Sarah Jessica Parker is that rare creature, a successful child actor who not only entered the cave of kiddie fame and lived to tell the tale but has emerged as one of the freshest and funniest young actresses in Hollywood.
While in the cave, she developed a keen eye for making the right move at the right time. In fact, she has been making professional decisions since the age of 8, beginning with her name.
“I think what confuses people is that there’s no hyphen,” the 29-year-old Parker says during a recent swing through Chicago, “so it looks like it’s my middle name. But it’s not. Sarah Jessica is my name, like Mary Louise or Billy Jo.”
Once she’d put her mind to it, it didn’t take long for that name to appear in the public eye, partly because she liked to peruse the morning newspaper at home in Ohio.
“I read in the kids section that NBC was looking for a girl to play the Little Match Girl in a television adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen story,” she remembers. “I don’t know what made me believe that I had anything to offer, but I went downtown (in Cincinnati) and there were all these little girls there and I auditioned. I got the job and I enjoyed it. So I pursued it.”
Up until then, her main exposure to the arts had been her regular weekend jaunts with her family-her mother, stepfather and seven siblings-to the museum, the symphony or the theater, which had a profound effect on her. “We weren’t allowed to watch television,” she says. “Instead, we listened to a lot of comedy albums and Broadway musicals. Art was the paramount influence in our lives, besides our parents, and since I didn’t excel academically, it was sort of nice that I was exposed to them (the arts).”
During a trip to New York City to visit her father-her parents divorced when she was 2-Parker’s youthful career took a leap forward when she won a role in a Broadway adaptation of “Turn of the Screw,” directed by Harold Pinter. This was followed by a year as one of the orphans in the Broadway musical “Annie,” which led to her playing the title role when she was 15. By then, the whole family had moved to New York, not only to help Sarah Jessica’s career blossom, but just as importantly, to make sure she didn’t turn into one of those bratty “child stars.”
“There were big, huge concerns about that in my family,” she recalls with a laugh. “My parents were very afraid of the trappings that can happen to a young performer happening to me, especially when I got the role of Annie. Because fame accelerates all those things. You get a lot of attention for being cute and adorable and loud and brassy. You’re indulged. My parents didn’t like that. They didn’t like to see it in other children, and they didn’t want to see it in me.”
But as her acting career was taking off, she had yet another decision to make. She had been practicing ballet since she was a child and was dancing with the American Ballet Theatre in New York.
“I thought about my choices,” she says. “I knew my personality well enough to know that I wasn’t going to be satisfied being told I had to leave the company at 34 or 35 to teach what I so wanted to do. I also knew that an actress, someone like Ruth Gordon, could work until the day she died. And there was something else. Dancing is really hellacious and encourages unhealthy ways of living. There’s the eating and not eating thing. It’s torture on your body.” But she adds, “I loved performing. I really loved it.”
Once she had determined to concentrate on acting, television came calling, but her parents were dead-set against it. “More than anything, they did not want me to go to California. They did not want me to go to Los Angeles,” she says. But when the offer for “Square Pegs” came along in 1982, it was too good to resist. “Nobody in my family could say no to it,” she remembers. The sitcom about a couple of geeky teenagers trying to fit in at a hip high school still has a cult following, even though the series was on for only a year.
Once “Square Pegs” ended, Parker found herself looking for film jobs while continuing to work in the theater, which remains her first love. She clicks off her early film credits: ” `Rich Kids,’ which I got cut out of, `Somewhere Tomorrow,’ `Footloose,’ `Flight of the Navigator.’ ” Then it was back to TV for the series “A Year in the Life.”
But almost everyone agrees that it was her role as Steve Martin’s Valley Girl squeeze SanDeE+ in 1991’s “L.A. Story” that launched the most successful stage of Parker’s career.
“I loved the role. She was a character that operated solely from the point (of view) of her sexuality. I had never played that before and it changed all perceptions about me in terms of the industry. Prior to that, casting always came down to the fact that they felt I wasn’t attractive, or I wasn’t somebody who was thought of in a sexual way, or that men couldn’t possibly respond to me in that way. It wasn’t until Steve Martin said, `Yeah, they can. I do,’ that everyone else said, `Oh yeah.’ There’s that collective wisdom out there, sort of like in politics.”
It led to her being cast as the obscure object of desire in Andrew Bergman’s “Honeymoon in Vegas” in 1992 and last year as the actress Dolores Fuller in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood.”
“I adored that movie,” Parker says of “Ed Wood.” “I was proud to be part of it, because I feel there’s a heroic quality to that kind of tenacity and belief and devotion and loyalty. We all treated it like a love story, which is exactly what it is.”
Her new film is “Miami Rhapsody,” a Woody Allenesque comedy of love and marriage, betrayal and divorce, passion and pain that opened on Friday. Parker plays Gwyn Marcus, an ad copywriter preparing to marry her zoologist boyfriend, Matt. But as the wedding plans proceed, she discovers that everyone she knows-including her parents and siblings-are having affairs. It throws her into such a frenzy that she begins to worry that perhaps marriage isn’t the answer at all. Yet Parker believes the movie is ultimately pro-marriage.
“What’s great about my character is that she comes to understand the compromise that is required in marriage. She discovers that it isn’t insurmountable, but that you have to sacrifice. And we’re of a generation that doesn’t do that easily-either gender.
“But I don’t have any doubts,” the still-single Parker adds. “I mean me, Sarah Jessica. I really believe in marriage. I know it comes with a bag full of treats and difficulties, but I like that.
“I may not have the same fear of commitment that Gwyn does, but I struggle with the same issues. I struggle with wanting it all.”
