A couple of times a year, Mare Winningham kisses her husband and five children goodbye, leaves their farm in the California Sierras, and heads for Hollywood to add another notch to her black belt in acting.
During the last dozen years, Winningham, 33, has established herself as a gritty talent in a tricky field that rarely gets more than passing attention- made-for-television movies. Winningham has played a spectrum of roles, from teenage runaways and prostitutes to single mothers and imperiled women. She won an Emmy as best supporting actress in 1980 for ”Amber Waves.”
Her latest project is ”The Intruders,” a CBS mini-series airing Sunday and Tuesday evening. She plays a Nebraska woman who believes she has encountered extraterrestrials, and allows a California psychiatrist, played by Richard Crenna, to take on her case.
If Winningham`s young family, the farm and acting weren`t enough, she recently took a new direction-as a singer/songwriter-with the release of her first album, ”What Might Be,” and the initiation of plans for a tour.
Late one night several weeks ago, Winningham relaxed in her Los Angeles hotel room after a full day of shooting, and reflected on where she has been and where she`s going. Her husband, Bill Mapel, and the children, four boys and a girl ranging in age from 3 to 10, were a couple of hundred miles away on their 119-acre farm in the eastern Sierras, at the base of an 8,000-foot mountain. A foot of snow had blanketed the area the previous weekend, and another storm was on its way.
”This is the first job I`ve done in years where we didn`t take the kids out of school and bring `em all down here,” she said, glancing around the spacious but empty suite.
”I looked at the schedule and realized I had a lot of four-day blocks off, when I could go home. Also, my album was coming out, and there was a lot of work to be done publicizing it, so this was an opportunity to get serious about business. But it kind of backfired, because when I went home after three weeks, I had these little mutinies on my hands. I had to sign a petition the other day that this was the last weekend I`d be away.”
Speaking with a casual inflection, Winningham sounds much more rural than the Valley girl she actually is, raised by her schoolteacher parents-a football coach/physical education instructor and an English teacher-”with compassion and spirit” in the northwestern suburbs of Los Angeles.
”I came out of my childhood not only with a sense of myself,” she said, ”but also an awareness of my four siblings` senses of themselves.”
She became obsessed early on with performing. She has always been single- minded about the arts and her goals, she said, ”and everybody who loved me said, `We understand what you want to do.”`
First it was music. Mare started the piano at 6, and took up the guitar at 11. Then it was theater (”from 7th or 8th grade on, it was my whole existence”), fueled by the intensive high school drama competitions that are semi-annual events around Los Angeles.
Acting in a local summer production of ”The Sound of Music,” she was spotted by Meyer Mishkin, a Hollywood agent, who took her on as a client. Mishkin immediately set the course of her career by guiding her into television movies, among them ”Amber Waves” (her Emmy winner, in which she played a farm girl) and ”Off the Minnesota Strip,” a film about a teenage runaway hooker.
Winningham was barely out of her teens when, on a sound stage, she met her husband, an itinerant carnival worker turned technical adviser on her film, ”Freedom.” With some friends, he had poured his carnival earnings into land as part of a back-to-nature movement in northern California. Mare and Bill began a serious flirtation. ”We got pregnant immediately, and the rest is history,” she said. They were married when their first child was a year old.
None of the pregnancies, in fact, were planned, she said. ”Maybe three were conceived in that little interim period of nursing when you have the misread luxury of thinking that you have birth control with the breast feeding, only to find yourself going straight from breast feeding into another pregnancy,” she said. ”The others were probably irresponsible birth control, or maybe just throwing cares to the wind.”
Nonetheless, she said, ”the fact that I have this brood, this tribe, defines my life. It tells me what can and cannot happen at any given time.”
Fortunately, her success has come in television movies-21-day wonders-rather than in feature films, which take three to six months to shoot. Again and again she would audition for features, only land the occasional one (”St. Elmo`s Fire,” ”Shy People,” ”Turner and Hooch”), and then ”be handed these exquisite television movies.”
”I was such a whiner for years-I hated my television movies` success,”
she recalled. Gradually, she realized that her ”substantial, meaty TV experiences” compared favorably with the ”string of lightweight peripheral roles” she was getting in features.
”And at some point, the realities of having this ever-increasing family and being constantly employed allowed me to start relaxing a bit.”
An extra measure of satisfaction has come since she ”attacked the music thing,” as she put it-putting on tape the acoustic rock numbers she`d been writing for some time, mirroring her attitudes.
”Film and television didn`t provide me with a venue to really, really say or show what I had available inside me,” she said. But of her music, she said, ”There`s no interference. I mean, what I write and what I sing about-that`s a pure conduit. There`s nothing coming between me and how I want to communicate there.”
It began with her trio-two guitars and a bass-”gigging once a month or less” in the `80s, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area, ”and splitting up the 80 bucks we got from the bar among six people.” Having added drums and piano, the group recorded an album early in 1991, sought a distributor, and
”just got some lovely rejection notices.” Finally, Bay Cities, an independent label, picked the album up and released it in March.
”It`s like the `70s now,” she said. ”You`re going to see more and more singer/songwriters coming out of the woodwork. It`s the way it used to be with Jackson Browne and Carly Simon and James Taylor and Joni Mitchell.”
The forthcoming tour represents undiscovered territory for Mare and Bill- now the group`s manager-and the kids. They haven`t decided yet whether or not to take the children along.
Winningham is determined to maintain the existing pattern of her family`s life, as it has been since she became a parent. She works 20 percent of the year. During that time, her husband is primary caregiver. And, she says, he continues his protective role when she`s at home: ”When I`m off work, he is responsible for structuring the quality of our life.”
Bill established the ranch-45 minutes from town and the children`s schools-in the Sierra foothills, building a house, then adding a garden, orchard, meadow and pond.
Of her husband`s garden, Winningham said, ”He`s grown 20 different kinds of lettuce, every herb, squash, 10 different kinds of potatoes, peas, beans. We also have a lot of livestock and land that he looks after-and it`s all fueled by alternative energy he designed. He works sunup to sundown running everything.”
With the woods and creek as ”a natural, massive playground,” and with no television (”I wasn`t willing to put in the time it takes to weed out all the crap”), the children are being raised in an uncommon environment, and Winningham aims at sharing it with them to the fullest extent possible.
”Doses of me don`t satisfy any of our needs-theirs or mine,” she said, referring to her drop-ins while working. ”I get into my bride mode-love me, love me. I just want to know that they`re OK. I try to step back into my role, but the role of mom is not a weekend gig. And we are only as smooth as we are frequent with each other`s company.
”When it gets to the point where they haven`t seen me for a month except two days a week, we all feel the shift. On the one hand they want to please me and be extra special when they see me, but on the other hand, they`re kinda mad!”
Did she ever harbor fears about bringing children into the world?
”No. What I`m most concerned about is that I went over my quota,” she said. ”I think overpopulation is the issue-the big one. So I will forever have a sense of guilt about how I went outside my beliefs on that.
”But I would rationalize it by saying that their dad has an extremely heightened environmental awareness, and he`s passing along some keys to nature, and offering his children some ways of looking at nature that most kids never see, let alone live with.
”I`d like to think that maybe they`ll bring something to the planet to make up for the fact that I overpopulated it!”
