Every 10 years or so, actress Judith Ivey thinks her career may have peaked.
Then, unfailingly, she gets a chance to play a role unlike anything she has played before.
In 1983, having worked on the stage and in commercials for a decade without much success, with her savings dwindling, she considered leaving acting and taking up work in a pet shop or with a veterinarian. Then the role of a voluptuous Cockney bathhouse tart in the New York production of Nell Dunn`s ”Steaming” surfaced. In its wake came a Tony award for Ivey and parts in three Hollywood films in one year, opposite Paul Newman, Gene Wilder and Steve Martin.
More recently, as things again seemed at a standstill, two fresh opportunities in television came her way: the role of prosecutor in a TV movie, ”The Betty Broderick Story: Part Two,” and an invitation to join the cast of the hit CBS comedy, ”Designing Women,” as a merry, zestful, rich Texas widow.
”I`ve always had a love-hate relationship with this business, where I think I don`t want to do this any more,” she said recently, relaxing on a Warner Studios soundstage in Burbank during a break in rehearsals for the CBS series.
”And just then my career lifts to a different place, and I`m challenged.”
Ivey, a veteran of stage, screen and television, who recently turned 41 is a character actor-by choice.
”I`m not interested in being the leading lady-the femme fatale,” she said. ”Being the star that everybody`s bouncing off of doesn`t intrigue me. I tend to be attracted to the multifaceted roles, to roles that are extremely complex, and they tend to be the character parts.
”I was trained to make each character distinctly different. In fact, (in college) if you gave a performance that remotely resembled the one before, you were frowned upon and dismissed. So I don`t know how to do it any other way;
it`s a muscle that`s been trained, a reflex now. And I have discovered over the years that that doesn`t lead to celebrity, to major stardom and fame. It`s logical-you`re not recognizable.
”Some people specialize in being themselves and making a character become them. I`m the opposite. I become the character. That`s my specialty-transformation-because I`ve been blessed with a gift to observe people and to reproduce them.”
Critics long have applauded Ivey`s work. New York magazine has headlined her ”the best little actress from Texas,” and Mike Nichols once called her one of the two best actresses he had ever directed, the other being Meryl Streep. Ivey has earned two Tonys, the second for her performance as an abused erotic dancer in David Rabe`s ”Hurlyburly,” which had its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre. Yet her assuredness in performance was counterbalanced offstage for much of her adult life, she said, by insecurity, a need to follow the pack and a fear of establishing permanent relationships.
Today, her ”party girl” period, as she terms it, with its self-doubt and substance abuse, is history. She and her husband, producer Tim Braine, 42, are parents of 2 1/2-year-old Maggie, who spends most days on the set with her mother and travels with her (and the family`s two dogs and two cats) when assignments take Ivey away from Los Angeles.
Ivey is accustomed to an itinerant life. She spent her own childhood largely on the move, attending more than a dozen schools during her elementary and high school years. Her father, Nathan, now retired, was a community colleges administrator who changed jobs several times.
The desire to be part of a group, rather than a standout, Ivey said, is a legacy of those times as the new girl in town. She vividly recalls, for example, her 6th grade awards ceremony, in which she won prize after prize, until the principal said, ”Maybe we should just let Judy stand up here for the rest of the ceremony.” Rather than being pleased at the attention, Ivey cringed.
Ivey was born in El Paso, Texas. Her father`s career eventually took the family to the Midwest, where Nathan Ivey was founding administrator of John A. Logan College in Carterville, Ill., and Southwestern Michigan College in Dowagiac. Her mother, Dorothy, was an English teacher (”She taught me 9th-grade English, and then we moved, and she taught me 11th-grade English”).
As a young girl, Ivy would sit every night with her parents and younger brother and sister at family dinners.
”Part of the event would be to mimic all the different people we observed during the day, particularly when we had just moved,” she said.
”We`d make fun of how the people talked, probably because we had been made fun of all day for our Texas accents. So it was a relief, but it was always fascinating.”
Ivey fell in love with acting during high school in Illinois, winning a theater scholarship to Illinois State University in Normal. After graduating, she moved to Chicago to pursue her career. There were no jobs to be had, and after six months she almost gave up. She thought about enrolling in law school, even taking the LSAT`s: ”Let`s say I did on the down side of all right.”
Her parents, she said, have been extremely supportive throughout her life. (Her father routinely talks with total strangers during intermission at her plays, asking their opinions, then telling them that Judy is his daughter).
When she was in Chicago and quite discouraged, they urged her to persist. Three months later she got her first job in a Goodman Theatre production of
”The Sea” by Edward Bond. For the rest of her stay in Chicago she went
”from play to play to play” and made commercials ”selling everything under the sun.”
During this period, her marriage to a graduate student failed.
”I`m not very good with a split focus,” said Ivey, who had married at 22, ”and I had trouble letting go of the career and then focusing on the marriage, and then likewise reversing it.
