Lange got her first part as Dwan in the 1976 remake of King Kong. The film
flopped and Lange was singled out for criticism – just another Hollywood
blonde. “The press was just voracious,” she says. She didn’t appear in a
lead role again until 1981, when, to wide acclaim, she played the adulterous
waitress Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice alongside Jack Nicholson,
and her career snowballed. The same year, she and Grande divorced. By now
she was with the Russian actor and ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov, and they
had a daughter.
Until then – in the “early years”, as Lange calls them – she was haunted by
melancholy. “It was a deep depression, a profound loneliness I was filled
with.” This tendency to depression is a demon she has wrestled with in life
but been inspired by in her career. Some of her most successful parts have
been dark, tragic women on the brink of emotional collapse: the disturbed,
imprisoned actress Frances Farmer; the morphine addict Mary Tyrone in Long
Day’s Journey into Night; Carly, the gorgeous, volatile army wife in Blue
Sky, for which she won her second Oscar in 1995 – her first was in 1983 for
best supporting actress opposite Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. She has
carefully selected her roles for their intensity. “I’m not interested in
playing characters where there’s no meat on the bone – it’s too much work to
flesh it out,” she says. “To me, a part is easier the huger it is.”
Lange understands the turmoil at the core of these roles, having experienced
it herself: she has made no secret of her concerns for her own mental health
at certain points in her life. Has she exorcised her demons now? “Well,
there’s always that concern. How far are you away from madness at any
particular moment?” She laughs inexplicably. “Some of the characters I’ve
played – Blanche [in the remake of A Streetcar Named Desire], Mary, Frances
– were quite mad. That was great, because I was able to go through that
madness too, in a way you try to keep at bay in your own life if possible.
But once I had kids, they filled my life so totally, you shift from being
the centre of your universe to being on the outskirts, and I think that’s
good.”
Lange met, and fell instantly in love with, Sam Shepard on the set of Frances
in 1982. Soon afterwards she moved out of the New York house she shared with
Baryshnikov, and has been with Shepard ever since, though they’ve never
married. They have two adult children. As a couple, Lange and Shepard are
deliberately un-Hollywood: they’ve never lived in LA and only moved to New
York three years ago.
At heart, Lange is very much a country girl. “I really miss it – opening the
door and walking out into the grass, living outside as much as you live
inside. New York is a very inside way of living. I don’t like that much.”
This sentiment shines through in her photographs: faces peer from dark
interiors out into the light, train tracks stretch into distant horizons, a
young couple laze in the grass. None of her photographs are posed. “I have a
hard time pointing my camera in a way that would invade someone’s territory.
Most of my photographs are shot as if I’m not there. I never come up into
somebody’s face; that would be way too impolite. I just don’t have it in me
to do it.”
All of Lange’s work is shot without flash in natural light, even at night,
which gives it a grainy quality and sometimes a haunting blackness. In one
image, a girl’s face is totally obscured by shadow as she is led away by a
woman, and in contrast her white dress is radiant. It’s beautiful and
slightly sinister. Has Lange let her own, self-confessed dark places
influence her photography? She frowns. “I’m certainly drawn to the
mysterious in photography. I love things that are not explained and not
obvious. I like it when you look at a photograph and there are hidden things
about it.”
After she gave it up for acting, Lange didn’t begin photography in earnest
again until 15 years ago, when Shepard returned from location in Europe and
presented her with a Leica. Her book has an introduction by her friend Patti
Smith, the “godmother of punk” and herself a photographer (as
well as a former girlfriend of Shepard’s). In it, Smith describes the
collection as “Stills from the film of the eye of Jessica Lange”.
Lange is self-taught in photography. She doesn’t feel other photographers have
influenced her work, though she says her acting career has informed it. “I
love a dramatic setting, where the light has a certain emotion to it and you
get a theatrical feel to the shot. I’m sure that has to do with
cinematography – observing how shots are set up.”
The waitress arrives with her order of beet salad, and a mountain of french
fries, which she picks through with her fingers and dips in ketchup. “Feel
free to help yourself to some fries,” she tells me. She says she doesn’t
diet to maintain her slim frame: she walks, gardens and swims. “I’ve never
been a workout queen. I can’t think of anything more boring.” Jack Nicholson
once described her as a cross between a fawn and a Buick. At intervals, her
sense of fun twinkles through; her smile is easy and she laughs a lot, but
she’s never off her guard or far from pushing her point.
Lange has always been politically minded. She has spoken out against the Iraq
war, and campaigned for Barack Obama in the primary season of the
presidential elections. As we talk, the Democratic convention is taking
place, and she’s looking forward to watching Bill Clinton’s speech that
night with her family: “We have a perverse interest in what he’ll say – will
he mind his Ps and Qs or not?”
In the lead-up to Iraq, she came under attack from supporters of the war,
which she still finds hard to believe. “The country was so blinded by 9/11,
and what followed was this jingoistic fervour that was really alarming. The
Bush administration fed the nation a diet of fear, so if you spoke out
against the war you were a traitor. People like me were actually accused of
endangering the troops. It was mindless.Hopefully, Obama will be elected and
there’ll be some kind of intelligence at play; intelligence, conscience and
goodwill. As a nation, over the last eight years we have plummeted to an
all-time low. It’s hard to come to grips with.”
Lange’s softer side is most evident when she talks about motherhood, a role
that took precedence over any of those she has taken on stage or film and
led her to turn down some potentially career-defining parts: the lead in
Gorillas in the Mist, for example, for which Sigourney Weaver was nominated
for an Oscar.
