'Smart' Describes Actress and Her Lines

By: Jane Sumner
Source: The Dallas Morning News - October 23, 1999

AUSTIN - Get Smart. Casting directors should be hearing those words all over the place. Jean Smart's role in Guinevere may be small, but it's simply coruscating.

Not since Beatrice Straight told off William Holden in Network have we seen an actress flay a man as Ms. Smart does Stephen Rea in the romantic drama. It's an acid-dripping turn that should nab a supporting nomination at Oscar time.

Guinevere, about a young woman who passes up Harvard law school to live with an older bohemian mentor, belongs to its lead - Canadian national treasure Sarah Polley. But as her domineering mom, Ms. Smart purloins each scene she's in.

In a confrontation with Mr. Rea, she sends a line from director Audrey Wells' prize-winning script zinging into theaters like an icy aerosol.

"She's a pretty unhappy lady," Ms. Smart says. "She's got that wit, but she's able to use it like a surgeon."

Though her character is an embittered harpy, Ms. Smart manages to make us understand, even sympathize, with loveless Deborah Sloane.

What's so awful about Deborah, she says, is that she knows she can reduce her daughter's boozy mentor Cornelius Fitzpatrick (Mr. Rea) to jelly.

"And she's relishing it. At the same time, you know it's got to hurt, too, because of what she's doing to her daughter. It's really ugly. There's one moment when I just wanted to say, 'I'm sorry I have to do this. You know I have to do it. Just be quiet and let me do it.' "

It's a tough scene to watch, she says. "At the same time, when I first noticed audience reactions at Sundance [Film Festival in Utah], I thought, 'I'm one of those characters you love to hate.' It's like watching Richard III slash his way to the crown. Two more people to kill. . . . Go! go!"

The independent film marks the directing debut of veteran screenwriter Wells, who nevertheless was cool and relaxed, Ms. Smart says. "It was almost all guys - it almost always is - and a real strong D.P. [Pretty Woman cinematographer Charles Minsky]. But she [Ms. Wells] seemed to be having a good time. She could walk up to you and get right to the heart of a scene. To me, it's so well-written that I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it from the beginning."

Ms. Wells has written numerous screenplays, including The Truth About Cats & Dogs and a rewrite on George of the Jungle. Her script for Guinevere won the coveted Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at this year's Sundance festival.

Obviously, the actress says, Ms. Wells loves actors. "Unfortunately, that isn't true of all directors. She'd written the script. She knew what she wanted. It was all there in her head. She could see and hear every moment."

Working with the tiny Ms. Polley was a joy, Ms. Smart says. "Those eyes! She was so great to work with because everything she does is so minimal and real, and that's what makes it so powerful. Stephen's the same - especially in that confrontation scene."

The subject of mentoring has been frequent movie fodder. Pygmalion, A Star Is Born and My Fair Lady for starters. But here both the young woman and the older photographer are outcasts who desperately cling to each other.

"For men, the awe that comes with that kind of relationship is kind of hard to resist," she says. "It's just that it's not going to last too long, fellows. Certainly women like their own share of 'awe' as well."

But, she says, "Instinctively, women are realists because they're mothers. They have to be more practical. I think women discover at a much younger age - and this is really not a criticism of men - what's really important in life. Men just take a little longer."

After graduating in drama from the University of Washington, the Seattle native didn't go Hollywood. Instead she worked on the regional stage, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, off-Broadway, on Broadway, at film and TV.

She can play anything, sliding up and down the emotional scale. "In the theater, that kind of versatility is considered a plus," she says. "I have felt in the last couple years that it's not a plus in Hollywood. You need to be a type - either a leading lady or a character actress. You can't be a little of each, which is what I am and always have been."

Ms. Smart is a charmer, a throw-back-her-head laugher and good company. She's also 5-foot-10 in an industry full of short men.

"I'm too tall for a lot of guys. Remember 'awe' [the word she uses to destroy Mr. Rea]. You don't get a lot of awe when a woman's looking you right in the eye."

She has had several film roles before Guinevere, but her highest visibility has been on TV, in roles such as Designing Women's sweet, dim Charlene Frazier, as a borderline-retarded mother fighting for custody of her kids in ABC's The Yarn Princess, as a taciturn swamp farmer in CBS' The Yearling and as a stogie-smoking lady friend of Rhett Butler's in CBS' eight-hour miniseries Scarlett.

And though she'd like to forget it, she was a lawyer's ill-fated wife in CBS' A Seduction in Travis County, filmed in Austin with Peter Coyote in 1991.

"Designing Women was the easiest show I ever had, the shortest hours I ever worked. Don't let any actor fool you about episodic TV unless they're doing an hour show. I don't know how they survive those. Hour shows are killers."

She's proud of The Yearling but felt frustrated, too. "You're redoing an American classic, and you have to do it in 21 days. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but gosh, you're doing a period piece, and the lead is a child, which means you can only work so many hours, there are animals galore, which takes a huge amount of hours, and you have to shoot it in 21 days. It's not fair."

Making Scarlett in London and Charleston was fun, she says. "Of course, I got to play a woman who was a little ahead of her time. She was elegantly dressed but puffing away on little cigars and driving carriages through the streets of Charleston, which was scary."

But oh, those tight corsets, she says. "The first week I made the mistake of eating a normal-sized lunch. For the next week, I was so ill, I thought I'd rupture my spleen. I got toxic. You stand up because it's so hard to sit down."

A diabetic since childhood, Ms. Smart says she has been lucky. "I haven't had side effects. Oh, I wish there was one day when I didn't have to think about it. . . . When you're a kid, you think, 'What could be worse - I have to take shots and I can't eat candy!' But I think you're more adaptable as a kid. I was giving myself injections the day I was diagnosed."