set in the 1960s, which is scheduled for release early next year.
"Quite a lot of hours went into the making of Home, and it required a lot of emotional ability, but she was up to the task," Harden says. "And I was given strict instructions by her not to direct her and not to tell her what to do. She informed me that she already had a director. It was really a lot of fun to be part of her creativeness."
Now let¹s see if Eulala chooses to go to college in Greece.
