”I think I`m willing to bleed.”
Speaking over the din in a posh restaurant, actress Christine Lahti considers her niche in Hollywood.
”I`m aware that a lot of times people call my characters the heart of a movie, that I`m able to touch people. But I can`t tell you how I do that. It`s really my work. I think maybe it`s a willingness to bleed, to have my characters go beneath the flesh and show some stuff that`s maybe a little more raw.”
Lahti, 42, is one of those actresses who give identity to the characters they play, and yet aren`t readily identifiable themselves.
In Lahti`s case, the characterizations have flowed from her life and the values she has espoused. A onetime hippie and political activist, an ardent, once angry feminist, a woman who often has felt like an outsider, she has played an antiwar militant on the lam, a symbol of the feminist movement and a host of women outside the mainstream. She also has portrayed an array of professionals-lawyers, doctors, teachers and a television journalist.
”I choose parts that are very close to the bone, parts I feel passionate about, parts I have a personal connection to from somewhere along the line in my life,” Lahti explains, adding with a laugh, ”I play lonely good.”
Lahti`s newest movie, opening Friday in Chicago and several other cities, is ”Leaving Normal,” which might seem to be another ”Thelma & Louise.”
Costarring Meg Tilly, it`s about two women-outsiders, drifters, loners-on the road. ”That`s the only similarity” between the two movies, Lahti says pointedly.
”The movie`s really about the improvisation of life, about second chances, about people who`ve messed up their lives in big ways, about resiliency,” Lahti says. ”Most important, it`s about friendship and about two women who find family in each other.”
This isn`t Lahti`s first attempt at probing loneliness and the costs of being an outsider, or portraying a woman whose soul has a dark side. Her role as an underground radical in ”Running on Empty” and the homeless mother she played in ”No Place Like Home” in 1990 on television are prime examples.
Yet there`s a bright side to Lahti, a humor and sunniness that invariably emerge, as they do in ”Leaving Normal.”
Born and raised in affluent Birmingham, Mich., she is of Finnish descent: the daughter of a politically conservative surgeon, Paul Lahti, now retired, and Elizabeth Margaret Lahti, a homemaker.
”My grandmother had a Finnish-language radio news program, and wasn`t home a lot,” Christine Lahti notes. ”My grandfather was more the house husband, although he had a grocery store. And my father`s sisters and brothers all became professionals. My mother gave up her nursing career to stay home after getting married. But my father did encourage his daughters that we were capable of doing anything we wanted. So he understood feminism and what that meant, but he didn`t want to marry (a feminist).”
Christine, third of the Lahti children, was nicknamed ”Jolly Green Giant” and was the butt of jokes in junior high school because of her height (She`s 5 foot 10) and gawkiness. This contributed to her sense of being an outsider-”and my sense of humor,” she says. Still, when she enrolled in the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1968, she hewed to the expected path, joining Delta Gamma sorority for a semester and looking for boyfriends.
Then the mood of the place and the era struck her.
”I dropped out of the sorority and became a hippie really fast, throwing away all my makeup, throwing away my razor for shaving my legs. It was so quick, which probably meant it was very superficial. But I grew into it-into those values, like refusing to objectify myself or any other person in terms of sexism or racism. I prefer humanism. As a woman, I grew up thinking that my worth was based on how I looked, not on what I felt or thought. That was something I began to refuse to accept, and still refuse to accept in myself and others.”
Her parents` support was unfailing. ”The one thing they gave me that I will always cherish was the feeling that I could do anything I set my mind to, if I really worked hard,” she said. ”It wasn`t like I was taught I was going to be handed anything-I was taught it was going to be a struggle. That`s a really huge gift.”
After majoring in theater at the University of Michigan, she began a master`s program in theater at Florida State University, but gave it up for training in New York. She waitressed a lot, did a couple of commercials, then made a couple of appearances off-Broadway.
Her feminist epiphany came early on, when after endless waitressing, she decided to ”sell out” and audition for a commercial. Spotting a classified ad in a theatrical publication, she went to advertiser`s office.
”This guy asked to take some pictures, and he did,” she says. ”He told me to call him the next day. When I called, he told me to come into the office again. I did, and he told me I had gotten two national commercials and I didn`t have to audition for them. Then he said, `You are the type my director friends like.”` Slowly it dawned on her, she said, that he`d shown the pictures to his associates, and that he was hiring women to have sex with them.
”When I turned him down, he said, `You`re a fool! You`re not gorgeous, you`re not special! Who are you? Your family`s not in the business, so how else are you going to get ahead?`
”I was shocked, horrified and angry that he had made assumptions about me. I left his office in tears. I remember walking the streets of New York for hours, crying and angry. I had been a feminist on paper and in my head, but that`s the day I became a feminist in my heart.”
That guy`s prediction was way off-base. One by one the opportunities came. She gained an Oscar nomination for her 1984 portrayal of Goldie Hawn`s tough-talking pal in ”Swing Shift,” and began racking up a series of embracing performances.
”Running on Empty” (1986), costarring Judd Hirsch and River Phoenix, depicted two `60s radicals who are compelled to emerge into the light after more than 15 years in flight from federal authorities. The reason: Their son, a musician, has received a university scholarship.
The actress` own life changed in 1981 when she met Thomas Schlamme (then a director of commercials and cable television programs) through a mutual friend. Two years later, they were married.
Today, after years of a bicoastal existence, they live in Santa Monica, with occasional jaunts to their upstate New York farm. Their marriage is solid, although not without tensions.
”Oh, we fought, we fought,” Lahti says about the early days. ”We still fight. We`re really vocal, loud, passionate people. We like to fight, I guess. But it clears the air, and then we can get back together very quickly. And we fight a lot less than we did.”
Of their son, now 3 1/2, she says: ”Willie changed everything for me. I`m not able to be as selfish and work-obsessed as I used to be. I used to spend periods not working, being depressed and feeling sorry for myself-wondering why I didn`t have more opportunities. Now when I`m not working, I`m so thrilled to be with this person.”
Lahti still considers herself an activist. ”I`m not on the news with it, but I definitely reflect it in my life and in my work. I`m tremendously tuned in to women`s struggle to become empowered.”
She continues looking for roles that allow her to find ”the soft underbelly” of characters. ”What are they afraid of?” she asks. ”What are they insecure about? What`s their sense of humor like? What are their more human colors, their more vulnerable spots? Focusing on that, while playing someone who is hard, tough and career-obsessed-that`s what interests me. Finding the secrets, the stuff that`s not so obvious.”
