Sally kirkland5/15/2023 ![]() ![]() She went home and meditated for six hours, willing the part to be hers. There were more vacillations, finally a dinner with the director at which, in tears, she demanded to know whether she had the part. “I didn’t have to act to convey that,” she says. The director also asked Kirkland to convey what it feels like to be growing older. She said, ‘I see nothing but success.’ I said, ‘You’re Aries with Scorpio rising I’m Scorpio with Aries rising. ![]() The women were asked to forget the script and improvise some scenes (a technique later used with fine farcical effect in the film). The idea was to make her look like an older woman trying to look younger. “I wore a black suit that Anna was going to wear in the film, and I had $300 worth of makeup done,” Kirkland says. The author and the director, another Polish exile named Yurek Bogayevicz, kept calling her back for auditions and finally asked her to read with Paulina Porizkova, the fashion model who was set to play the young refugee actress Anna befriends. You have to let it go and know it’s your own.” Typically, American actors are so intent on getting the accent right they overdo it. “Too much accent not relaxed enough to make it sound natural. Now, script in hand, she went to Actors Studio for what she calls moderation critiques with her friends Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. She met another man who had been a director in Warsaw and was now a house painter in New York.įrom high school, Kirkland had gone to study with Lee Strasberg. The elevator man in her building turned out to be an exile who had been a theatrical director in Eastern Europe and who helped her with her accents. She spent two months learning to speak Polish and Czech, not quite the same as learning the written languages but still difficult. She got hold of the script by Agnieszka Holland (who had won an Oscar for her documentary “Angry Harvest”). But she had no doubt that it could be the breakout role vaguely foreshadowed in Selznick’s prophecy, and she went for it with a terrier’s tenacity. Kirkland admits she was not the first choice for “Anna.” The other names in consideration were a good deal more luminous. Three of her films-”Futz,” “Brand X” and “Comin’ Apart”-have been artfully intended but also X-ratable. She has removed her clothes in the name of art and in social protest. Within the industry (stage and screen alike), Kirkland has won a reputation as a serious actress who is also fearless and unconventional. She suffered frostbite shooting the film in Stockton. Her most conspicuous film appearance until now may have been in the ads for a prototypically late-’60s independent effort called “Futz,” in which she was seen riding the mammoth pig of the title, both she and it bareback. She had roles, ranged upward from minuscule, in such films as “Blue,” “The Way We Were,” “Cinderella Liberty” and “Big Bad Mama.” She was in “Bite the Bullet” but Richard Brooks cut four of her scenes, telling her in a kindly way that she was “too interesting” in a small role. She has in fact done 26 films, 150 plays and 40 guest roles in movies for television. Was he psychic? Did he program my mind? I’ve never stopped acting.” He said I should keep working, do everything, rack up as many credits as I can. Her conversation tends to be a long and wondrous series of exclamation points. “He was telling me all this and I was 17!” Kirkland says. He said I was too tall, too bright and too individual and eccentric to make it either as an ingenue or as a leading lady. “David,” Kirkland goes on, “said there was no studio system anymore and therefore no one who would bring me along. It is one of those incandescent parts which, as has been observed, actors will mortgage their souls to get. She plays a Czech film star in exile in New York, drowning in alcohol and despair but clinging to the shards of a career. ![]() Kirkland, who is 43, stars in the title role of “Anna,” which opens Friday in Los Angeles and which has been winning her the kind of where-have-you-been-all-my-life? reviews that hint of major stardom and certainly of major reputation. It is an easy prophecy to remember it’s the ones that don’t work out that you forget. “David said, ‘You’re going to be a major star, but not before you’re in your late 30s or 40s.’ ” The legendary producer of “Gone With the Wind” liked and admired her. The way Sally Kirkland tells it, she was young but already determined to be an actress and was dating a stepson of David O. ![]()
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