The Return of Juliette Lewis

Marshall and producer Alexandra Rose decided to go with her, and so, for the first time in almost two years, Juliette Lewis walked onto the set of a big-studio picture. Who says there are no second acts in American life?

The first act of Lewis's life began when she entered the world in an unassisted home birth, and it continued in the bohemian households of her actor father (Geoffrey Lewis, who can be seen in six Clint Eastwood movies) and her mother, Glenis Batley, a graphic artist who divorced Juliette's father when Juliette was two. The parents nurtured their daughter's creativity and set few boundaries.

"Our dad never had a curfew or anything, but if I needed a video camera, he gave me one. He gave me the tools, but he never tried to form me." Each parent has since remarried more than once, so there's a raft of siblings and half siblings, some of whom starred with Juliette in lots of garage productions. Lewis claims she knew she wanted to be an actress when she was six. "People can't grasp it, but I knew I was legit."

Dad, who lived in the San Fernando Valley, agreed high school wasn't doing much for Juliette, so she dropped out, went to a tutor, studied for the proficiency test and passed. At 15, she became an emancipated minor so she wouldn't be bound by child labor laws. She left home and temporarily moved in with a family friend, actress Karen Black, until she saved enough money for her own apartment. Ever resourceful, she used a friend's name (and birthday) to buy a used car, and with no license she drove around to auditions. Though she'd never had an acting lesson, she quickly began landing jobs in sitcoms which, not surprisingly, she found constraining. On such short-lived series as A Family for Joe, the directors would stand there and say, "Don't do anything with your hands."

"Since they don't care about character and everything is geared for the punch line, I'd be standing there stiffly waiting to yell my lines in a really animated way. 'BUT DAD, YOU KNOW WHY I DIDN'T...'" She shudders thinking about it. "TV strangles your creativity and turns you into a bad actor."

In 1991, Scorsese rescued her from sitcom purgatory.

"Scorsese allowed me to do what I thought I knew. He validated me. This was huge. I needed that validation. And afterwards, I thought I had arrived. I thought, 'This is professionalism at its finest. It'll be this way from now on.' I got spoiled." As it turned out, she would have to wait seven years before she'd get spoiled again.

During the two weeks of rehearsal for The Other Sister, Lewis hadn't yet homed in on the guttural monotone of her character's voice. She and Ribisi had visited with the mentally handicapped, and Ribisi was already in character 24 hours a day, but she was still searching. "I'm sure other directors would have kept coming up to me and saying, 'Do you have the voice yet?' but Garry didn't. He had faith that I'd find it, and that made me more courageous." She needed this shot of courage, because not only was she making a comeback, but "this was the most challenging part I ever played. I couldn't fall back on instinct or mannerisms. I had to be more precise, and I had to trust Garry to give me ... what's the word ... barometers?"

"Parameters."

"That's it. Because I knew it would be easy to do this part badly. Normally I don't trust directors. Some of them try to get under my skin and do some weird mind-gaming. I don't need that. With Garry I had the kind of relationship where we got intuitive with each other. He would think something and I'd end up doing it on the next take. It was this special thing."

Marshall later tells me, "We got on so well that I went to her birthday party and roller skated. I never realized how funny she could be. On the set, she had these moments of exuberance that don't exactly go with her past. There was a real joie de vivre about her. I'd screened some of her movies, and I'd never seen her light up the screen with that kind of smile. It helped that she liked the boy."

When "the boy" and Lewis's character, Carla, have their first kissing-on-the-couch scene, she confesses to feeling some things in her belly that she's never felt before. "I'd go into my trailer after a scene like that and feel such emotion," Lewis says. "I was so moved by what was going on between these two characters. I've never been moved by a piece like that."

Lewis will wait for the movie's release and brace for the media onslaught in a Hollywood Hills house she shares with her sister, her brother-in-law and two nieces. As for boyfriends, "I haven't had one in a long time. I'm not running to a love life. I've finally started to like being alone." And when there's a little too much private time? "I get on the highway and drive to Pasadena and listen to New Order."

Of course, after The Other Sister, there may not be a lot of private time. When I ask Marshall about Lewis's Oscar possibilities, he says, "All I know is that I had this poor girl in a bird suit, I shot her with makeup on only half her face, and I shot her with cracker crumbs on her sweater. Most actresses want to be glamour girls, but Juliette doesn't worry about that." As for her range, "She can go from comedy to losing it completely, and that's a stretch for anybody." But perhaps most importantly, when it comes to the Oscars, Marshall says, "The town likes people who get it together, and Juliette has gotten it together."

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Jeffrey Lantos interviewed Nick Nolte in the Dec./Jan. 99 issue of Movieline.

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