The Curious Career of Jill Clayburgh

Clayburgh groans aloud at the mention of the Costa-Gavras fiasco. "An extremely difficult movie--perhaps the most difficult I've ever done. I really should have taken a couple of years off when I had my first baby, but instead I schlepped this little baby all over Israel, in really difficult conditions. I got very sick. Also, Costa-Gavras was incredibly stressed by the subject matter, and the script was so stilted it might have been translated from another language." She laughs and says, "I really don't think I understood the character he wanted me to portray."

Several promising projects that might have helped Clayburgh out of these career doldrums did not get made: Sweet Libby, a biography of '30s torch singer Libby Holman; a film version of the off-Broadway hit A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking, pairing her with Susan Sarandon; a remake of Carole Lombard's great screwball comedy Nothing Sacred; and any number of others at Clayburgh's own production company. The proverbial tide had turned, and suddenly Clayburgh found herself the recipient of such snideness as this comment from Us magazine: "The cement ridges of an increasingly rigid screen persona threaten to bake the actress into premature self-parody."

In her 1982 interview with Saturday Review, Clayburgh waxed clairvoyant: "I don't know what the future holds. It's frightening. Women could go out again. They could just be a new fad in movies." Precisely. When Hollywood turned, increasingly, to the buddy "boy" films of the '80s--and, in any case, shunned Clayburgh for exceeding the limit of flop films (two in a row, at most)--she took time off to concentrate on her growing family. She also took the opportunity in every interview she did to distance herself from the role everyone associated her with, Erica in An Unmarried Woman. She called the film "old-fashioned" while explaining, "I was an actress picked by a director. It wasn't my story ... I'm not Gloria Steinem," and announced, "I'm so sick of those books for women, by women, that say you can have it all, because you cannot. It's a lot of crap .. . women who aren't doing it all now feel inferior, when actually nobody is doing it all."

Though there had been talk, at one time, of Clayburgh reteaming with her college-days pal Brian De Palma to make a feature called Where Are the Children?, based on Mary Higgins Clark's novel, by the time it finally got made--in 1986--De Palma had departed, and after a brief run in a handful of theaters, the film went straight to video. She followed this with a TV movie, Miles to Go, playing--as she had in Griffin and Phoenix--a cancer victim. In 1987, Andrei Konchalovsky came to Clayburgh's rescue, returning her--and co-star Barbara Hershey--to the big screen in his little-seen Shy People. After that, it was again back to TV for several "issue" films: Who Gets the Friends? (divorce), Unspeakable Acts (child abuse), Reason for Living: The Jill Ireland Story (cancer, again, plus a son on heroin, again). If these were "classy" TV projects, others were not: Clayburgh replaced ailing Kate Jackson in the killer-hunting-down-a-career-woman Fear Stalk, and the aforementioned Firestorm, earlier this year, was just another recreation of a recent tragedy. Throughout the late '80s, Clayburgh offered no-nonsense answers to questions other performers might have reasonably dodged. When the Long Beach Press-Telegram asked why she had never fulfilled her promise, Clayburgh said, "Stupid career moves. You can't go flying off with Bertolucci with a script that isn't finished--that's not a bright thing to do. I had been offered Norma Rae at the time. I should've done Norma Rae."

When I ask if she wishes things were different, Clayburgh concedes, "I do wish my career were in better shape, but fame is not what attracted me to acting. Fame is not where my heart and soul lie. I mean, I've never been a star like Stallone or Madonna--people never went, 'Ooooh, it's Jill Clayburgh!' I used to have to act, now I enjoy acting."

She returned to the big screen again last year, playing the wife of psychiatrist Alan Alda in Whispers in the Dark. This year, she's in the vastly better Rich in Love, in which she plays a woman who walks out on her husband and family, leaving them all to fend for themselves. Sitting with her in her home, nothing could seem farther from Clay-burgh's own life.

"It's not what I would do," she says, "but it is like acting out a fantasy. I don't really identify with that character on some levels, but you know, everyone feels like doing it some days."

As I prepare to leave, I ask Clayburgh what she wants to be doing in 10 years. "I don't really think like that," she answers. "I just sort of try to get through the day." I press for a reply, and she tells me, "Oh, I might work for the Peace Corps. Maybe I'd become a mountain woman, hiking and camping. Or perhaps I'll move to Italy--I don't get much pleasure from New York right now. Well," she says with a laugh, "I sure as hell loved that Matisse show."

One last question: is there a role she's never gotten to play? "I never got to play Peter Pan," she says. "That's something I could really go for. But I don't know if the world is ready for a 50-year-old Peter Pan!" I tell her that both Veronica Lake and Tallulah Bankhead played the ageless lad when they were well over 21, and Clayburgh laughs. "You mean they flew around on wires and everything? Then I certainly can! This is food for thought."

Eve Golden is the author of Platinum Girl: The Life and Legends of Jean Harlow. This is her first feature article for Movieline.

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