Meg Tilly: Meg o'the Wild

It was another stroke of dubious luck that soon got her into a bad movie called Impulse that her husband was producing: "They asked me to come into it four times and I said no, that's not what I want after Big Chill and Amadeus. I always went on location with my husband but I said this time I didn't want to go 'cause I was scared they'd ask me again. He said don't be silly, they've already got someone. So I came with him and four days before they started shooting the actress pulled out and they didn't have anyone and the crew was there waiting. My husband and the director took me out to dinner and asked me to do it. The studio and the director put my husband on the spot, but I was really on the spot too, so I did it. I didn't like the script. It wasn't something I believed in. I worked as hard as I could to make it good, but it hurts my stomach to think about it."

The screen tests Tilly did for Amadeus were eventually seen by Norman Jewison and helped her get the role that won her an Oscar nomination, opposite Jane Fonda and Anne Bancroft. Tilly's first impression of her work in that film was not exactly the Academy's: "I saw half of Agnes of God and I was devastated, because I thought I was really horrible in it. And I thought all the work I did was lost and ruined and I thought my career was over. I put so much in it from my insides and I looked at the screen and all I could see was my big blank face. I left and called up my agent and said I don't think I can be an actress anymore." The agent in question, without seeing the film, advised Meg to make another immediately--the little heralded Off Beat.

So much for Hollywood advisers. But Tilly herself chose not to capitalize on the offers that came in after she went on to receive an Oscar nomination for the performance that had appalled her: "Everybody said, you can't have children. Get your career and have children later. But I said no, I want to have children. And after Agnes, everyone said here's the time to cash in, and I said no, I want my children to be close together in age so they'll have each other. So I had another baby. These things set you back. But I live my life, and in between I make movies."

Tilly's career did lose momentum. She came back in an intense, nicely honed performance in Bob Swaim's 1988 Masquerade, as an orphaned blueblood taken in by Rob Lowe ("I didn't really get to know him. I try to keep things separate...he's a nice boy, though--a boy?? He's a man I'm sure, but he seems like a boy, doesn't he?").

She also did fine work in the skewed independent thriller Girl on a Swing, of which she says, "The movie's not what I made. It's so disheartening, it made me feel like quitting acting when I saw it because I couldn't put more into a movie. I had the purest of intentions. I feel exploited."

The part of Madame de Tourvel in Milos Forman's Valmont was her first crack at a high profile part since Agnes. From what she says, just working with Forman was as important as playing the part.

"I would be happy just to read and rehearse with Milos because I learn so much. He knows exactly what he wants. He'll give an area this big"she holds her thumb and index finger around a tiny space"to work in, and some people find that constricting. He knows every move he wants, how he wants every line said. But within that, there's an incredible freedom. You can breathe, you can think. Sometimes you do something and he'll say, 'no, no, that's stupid, that's awful.' And he'll walk around and mimic you. Some people cringe because it's in front of a hundred people. But I'm used to ballet teachers yelling out, 'What are you doing?!'"

Tilly explains that Valmont is a very different take on the novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses than Stephen Frears's adaptation of the Christopher Hampton play of it. "It's less theatrical, it's more in the smaller gestures and the period," she says. And the main characters, particularly the conniving Marquise and Valmont, are younger. British actor Colin Firth also plays Valmont rather differently than John Malkovich did: "You know the guys who are the most dangerous?" asks Tilly. "The ones who make you feel the most comfortable. They make you laugh and they make you feel like the most fascinating person. Valmont loves women. And Any man who's a philandering womanizer has to really be able to get inside a woman's head, don't you think? Would you fall for some guy who's just obnoxious? Maybe once in a while, if you feel real sorry for him."

As it happens, Meg Tilly fell for Colin Firth. "But just don't say it was like Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer," she says, referring to the romance that blossomed during Dangerous Liaisons and ended Malkovich's marriage. "Because it wasn't at all like that. I'd been separated from my husband six months. It was after the movie was pretty much over that we decided to go out. Toward the end we started letting our characters go. We were so into them we could let them go. And that's when I realized, hey, I like this guy."

Tilly had met her husband, Tim Zinnemann, on her very first movie, Tex, which he was producing. "I didn't know who he was, I didn't know what a producer did. He was just somebody hanging around the set. I didn't know who Fred Zinnemann [Tim's famous director father] was. I didn't know how to pronounce Tim's last name till we'd been together for some time. I called him Tim Z. I met Tim's parents on The Big Chill, but they were just two nice old people. We got married when I was shooting Big Chill. I'd gotten Amadeus and he said 'there's no way you're going to Czechoslovakia for six months unless we're married' and I said, OK.

"We've been separated since August a year ago and we're divorcing. I wanted to be sure. We tried marriage counselors, we tried very hard. I've been with him almost eight years, that's a long time. You want things to work out. But I'm happier now. My children call him every day. He's a very good person and a good parent. And he was a good husband. I'd highly recommend him, you know what I mean? I think it was just me. I was barely 21 when we got together and he was 40. The 20's are very important years for a woman. I take responsibility for the marriage not working because I grew and changed and became not the person I was when he married me. If anything, he became a better person."

After Tilly finished Valmont, Jack Nicholson cast her in TheTwo Jakes, in the crucial, though supporting, role that Kelly McGillis was set to play in the movie's previous incarnation, back when producer Robert Evans was going to play the other Jake and Robert Towne was directing. "I wasn't sure if I really wanted to do the part," Tilly says. "But when I met with Jack and he started talking about the character, my curiosity got struck because I'd seen her differently. It was fun because after Milos, Jack was, like, Whoaooo, let's have fun.' It wasn't joking around. He was obsessed with making it better--and for me that's fun. I heard somebody said in some newspaper everybody couldn't wait to get off the set. Some New York paper. Nobody I talked to felt that way.

"Unfortunately, we weren't getting scenes until the day we shot them. One time, Jack had to write a scene himself because it never came. We came to the set and he did rewrites and we were dressed in our wardrobes. The set was lit and we were sitting there waiting for the scenes to come off the xerox. Luckily, this was the end of the movie and I had my whole character and my whole situation and he did too."

I ask Tilly what her plans are now, thinking she may have a strategy for following up her return to mainstream, "A" films. I should have known better. She tells me she's thinking of taking the year off. It's her daughter's first year of school--she just went to her first parent-teacher meeting--and she needs to be close to home. How does she maintain a relationship with Colin Firth? "He comes to visit and it's wonderful. He works out of London. I need breathing space. I've gotten out of a relationship that seems very recent, and I don't want to leap too deeply into another. It's nice. He'll come back and visit."

So Meg Tilly will just live for a while in Canada, away from the crowd. "L.A. isn't healthy," she says. "Everybody comes up and even if they're friends or nice people, they say 'So and so's getting so much, you know what their quote is now? And so and so, everybody hates that one now. And, did you see her fat ass?' Everything can get a hold on you and you have to say, wait a moment. I'm really lucky in my life."

As our waitress comes up to give us the check, she looks sheepishly at Tilly and says, "I know you're an actress, and I just can't think of your name. But could you sign an autograph? And could you give me one for the other waitress too?" Without announcing to the waitress what her name is, Tilly signs two autographs. Then she looks at her watch and registers surprise. "Oh, I've got to get home," she says. "I've got a turkey in the oven." I thank her for the interview and watch her disappear into the mall's thinning population. Later, on board Greyhound for my ride back to Vancouver, I think of her up on one of the surrounding hills, away from the discount stores, taking a turkey out of the oven in her log house.

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Virginia Campbell is the co-Editor of Movieline.

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