Jennifer Jason Leigh is a most chameleonic screen actress. Even after meeting her twice, she can be visualized from the characters she has played.
Diminutive and unassuming in person, she has a pouty mouth and broody, thoughtful eyes. For an interview she wore all black, which emphasized her light brown hair and pale complexion. It also highlighted her moppish sensuality, which often comes across as edgy and messed up on screen.
Up close she’s not palpably pretty, which has been to her advantage because as an actress she has been able to inhabit odd roles. Few other young actresses have played such an assortment of ignoble characters. What’s distinctive about her performances is that most of the time she’s barely recognizable from one film to the other.
Leigh readily admits to being shy and private outside of acting, and there appears to be little flashy carry-over from celebrity status to the real person. But when playing someone else, she appears to have the ability to lose herself in the character. And she doesn’t seem to mind whom she plays-the odder the better, it seems.
Leigh was the stressed out young mother giving phone sex to pay the bills in “Short Cuts,” the roommate from hell in “Single White Female,” the drug addict in “Rush,” the prostitute in “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and the victimized blind girl in “Eyes of a Stranger.”
Her most recent role was that of a hard-nosed, fast-talking reporter in the “The Hudsucker Proxy,” and next up, the witty, wild-living but sad New York writer, Dorothy Parker, in “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.”
At 32, Leigh, the daughter of an actor father and a screenwriter mother, has been in two dozen films, but uncharacteristically for a Californian who grew up surrounded by Hollywood, she doesn’t seem to be preoccupied with her screen image. What matters most to Leigh is her craft, the art of losing yourself in someone else’s character, and the more unlikeable, the better.
“To me acting is a lifeline,” she says. “It’s like stepping inside someone else’s life, understanding their behavior and who they are and communicating that experience.
“I actually like playing unlikeable characters. I often find them the most appealing because they are not attractive on the surface. When you’re playing them, hopefully you can communicate that you can’t simply put these people in a box because we all have things about us that we dislike. There are always parts of ourselves we hide away in order to please other people, and it’s wonderful as an actor to inhabit those parts and get them out.”
To look attractive on screen isn’t a major consideration for Leigh, and even nudity or being depicted in sexual activity doesn’t hold many fears.
“Doing love scenes doesn’t have to be this terrible thing,” she says.
“To look beautiful is not what’s interesting to me-that’s not the pull of acting. And I don’t have a problem with nudity if it says something about the character.”
She will even go to great lengths, above and beyond her practice of doing a lot of character research, to get the feel of a role. It wasn’t just the pushup bra and trashy blond look that conveyed the character in “Last Exit to Brooklyn.”
“You know I avoid looking at myself in mirrors when I’m in character, especially in a part like `Last Exit to Brooklyn.’ I completely avoided mirrors because that character had to see herself as a mean, sexy bombshell, but in reality she had to look like shit. I had to believe as the character that I was sexy, but I couldn’t see the truth.”
Researching the characters is often the most demanding part, she says: “I love doing the research because I never graduated from high school; I left early because of acting. I probably wouldn’t have graduated anyway because I was never there. Doing research is a great opportunity for me to learn, and I always take advantage of it. It’s often the hardest part of the work because it’s where all your fears come it.”
Having played a series of hookers and hard-core weirdos, there was light relief in her portrait of a brassy, 1950s journalist in “The Hudsucker Proxy,” a comedy about corporate greed and personal redemption, which co-starred Tim Robbins and Paul Newman. She was one of the boys, unashamed of flirting to get what she wanted, and even stirred her coffee with her pencil.
“It’s reminiscent of screwball comedies of the ’30s and ’40s so I approached it as though I was an actress in that period,” she says. “I’ve done about five comedies actually, so this isn’t my first one, but it’s my most stylized in many ways. I’m such a huge fan of the Coen (independent directors Ethan and Joel) brothers, I couldn’t believe I got the role at all. I’ve now reached the stage in my career where I can work with directors I really admire, and I’m getting offered inspiring roles.”
Playing Dorothy Parker, the writer and scandalous figurehead of New York’s literati in the 1920s, in “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,” marks another bold move by Leigh.
“I loved everything about Dorothy Parker, her remarkable wit and the chaos that was her life. She wrote glorious prose and poetry. I’ve always been a huge admirer of her writing so getting to play her was a phenomenal turn of fate. She was this very complicated woman, so delicate and fragile and yet so witty. I loved every moment of playing her. I loved living her so much.”
Leigh makes clear that her own private life is not a topic for discussion.
“I’m a shy person. I don’t think it’s something you ever get over. It’s something you learn to live with-it’s who you are. Whenever I read about anyone’s private life I cringe. I don’t want people to know about me.”
Leigh only admits to living with a dog named Bessie.
Her family background has made her wary of marriage, she says. Her mother, screenwriter Barbara Turner, had divorced her father, actor Vic Morrow, who died in a 1982 accident on the set of “Twilight Zone-The Movie.”
“Divorce is a horrible thing, and any child of divorce has a tough time believing in marriage. I don’t think I’d ever get married on a whim, or if it didn’t feel truly grounded, like a life commitment.”
Leigh says she has a close relationship with her mother, whom she regards as her best critic, and later this year they plan to be involved in a film together.
“I play the younger sister of this grounded family who is a singer but has no voice. The older sister has a voice from God, a gift, and it’s about their relationship.”
Although Leigh grew up and still lives in Los Angeles, she seldom is part of the Hollywood social scene. Away from the set, her life is taken up with pretty ordinary things, she maintains.
“My own life is fairly simple: I don’t like parties and clubs. I’m not very good at small talk.”
With the death of actor River Phoenix, still a relatively topical subject among younger actors, Leigh, who is also counted among the young and moving upward set, maintains that substance abuse is not a problem. All indications are that she has considerable willpower-after all, she lost 60 pounds to play a teenager with anorexia in the “The Best Little Girl in the World,” and she undertook two months of researching twins and psychiatric cases for “Single White Female.”
“I don’t know much about his (Phoenix) drug history, but I don’t think it has anything to do with being a celebrity. I’ve simply never liked drugs personally. I have an aversion to them.”
She isn’t like the other actors who, when they make it, try to keep their distance from Hollywood by living elsewhere.
“I’ve never wanted to leave Los Angeles. I grew up there. I think it’s different if you’ve grown up in Hollywood than if you’ve moved there from somewhere else. Although it’s a film industry town, it’s also home to me. I grew up a couple of blocks from Hollywood Boulevard; it wasn’t some fabled land.
“I probably have a very different image of the place from people who come from outside. It’s not the most beautiful place in the world, but it’s my home. Even with the earthquake, to live in a place where everyone is feeling the same feeling is phenomenal.”
Coming from a family working in films wasn’t the impetus in becoming an actress, she suggests.
“I think it was more about being someone who was very shy and self-conscious and (I) found when I was able to act I lost all of that. I could reach out and be amongst people, which for me on my own was very hard to do.”
With her film profile rapidly rising, Leigh professes not to be worried by being a celebrity. “I’m not really worried about it because I’m a very private person, and I’m hardly ever recognized in the streets, which is a great thing. It hasn’t become a problem for me in any way, except I’m getting a lot of work.
“I think I’ve just been lucky in being able to do so many roles which were really interesting women, and I’ve been fortunate in that my tastes are odd.”
