“It’s funny you should catch me at this stage in my life,” actress Elizabeth Perkins says between drags on a cigarette.
“I think that when a woman gets to 32, which I am now, something happens. You look back on the last 10 years and you say, `Wait a minute! Where am I going? What am I doing?’ And you reach a certain level of maturity, becoming who you’re going to be for the rest of your life.”
The girl from the 1988 movie “Big.” That’s how audiences and critics continue to identify this woman who has had that one box-office hit during a 12-film movie career. She played a marketing analyst smitten by a guy in his 30s who’s really a 12-year-old kid-played by Tom Hanks.
Perkins says she is a former “hell-raiser,” a native New Yorker who spent part of her teens and 20s in Chicago. A frenetic lifestyle-“dabbling” in drugs and alcohol-is in her past. She does still smoke. As her lifestyle has grown more conservative, she has become less naive and sanguine about the business in which she has worked for nearly 10 years.
“I used to think that hard work, good work and strong values would get you far, and that’s not necessarily true in the movie industry,” she says. “Being a good actress and not compromising and working with good directors is not necessarily going to get you to the top of the heap.”
In response, she has shifted her expectations.
“I don’t aspire to greatness. At least, my definition of greatness has been redefined. I’ve lowered my sights. I used to look at Bette Davis and say, `That’s greatness.’ But that doesn’t exist anymore.
“When I was in my early 20s, Sally Field was doing `Places in the Heart.’ Meryl Streep was in `Silkwood.’ Jane Fonda had just done `The China Syndrome.’ What I aspired to existed.”
Perkins misses the strong women characters she saw in those films. She says, “Hollywood was in a very different place than it is now. Today it’s making cartoon movies about cartoon characters.”
Perkins made her film debut in 1986 in “About Last Night” as Demi Moore’s wisecracking roommate. She also was in “The Doctor” (1991), playing a cancer patient who brings a spark of humanity to a once self-righteous, now stricken physician played by William Hurt. Her other films include “Avalon” and “Love at Large.”
Perkins says she thrives on edgy, shadowy roles in offbeat film projects. She would like to play the late Diane Arbus-a photographer who once said she was “born at the top of the ladder and (have been) climbing my way down ever since.” Arbus, a pioneer of modern street photography, took intensely personal portraits of people on society’s periphery.
“I guess I’ve never found anybody who didn’t look at the darker side of things to be very interesting,” Perkins says. “I’m an explorer. Things that are off-center to me are much more interesting than the things that follow the straight and narrow path.
“That’s why I am very fascinated with people who kill,” she says. “What is it that happens in that person that doesn’t happen in the person standing next to him? My job-what I do for a living-is to study human behavior. I’m fascinated by exceptions to the rules.”
The down side of being out of the mainstream is being out of the limelight. That’s been Perkins’ history.
But a new year brings fresh opportunities. Around the time of the spring release of her latest feature film, “Indian Summer,” a nostalgic comedy-drama about a camp reunion, she will appear for the first time on television. Her prime-time ABC movie, “For Their Own Good,” to be aired in April, finds her in a typical, deadly serious central role, as a woman who blows the whistle on a sordid event in corporate America.
“Several different chemical industries working with carcinogens in the 1970s realized their female employees were in highly toxic situations,” Perkins says. “They solved it by adopting a fetal protection policy, which stated that all women of child-bearing years who wanted to keep their jobs had to agree to sterilization, or they would be fired. The women were getting $13 an hour. It was the highest-paying job in some towns.
Of one woman who was sterilized,” Perkins said, “Less than a year later, her entire department was laid off.”
(Eventually, the fetal protection policy came before the courts, and in 1991, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited corporations from establishing such regulations.)
Perkins took the role, which blends the experiences of several women, for a simple reason. “I read the script and thought it was important. And for this particular story, television is by far the best medium, because millions are going to see it.”
Her shift toward television, she says, is more a reflection of where the film industry stands today than of her own preferences. The kinds of roles she wants seem to be more in television than movies, she says. She’s impressed with the direction of theater as well.
“I just went back to New York to see `The Sisters Rosensweig,”‘ she says, “and I came out of there completely exhilarated and yet completely depressed. I thought, `These are the people who are saying something!’ “
The child of divorced parents, she spent six years-from the time she was 9 until she was 15-on her grandmother’s farm on the Massachusetts-Vermont border, with her mother (a drug and alcohol rehabilitation counselor) and two sisters. That isolated, matriarchal existence, she believes, was the source of her career.
“I lived way out in the middle of nowhere,” she says. “We got on the bus at a quarter of 7 to be at school 25 miles away at 8:30. I spent an enormous amount of time-6 years-alone, and developed a very active imagination. Nobody ever came to visit me. Dates later would complain about having to come and pick me up-I used to have to meet them 10 miles down the road.”
Her educational history was uneventful until boarding school, in her junior and senior years of high school.
“I was basically insubordinate,” she says. She was expelled two months shy of graduation after a series of violations-cutting classes and other acts of mischief.
She joined her father, a writer and editor, in Chicago, finishing high school at Robert Waller High School (now Lincoln Park). At a career program in 1977, she met a man from the school of the Goodman Theatre. After auditioning before longtime Goodman acting teacher Bella Itkin, she was accepted less than a week later on full scholarship.
After completing her course work at the Goodman, she worked there as an understudy, and with other area troupes. Her break came in 1983, when Gregory Mosher-then the Goodman’s artistic director-picked her for the lead in John Guare’s “Gardenia.” When the show closed, she moved to New York. Within two months, she won a part in the touring company of “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” More work at New York-area theaters led to the film “About Last Night” (adapted from a David Mamet play, “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,”) and the movies that followed.
All the while in New York, she experimented with “every kind of drug” available, until she simply decided one day that “this is not good, this is not working.”
Her mother’s experience in rehabilitation helped her overcome her own addiction, she says.
From 22 to 27, she was married to fellow Chicago actor Terry Kinney. The marriage failed, she says, because she was “unprepared for that amount of commitment. I didn’t want that stability then-I wanted to be free.”
Today, not only is she involved with her boyfriend, director Maurice Phillips, but she also is the mother of their 18-month-old daughter, Hannah. Both have brought change and maturity to Elizabeth’s life.
“Maurice is 13 years older than I am. I needed to be with somebody older. He is extremely supportive. He takes care of me. For me, that is a real first. I needed that-rather than having to take care of someone else. But I’m just as supportive of him.”
As resigned as she is to being part of an industry in which, she says, “women have to work twice as hard as men” to get work, she isn’t ready to stop battling. She searches for and reads scripts, and she says, “I call everybody in town-producers, directors. I hustle as hard as anyone.
“I want to work,” Perkins says. “I want to do things I’m proud of. And I won’t compromise certain values. I don’t believe in excessive violence or exploitation. (I say,) `This is what I will do and this is what I won’t do.’ That’s the way I choose to live my life.”
