When history rushed through Marina Oswald’s house in Dallas like a hurricane 30 years ago, she was left high and dry. She was a widow with two babies, little knowledge of English and a lifetime label: wife of the man who committed the crime of the century.
Telling Marina’s story in “Fatal Deception: Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald” at 8 p.m. Monday on NBC-Ch. 5 marks the 30th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy with the ultimate “woman’s angle” TV movie. Marina’s role in Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities was nil, but she-like the rest of us-suffered the consequences.
“Marina has always felt guilty,” says Helena Bonham Carter, the Londoner who plays Marina in the TV movie. “She knew Lee was unstable. She knew he had gone after Gen. Edwin Walker and she knew he had a gun. She had argued with him for months over it. She was in the act of checking to see if the gun was still there on Nov. 22 when the police arrived.”
Marina Oswald is now Mrs. Kenneth Porter, living in the Dallas area and working as a house cleaner. Her two children with Oswald are grown and she has a teenage child with Porter.
“She’s quite attractive and witty,” Carter says of Marina. “She’s slighter than me with bright blue eyes. She dominates the conversation and she doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”
When NBC filmed in Russia, Marina accompanied the production for only her second visit to her homeland since marrying Oswald in 1961.
“We all went out to dinner one night and she really relaxed and sang Russian songs,” Carter recalls.
Carter studied videotapes of interviews with Marina to capture her accent and learn her point of view.
“At first she believed Lee (played by Frank Whaley) was guilty. But when she testified at the 1978 hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, she realized that there was a lot of evidence that there might have been a bullet coming from a different direction.
“She began to feel she’d been used as a pawn by the government. Then she met a conspiracy theorist who convinced her that Lee didn’t do it.”
For years Marina resisted TV offers to tell her story but finally agreed, accepting a substantial fee. In its re-creation of the assassination, the movie will leave viewers with the impression that “Oswald didn’t do it alone,” Carter says.
Carter, who has specialized in playing well-spoken Englishwomen in period dramas, admits that she seems odd casting to play a contemporary Russian. She does have a Russian ancestor, a great-grandmother who came from Odessa.
Her better known forebears include her great-grandfather Henry Asquith, who was British prime minister; great-uncle Anthony Asquith, a film director; and grandmother Violet Bonham Carter, a writer and politician.
“The producer of `Fatal Deception’ (Bernard Sofronski) definitely wanted a foreigner,” she says.
“The fact that I’m not Russian didn’t faze him. He kept going on about my face. I wish I weren’t cast for my face but it seems to be inevitable.
“The great pleasure for me in playing the part was doing the accent. I had to fight for the accent, but I dug my heels in because so much of the story is about her inability to understand what’s going on.”
Carter’s best-remembered role was in “A Room With a View,” playing a turn-of-the-century belle named Lucy Honeychurch. She also has appeared in three other films based on E.M. Forster novels, “Howard’s End,” “Where Angels Fear to Tread” and “Maurice,” and she played Ophelia to Mel Gibson’s Hamlet. She calls parts like these “corset roles.”
She looks neither Russian nor corset-bound on a quiet afternoon in the home of her parents, a wheelchair-bound retired merchant banker and a psychotherapist.
She’s wearing a shapeless blue housedress with sneakers, and her mass of chestnut hair is pinned up. She was born in this large North London house and still lives there.
In an upper-middle-class drawl that the British describe as posh or toffee-nosed, she describes her efforts to advance beyond her Lucy Honeychurch image.
“I’ve just done a TV movie here called `Dancing Queen,’ in which I played a strip-o-gram, a real working-class girl. I worked hard to get that part, and they warned me I might wind up with egg all over my face. But instead of laying into me, the critics gave me the thumbs-up, which was heartwarming.
“I’ve had a good ride in costume drama. The characters did tend to be intelligent, and they weren’t just adjuncts to the male central character. Still, I feel I must get out of that corset.”
Carter began her career at 17 in “Lady Jane” when the film’s director, Trevor Nunn, saw a photograph of her in pre-Raphaelite costume. At the time she was a student at the highly selective Westminster School, intending to enter Cambridge to study French and philosophy. She has been busy acting ever since.
“It’s depressing to be in a business where you’re so reliant on what you look like. I suppose I’m considered petite-a word I hate-so I’m probably what people think people looked like in the past.
“I’m fine-featured and I’ve got vaguely pale skin, almost tubercular. Yet I am living in the 1990s. I am not living in some dreamy 19th Century fantasy.”
