While most Hollywood actresses search for a lead that will galvanize their careers, 28-year-old Kyra Sedgwick is taking a different tactic-standing out as a gifted ensemble player among fellow actors.
The actress held her own with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” and with a rash of her contemporaries, including Matt Dillon and Bridget Fonda, in “Singles.”
Over the last year she has appeared on television with Maximilian Schell and Amanda Plummer in “Miss Rose White” and with Anjelica Huston and Sam Neill in “Family Pictures.”
In her latest movie, “Heart and Souls,” released this summer, she’s one of four “souls” (along with Alfre Woodard, Charles Grodin and Tom Sizemore) who attach themselves to a young man (Robert Downey Jr.) born at the same instant as a bus crash that claims their lives. Once more it’s ensemble work.
“I’m really, really happy with it,” Sedgwick says. “It’ll make you laugh, and it’ll make you cry, and it’s about life, and it’s about death, and living your life for the moment.”
The part of a young woman in the movie who is trying to choose between marriage and independence “came out of the blue,” she says, without the need to audition, a welcome development given a paucity of scripts for women. (Sedgwick says she sees one script a month.)
Within her two-actor household (she is married to Kevin Bacon, himself an ensemble player in “Diner,” “JFK” and “A Few Good Men,”) she is striking a balance between her career and such non-professional concerns as motherhood and social awareness.
Sedgwick, with her cascading, shoulder-length blond curls and wide, incandescent grin, is a New York native who lives with her husband and their children (Travis Sedg, 4, and Sosie, 1), on a Connecticut farm and in a New York pied-a-terre, with its Hudson River panorama, for use when they have appointments in the city.
She is the second member of her family to gain headlines as a performer but is weary of the invariable mentions of the first, Edie Sedgwick, protege of the late Andy Warhol.
“Ohhh, I wonder when that’s gonna end!” the actress moans at a reference to Edie. “Yes, she’s a second cousin. I never met her. She died before I was born.”
Of two schools of thought among some young performers-one, that you have to make your mark early and forcefully, the other, that steady, if gradual progress serves one best in the long-run-she adheres to the latter.
“I feel like I’ve carved out a niche,” she says. “I couldn’t have written my career any better myself. It’s been a slow build, which is just what I’ve wanted. It’s too much pressure to, all of a sudden, shoot to stardom, like Julia Roberts. That kind of buildup can make you crazy.”
Sedgwick says she yearns for the kind of career that exists for actresses in England: “Miranda Richardson can do what she wants-from a lead to a small part and back again. They don’t build up their stars into mythic beings there.”
The daughter of an entrepreneur and a speech and learning disabilities specialist turned family therapist (her parents are long divorced), Sedgwick is one of six children (her brothers are an actor, an artist and a real-estate salesman, and her sisters are a teacher and a homemaker). During elementary and high school she moved frequently among private schools in Manhattan (“I kept trying to find one I liked because I thought school was supposed to be fun”) before settling in at Friends Academy, where she finished and “where I wished I’d started.”
While she was in high school, along with school plays, summer stock, children’s theater and acting classes, she was cast in the soap opera “Another World.” She never waitressed, having “socked away” money from television.
After graduation she alternated between colleges on the coasts (she briefly attended Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, N.Y., then spent a year at the University of Southern California) and acting stints on television, in movies and in the theater.
The role that made audiences and critics notice Sedgwick was that of Donna, high school sweetheart of Tom Cruise playing Ron Kovic, a paralyzed Vietnam veteran, in Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July.” Donna, who raised Kovic’s political consciousness, was the first role in which Sedgwick’s character serves as a catalyst for other events.
In “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” Newman and Woodward, as repressed heartland WASPs, were set against Sedgwick, their independent-minded teenage daughter. And in “Miss Rose White,” a drama set in post-WWII New York City, her title character hid her Jewishness to be accepted in the secular world, only to face her heritage again in her long-lost sister, a Holocaust survivor newly arrived in America.
