The names Embeth Davidtz, Julie Delpy and Ming-Na Wen may not yet cause you to rivet your eyes to billboards and marquees. But be patient-time should bring these women into focus.
South Africa’s Davidtz, France’s Delpy and Wen, born in China and raised in Pittsburgh, represent a new wave of actresses from abroad who are making their marks in Hollywood.
Davidtz, 27, has the pivotal role of a Nazi commandant’s maid in Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.”
Delpy, 23, who was featured in “Europa, Europa” and had a bit part in “The Three Musketeers” last fall, stars in three 1994 releases, including “Killing Zoe,” a dark comedy that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
Wen, 25, who played the haunting central figure June in “The Joy Luck Club,” will appear in a syndicated television movie, “Vanishing Son,” in April.
In the ’30s, the hot newcomers were Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. In the ’40s and ’50s, Ingrid Bergman and Sophia Loren arrived. France, England, Scandinavia to a lesser extent and the rest of Europe always have been well represented in Hollywood.
Occasionally an Asian-born actress surfaced, then virtually disappeared. (Think of Oscar-winner Miyoshi Umeki, or Lisa Lu and France Nuyen, for whom “The Joy Luck Club” marked their big-screen comeback after several decades.)
As producer Lindsay Law, of public television’s “American Playhouse,” observes, “Audiences’ appetites have grown to include a wider variety of movies.”
The result is a heightened interest in multicultural, multiethnic themes, mirrored in a “Joy Luck Club” or “Heaven and Earth,” and the trend towards casting foreign-born actresses.
“The world is changing,” says Delpy, 23. “When you’re around people, you find they’re from all over. And they’ll have to put that in films. Because if they only keep Americans in films, it’s not realistic anymore. It’s a fake image. It’s not the truth.”
The script of “Significant Other,” with a spring release, did not envision the nanny to Meg Ryan and Andy Garcia’s children as Asian, yet Chinese-American actress Lauren Tom (recently in “The Joy Luck Club”), a Chicagoan, is playing the part.
Ironically, females overseas and ethnic talents also are benefiting from a industry fact: Women, whether Delpy or Demi Moore, rarely sell a movie in the United States. Since it doesn’t involve major risk-taking to place an actress alongside a male box-office attraction, the field is open.
“It’s not going to imperil a movie to put a new woman in,” says Roger Avary, director of “Killing Zoe.”
“Men are somehow supposed to be the pillar-they’re carrying the ball,” says producer Janet Yang (“The Joy Luck Club,” “Heaven and Earth”). “We expect them to be rooted, more established. Women are ornamental to the package, so the expectations for them are different. Because of the way they’re objectified, people are more accepting of a variety, of a diversity, in women than in men.
“Then suddenly, they’re there, on a big screen, and they’ve made a huge impression. And people say, `Ohmigod!’ If the expectation was for them to take over the scene that way, they probably wouldn’t have been allowed to make it happen in the first place.”
Some women, like Wen, have spent most of their lives in the United States, working their way up. Others, like Delpy, created stirs in movies in their homelands before establishing residences and careers here.
Davidtz came from Johannesburg in 1990 because of politics: the restrictions her father, a chemical engineer, experienced professionally over the years because of his liberal views (“I sometimes think they broke his spirit in a way”) and the racial violence she witnessed on the Rhodes University campus. Also, she had exhausted all available artistic avenues there.
After receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in drama, she advanced in her craft to the national theater troupe.
Then, she says, “I started to look at myself, a middle-class white girl, in a culture that was changing so fast. . . . I already decided it was not going to change fast enough in the way I wanted it to or needed it to. It’s a terrible thing, and I’ll admit it . . . but I lost my faithfulness to the place. I lost my desire to be a pioneer for change.”
She had one invaluable possession: an American passport. She was born in the United States while her father was on a student visa, doing graduate work at Purdue. Then the family lived in New Jersey, where he did research for Mobil Oil and taught at Princeton, and returned home when Embeth was 7.
