Madeline Stowe: Stowe-ing Away

On the occasion of returning to the screen after a two-year baby hiatus, the inimitable Madeline Stowe talks about playing nasty Barbies as a child and making love to William Hurt, Kenneth Branagh, and Doogie Howser in her new film, Tempting Fate.

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I arrive early at Madeleine Stowe's new house in Santa Monica. Having interviewed her before, I know she admires promptness and I left time for traffic, but there wasn't any. Early seems tacky, so I sit in the car and talk on the phone. When someone knocks on my window, I nearly jump out of my skin. There stands Stowe. "I thought that was you," she says, as I get out of my car. "You know how crazy my life is--I have nothing better to do than stand around and look out the window and wait for my interviewer to arrive." She lets loose one of her loopy laughs, half sexy-throaty, half air-going-the-wrong-way-through-her-nose, and runs her hands through her monumental hair.

As we head into Stowe's house, I'm wondering if she and husband, Brian Benben, have changed their ways since having a baby (they've been together 17 years). The last house of theirs I was in had a dorm-room feel you wouldn't associate with a movie star--piles of boxes, dogs sleeping on the sofas, the odd poster tacked to the wall. "Don't be appalled by the way we live," she begged me at the time. I look around to see if they've altered their lifestyle and gone for comfort over chaos. Nah--now there are just baby things adding to the clutter. Stowe sees my look. "We've got an interior decorator," she announces proudly. "He's going to make this place look fabulous."

Across the room, one-year-old May Benben sees her mommy and laughs with delight. Stowe scoops her up, and for once the actress, who often looks in normal life like a deer caught in headlights, seems relaxed and happy. "I'm good at this," she says. "Really good. I didn't know if I would be, because I don't really know that many people with kids."

Actually, to listen to Stowe, she doesn't know that many people with or without kids. As I say, I've interviewed her before and the subject of her lack of friends comes up over and over in conversation. For example, I point out that while she has a new film now, Tempting Fate, it's been over two years since her last movie, Terry Gilliam's_ Twelve Monkeys_, and she says, "Terry Gilliam and I had a terrific time during Twelve Monkeys. You know, I did a terrible thing with Terry..."

"Really?" I ask.

"No, not like that. It's just that Terry called me to chat and I didn't call him back for two months, because you know how I am--I don't really have a lot of friends and I don't know how these things are supposed to be done. We wouldn't have been in the same room, so what would we have said? He finally gave up on me."

As I'm pondering what this spaciness may have to do with the fact that Madeleine Stowe is not a superstar despite being gorgeous and despite having given performances like the one in, say, The Last of the Mohicans, Brian Benben comes bursting into the room and trips over the baby toys, looking for his keys. "I have to run," he tells Stowe. Then he points out that there's an exterminator in the backyard in a white jumpsuit with a mask over his nose and mouth, busily spraying.

"Close the windows," Stowe says, and we all run around to seal the fumes out. Benben goes out into the yard to have a man-to-man talk with the exterminator, who's apparently here to deal with ants. When he comes back, he shuts the door behind him and announces, "He says it's safe." We all look out at the exterminator, who has kept his mask firmly over his nose and mouth the whole time.

"You guys should go out for lunch," Benben says. We do, and I seem to be the only one who's worried that we've run out of the house for safety and left the baby inside.

As Stowe drives through Santa Monica, she laughs and says, "I really have no idea where we should go since we never go out to eat. So just pick out a place and we'll go there."

We stop at the first restaurant we see and get settled.

"So, in Tempting Fate," I begin, referring to Stowe's new movie, "you star with Kenneth Branagh, William Hurt and Doogie Howser."

"Neil Patrick Harris," Stowe laughs. "That poor guy... he'll probably be Doogie Howser for years. The movie's about a very extravagantly wealthy couple in the 1930s, East Coast high society. William Hurt plays my husband and we have a fabulous life, only we can't have a baby--he's infertile. He really wants an heir and my character really wants to be a mother, and they adore each other, so they look for a surrogate father, someone to impregnate me, and he basically buys this young guy out of Harvard-- Neil's character. And we sleep together, Neil and I, and he starts to fall in love with me and then he dies, and I believe that my husband may have killed him. And I turn to my priest, because I am a very religious Catholic in the film..."

"Omigod, it's a potboiler..."

"Totally. It could have veered over into melodrama, but it doesn't. The priest is played by Kenneth Branagh and he has a secret of his own, and the story is told from his point of view."

"Is it sexy?" I ask. Most of Stowe's films are, and I've heard that in this one she has sex not only with Hurt and Harris, but Branagh, too.

"Yes, I'd have to say yes. Part of it is that she and her husband are so in love. And she has feelings for all three of these men."

"Does Neil look really young? I mean, do you look like you could be his mother?"

"It felt a little weird, but the way guys in Hollywood carry on--there are 50- and 60-year-olds who want to play romantic leads opposite Gwyneth Paltrow. They look like her grandfather! At least in Tempting Fate that stuff is explained. "It was very important to me to find the core of the marriage," she continues. "If you have any belief in relationships surviving over time, that the core of whatever brought you together will not dissipate, this is what the film is really about."

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