“I don’t think it’s been a conscious decision to do ensemble work,” Sedgwick says. “It’s just that the movies I’ve looked at where I’m the lead that have been available for me haven’t been movies I’ve wanted to do.”
In one of her few movie leads, in “Pyrates,” a part she says she “absolutely loved,” she was cast with her husband as a couple whose lovemaking sets off fires. It went quickly to video.
She loves her work for the impact she can have on audiences.
“I love exciting people’s imaginations,” she says. “Compassion is really the greatest human trait there is. It’s such a beautiful thing to make people feel something for another human being. For two hours they walk around in that person’s shoes. That’s so important, I think.”
She met her husband when they appeared in a public television adaptation of Lanford Wilson’s play, “Lemon Sky.” With few exceptions they have been able to space their work so they can be together on location. Recently, though, Sedgwick was in Los Angeles and San Francisco for “Heart and Souls,” while Bacon went to Zimbabwe to shoot “The Air Up There.” But the family will all be in rural Oregon when the actor films “The River Wild” with Meryl Streep.
Sedgwick says she will not work just for the sake of working. She must have the part of someone “who has a lot of character to her character,” she says, smiling at her play on words. “I don’t want people to walk out of the theater and entirely forget the character I’ve played.
“If someone is just a cookie-cutter image of a girlfriend or date or wife, I’m totally uninterested. I’ve always passed on those scripts. Even when I was young and had no right to be picky, I just said, `I can’t do anything with this part.’ But if it’s a really small part with something interesting about it, I’ll do it.”
Such was the case with the role of Donna in the Kovic movie. Sedgwick stresses that she’s “not a writer,” yet she suggests that “one of the reasons Oliver hired me was because I disagreed with certain things he had in the script.”
“Donna was underwritten,” she says, “and we had a lot of talks about it. We went head to head a couple of times-in a great way. That’s why the part ended up a lot better than it was originally on the page.”
She attacks her roles painstakingly. It shows in her letter-perfect pronunciation of Hebrew in “Miss Rose White” and in her sympathetic portrayal of a woman burned by a series of love affairs in “Singles.”
“When I first got the part (in “Singles”), I didn’t think it would change anybody. It wasn’t until I really started researching the role, hanging out in the scene in Seattle, speaking to people, that I realized that it (being single) is a huge issue, and hugely painful.
“It wasn’t until I could get into the pain of it that I could feel good about the part I was playing”
Off-camera Sedgwick finds other ways to say something. As “hopeless and helpless” as she feels about the world, she calls herself “an active environmentalist.” She also is involved with a national organization, Northern Lights Alternatives, having gone through its program training volunteers to work with children and babies with AIDS.
She bristles at the criticism of Hollywood celebrities who are active in politics.
“Alfre (Woodard) said the greatest thing about it,” she says: ” `Why are we to be thought any less of just because we’re actors?’ I mean, we have a right to talk to our representatives and try to elicit change like anyone else.”
She says, however, that she is troubled by people in the industry who “jumped on the environmental bandwagon three years ago” and now you don’t hear anything else from them.
“I have a huge problem with AIDS ribbons,” she says. “People think if they put on the ribbon they won’t feel guilty. I’ve had people come up to me and thank me for not wearing a red ribbon.”
If you’re really doing something, you know it in your heart. And I really feel I am doing something,” she says of her environmental efforts and work with AIDS children. “But I’d like to do more.”
Entering the sixth year of her marriage, she prefers not to hold up her private life as an example of “having it all.”
How do she and Bacon work out the logistics of individual careers and parenting?
“I don’t have an answer. We just wing it. No parents know exactly what to do, and we don’t know it either. But we just try.
“I’m so tired of people saying `You can have it all,’ and `Oh, we manage,’ making it seem like our women movie stars are able to do somehow what no other career women can ever possibly do. Here are these people who look incredible, with perfect bodies, saying their lives are perfect.
“It’s so wrong, so unfair to the real world-the people who are having trouble and struggling. That’s why I want to sound as confused and as bumbling as everyone else.”