”When the marriage was challenged, the career won-I think rightly so. And my ex-husband has confirmed this. I don`t think he would have been happy with the way I wanted to lead my life, which meant New York.”
Moving to Manhattan in 1978 after the breakup, she became gun-shy, she said. Divorce was unheard-of in her family. It was a label she was ashamed of, she said, and she didn`t want to make another mistake where marriage was concerned.
”I got pretty close a couple of times, but I would booby-trap the relationship, so it fell apart. I was able to blame it on the guy, or on the circumstances, and not face the fact that I was terrified to walk in and commit myself to somebody. There were some wonderful men in my life who probably would have been wonderful partners, if I`d been capable myself.”
Complicating her life further, was the addictive life she led.
”I`m a child of the `60s,” she said, ”and I did my drugs and sex and rock `n` roll. I had played with all of that off and on since I was 19. It increased as time went on. It wasn`t something you just launched and did every day of the week-it crept up on you.
At first using drugs and alcohol didn`t seem to impede Ivey`s work success, so she looked at it as ”what we all read about-a way to relax.” But as time went on, she said, it was ”no longer recreational-it was somewhat therapeutic. And then I realized, this isn`t therapeutic. This is getting in the way of the rest of my life.
”I felt I was drinking far too much and was unhappy with it. It didn`t do anything for me except make me unhappy. It didn`t relax me. It didn`t take me away from my problems. It only heightened my awareness of what wasn`t working in my life. So the day came when I said, `I stop here. This is where I get off.` ”
That happened five years ago. There was no epiphany, no dry-out, no 12-step program.
”I slowly brought it under my control, just as it slowly had become an abusive situation,” she said. ”I think I had been in danger many times. I saw friends damage themselves and lose themselves, their careers, their homes. But I was lucky. I survived. If it had continued, I`d have some sad stories to tell you.”
In 1988, shortly after she learned to control her addiction, she met Braine, who was recently divorced. Tired of being alone, she realized that she had qualities to bring to a relationship: ”generosity, kindness, respect, fun and a lot of interests that keep a relationship going that I had not pursued because I`d been so focused on my career.” They were married in 1989.
The last year has been extremely gratifying for Ivey, she said. She spent most of the 1991-92 Broadway season playing an introverted, reclusive young woman opposite Jason Robards in Israel Horovitz`s two-character work, ”Park Your Car In Harvard Yard” (She received a Tony nomination). During the summer she played the prosecuting attorney in the sequel to ”The Betty Broderick Story” (it will be aired later this year on NBC).
”It was a role I hadn`t played,” she said. ”No one had ever asked me to be a lawyer, or to be that straight a character. It was most difficult because it required me to do less than I normally do-no jokes, no extreme idiosyncrasies, no quirks. In fact, her quirk was that she revealed very little.
”But there`s a part of me that completely understands her. I can be very quiet, very dedicated, very driven. And I can relate to her stillness because that`s part of my nature. I am slow but sure. I will get there. I will always get what I`m striving for.”
Now Ivey is loosening the ties to tackle B.J. Poteet, a character who, she said, ”is stretching all the muscles.” Ivey`s arrival as Poteet on
”Designing Women” is a bit delicate, considering that several characters have come and gone in the last two seasons as the show`s creative team continues to tinker with the formula.
”Part of the reason I was so attracted to the role, that made it different from characters before me, what you key into,” she said, ”is her positive attitude, her `go-get-`em` kind of gal. The characters that preceded me had negative qualities we loved to laugh at. This time you laugh along with her. Now all of us in the cast laugh together, rather than at each other.”
One of the trademarks of Ivey`s characters onstage and also in such movies as ”The Woman in Red,” ”Compromising Positions” and the television remake of William Faulkner`s ”The Long Hot Summer” is an inherent, deep-seated sexuality.
”In many ways we don`t think of women in their 40s as being sexual creatures unless you attach a certain quality-`Well, they`re that kind of woman`-that will allow them to be sexual. I don`t think that`s true. I was far more sexy in my 30s than I was in my 20s. It`s something I always look for in a character. I look for the humor, the vulnerability, the sexuality because that`s the way the audience can understand the character.”
Five years ago Ivey gained weight and was padded for a part in the movie version of Neil Simon`s ”Brighton Beach Memoirs.” It was another
transformation, a sharp turn away from roles she had been playing.
To her despair she found that ”nobody would see me for sexy tart roles after that, even though I was thin again and had long flowing blond hair. All they knew was the last thing they saw me do.
”There is a double standard for women in this business,” she said.
”When Robert De Niro gained 100 pounds for `Raging Bull` it was an artistic choice. When I did it I had gone to seed. It took great tenacity on the part of my agents to get me into certain auditions.”
In fact, she said, her roles tended to get smaller for the next two years, and she was asked more frequently to audition.
But the pendulum has swung back. As B.J. and as Judy, she`s swinging and sexy again.
Her assessment: ”It`s a wonderful time!”