When she decided to return to the United States, a network of contacts passed her along, from Johannesburg to London to Los Angeles, where she began auditioning almost immediately. She came close a few times. Then a B-movie director, Sam Raimi, cast her in his “Army of Darkness.” After a dry period of about six months, she appeared opposite Brian Dennehy and Treat Williams in the 1992 television movie, “Deadly Matrimony.” Millions saw it, but only one viewer really counted.
“Spielberg called the agency the next day, looking for me,” she says. “Two days later I was sitting in his office.”He asked her to audition for “Schindler’s List.”
The defining moment in the lengthy filming in Poland came during a scene at Auschwitz, in which a group of Jewish women have their hair chopped short by German guards.
“I turned to walk, and their hair stuck to the bottoms of my feet,” Davidtz says. “For one second I knew what it was like to be dehumanized, to have life and death there around you. I wept that night to think about it. I walked away from there knowing how profound it was to have been spared-spared by not having to live that.”
Delpy, whose parents are veterans of the avant-garde theater in Paris, believes that the French film industry is not what it was during “the nouvelle vague (New Wave), when there was a lot going on.” There still is activity, she says, “but not like a whole movement; so living in France as an actress is not very exciting.”
She spent much of her formative years absorbing the wave of activity swirling around her parents’ troupe and their artist and writer friends. By the time she met filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard when she was 14 and began working with him, she had seen all his movies with her father, as well as those of Ingmar Bergman (her mother took her to see Disney and sci-fi, she says) and was able to discuss them with him. Before the end of her teens she was honored as “most promising actress” in France.
During a holiday in New York she won the part of the enigmatic young European opposite Sam Shepard in “Voyager.” Hearing of an open-casting call, she pretended to be an American (“I love to challenge myself-I did my best accent”), then played the scene with her own accent. The director, Volker Schlondorff, hired her, then found out about the ruse.
Falling in love with New York, she decided to move there, “work or no work,” and return to France when a part came around. She attended New York University Film School for three months in 1992. Recently, though, a “weird” feeling settled in that “somehow, I don’t want to be French anymore,” she says, so she rooted herself in Los Angeles.
Wen has followed a different route. Her affluent family in Suzhou-the Venice of China-was victimized during the cultural revolution and relegated to one room of its sprawling residence. The crime: success in business. So her parents fled to Macao, where Ming-Na (which means “Enlightenment”) was born, then on to Hong Kong, where they were divorced. In time, Ming and her mother came to the United States, first to New York City, then to Pittsburgh, where her mother remarried.
By high school Ming had assimilated completely. “Maybe I was rebellious-I wanted to be with the bigger crowd. I was friends with everybody-the jocks, the theater people, the freaks, the intellects.”
At Carnegie-Mellon University she never associated with the Chinese group on campus, only with fellow student actors. “I felt more comfortable with white people, with the people I grew up with-even with the Italian that I dated for a while.”
Even when she arrived in New York to act-she appeared on “As the World Turns” for a time as a 16-year-old of mixed-race who comes to America from Vietnam to find her father-she didn’t involve herself in Asian-American acting circles.
“The Joy Luck Club” changed all that, opening her eyes to who she was. March 1993, on location, she met her family, “about 60 of them-my uncles, cousins and aunts-and it made me feel stronger.”
She is grateful to the older actresses in the movie, her new role models, who “paved the way for people like me and the other young actresses to be able to continue forging ahead.”
Her circle of Asian friends has “quadrupled” in the last few months, she says, and her perspective has turned around dramatically.
“I’m much more focused on the image we Asian-Americans in the arts community want to project. Now I have a handful of people I’ve come to know who share my views on the image of the Chinese-American, the Chinese-American male, the family structure, who we are as professional people. All those things are very important to me now.”
The wave continues to roll for these women.
Fox Television has developed a situation comedy for Lauren Tom.
Davidtz is playing the female lead opposite Christian Slater, Kevin Bacon and Gary Oldman in a thriller now shooting, “Murder in the First.”
Delpy is starring in three releases this year.
Wen is slated to play a Midwestern teenager opposite Neil Patrick Harris in a new play at New York’s Lincoln Center.
“It’s all to the good,” producer Law says buoyantly. “Audiences are seeing faces and understanding lives that are not like their own.”
