The Curious Career of Jill Clayburgh

Clayburgh followed Silver Streak with another hit comedy, Semi-Tough, which cast her as a daft screwball gal desired by not one but two of the hottest movie stars of the time, Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson. And again Clayburgh got a chance to show off her skill for fleshing out underwritten roles, playing off the two men as if there was something in the script to play.

What Clayburgh needed next was a hit picture she could call her own, and she got it when Paul Mazursky--looking for a leading lady with "vulnerability, intelligence, and a sexuality that wasn't brazen"--cast her in the lead of An Unmarried Woman, a runaway Zeitgeist smash that touched a nerve with women everywhere. Playing Erica, who loses her identity as wife-and-mother when her husband leaves her, only to find a new life with supportive women pals, a supportive woman therapist, and a really cute new boyfriend, Clayburgh became the actress of the times. Actually an unmarried career gal with no kids, Clayburgh rode the crest of the film's enormous success all the way to an Oscar nomination and a Best Actress Prize at the Cannes Film Festival (which she shared with Isabelle Huppert for Violette).

"Roles are funny," Clayburgh said later. "For more than a year now, people have been saying, 'You're just like that person in An Unmarried Woman,'" adding that acclaim brought strain: "It's very frightening when you've suddenly got a big success. This sudden thing of, 'What if I fail?' So I was careful."

So careful, in fact, that she began making serious strategic errors. She passed up plum roles like Norma Rae, which she could have played very well--and which later won Sally Field an Oscar. Clayburgh waited a year before finally deciding on her next movie. Taking the high road, she played an incestuous opera diva in Bernardo Bertolucci's Luna, about which she prophetically remarked, "If I fail, I'll fail in Bertolucci's arms." Clayburgh certainly had reason to want to work with Bertolucci. Having made Last Tango in Paris and The Conformist in the previous few years, he had ascended to the level of acknowledged film genius. Then again, Clayburgh was set to play a mother who masturbates her heroin-addicted teenage son.

Luna was a commercial and critical disaster. "It was written to be incestuous," she told The New York Times. "But Bernardo was biting his fingernails and going nuts. He knew it wasn't right. He said, 'There just can't be incest because then there's nowhere to go. You can't go from such an act of destruction to a happy ending--nobody will buy it.'" Nobody did buy it, though today the film has a small cult following, which pleases Clayburgh.

"People like it or they hate it," she says happily. "I like that, because there's nothing wishy-washy about it. I don't know if it was one of the best films ever made, but it was certainly one of the best experiences I ever had. That's a role I would love to play over again, now that I have children. I think that there are things I understand about motherhood that I could have brought to the role."

Fortunately for Clayburgh, Luna opened the same week as the film she'd made after it, the hit comedy Starting Over, which teamed her with both Burl Reynolds and Candice Bergen. And yet, though this smash took the sting out of the failure of Luna--Clayburgh got a second Oscar nomination for Starting Over--there were those in the movie industry who were wondering whether Clayburgh's name, solo, could open a film that was not An Unmarried Woman.

Asked, around this time, whether it was true that she had turned down a $1 million salary to play the role that went to Lesley-Anne Down in a turgid thriller called Sphinx, Clayburgh told American Premiere, "If I did movies like Sphinx, what would people think of me? What kind of job would I get next?" But left to her own devices she managed to do at least as much damage as Sphinx could ever have done. When I ask her about what went wrong at this point, Clayburgh replies succinctly, "I just made a lot of movies that were unsuccessful, so there were no more offers."

The first of Clayburgh's bad films was another of the period's feminist-woman-undecided-about-love flicks, It's My Turn, badly directed by Girlfriends helmer Claudia Weill. Then, in a feminist-success-story "comedy" called_ First Monday in October_, she did a turn as a U.S. Supreme Court judge. Next, working from a script by her husband, playwright Rabe, she played another hyper-contemporary woman, a documentary filmmaker faced with the peril of Valium addiction in I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can. Last and least, she played an American lawyer in Costa-Gavras's pro-Palestinian rant, Hannah K.

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