“Smallville,” Annette O’Toole also can carry – and compose – a tune.
The actress has started a second career beyond her weekly role as the Earth mother of young Clark Kent (Tom Welling) in the Wednesday-night WB Network series. In tandem with her husband, “Laverne & Shirley” and “Saturday Night Live” alumnus Michael McKean, O’Toole now is a songwriter … an Oscar-nominated one.
She and McKean were up for the best original song honor at last month’s Academy Awards for “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow,” one of the tunes in the 2003 folk-music satire “A Mighty Wind” (which has its premium-cable premiere this month on HBO). The film was written and directed by the couple’s close friend Christopher Guest, who also worked with McKean on the 1984 cult classic “This Is Spinal Tap.”
The best song Oscar was won by “Into the West,” from “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” which dominated the awards.
The experience left O’Toole undaunted, and stunned by the degree of early success she’s had with her newest pursuit. “Michael has been writing music pretty much all his life,” she reports. “He started composing when he was 14, so it’s not new for him. But I started writing after 9/11. There’s music in our house all the time. We have a piano, Michael has two or three guitars, and I come from a musical-comedy background [her father is noted actor Peter O’Toole].”
“It’s not like it was completely foreign to me, but on 9/11, I was in Vancouver and couldn’t get a plane out … so I got in my rental car and drove 20 hours to get home. I just wanted to be with my family.”
The next morning, O’Toole was called to return for “Smallville” duty. “Somewhere between Portland and Seattle, this tune started going through my head, and it was driving me crazy. Michael came with me, so I said to him, ‘Would you listen to this and tell me if it’s a song that exists, or something I just made up?’ I sang the melody, and he said, ‘I think you’re making it up.’ Just as a lark, we started putting words to it, and it became this whimsical song about a girl named Potato who was in a paddy wagon. By the time we got to Vancouver, Michael said, ‘You know, I think Chris (Guest) would like it.’ “
Not only did that tune end up on the soundtrack of “A Mighty Wind,” Guest also commissioned a love song from O’Toole and McKean that became “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow.”
Guest thought it needed to be a bit funnier, but his wife, actress Jamie Lee Curtis, felt it was just right.
“Then,” O’Toole recalls, “the others went and did the movie, and I went off to ‘Smallville.’ Michael saw the movie first, and I asked him, ‘How was it? How was the song?’ He said, ‘I want you to see for yourself.’ When I did, I was just floored. You hear the song in its entirety three times, which never happens in movies, so people got to know it as a character in the film.”
O’Toole now spends much of her “down” time on the “Smallville” set working on her music, sometimes bouncing ideas off co-star John Schneider, the “Dukes of Hazzard” and Broadway veteran who plays Jonathan Kent.
“I play the mandolin now, too,” O’Toole reveals. “And I have one that I keep in Vancouver. Every once in a while, John will break out into a tune and I’ll sing along with him, but we haven’t done any music together officially; it’s just for fun. This just goes to show that you’re never too old to pursue something else.”(underscore)
