EDITORIAL

ROUTTNG 4-12-94 TO:

ENTERTAINMENT:.
9.

Role player

Rebecca De Mornay reinvents herself

By Frank Lovece
Some prisons, you do your time and

then you're out. Other prisons, you can be in all your life: Alcoholism. Ngative thinking. A dead-end job. Or, as playwright Marsha Norman

dpicts and actress Rebecca De

Mornay describes, "a toxic relationship." That's the crux of the ABC TV

April 2s), adapted from the play by

("'night, Mother"). The adaptation is a loose one the script is by a pair of TV-movie-vets, Eugene Corr and Ruth Shapiro conflict is the - but the same: Rehabilitated thief and killer Arlene Holsclaw tries to reclaim the

movie "Getting Out" (scheduled to air

Pulitzer Prize-winner

Norman

pretty! Didn't you see "Runaway

Dontalville, my agent, who's also Holly Hunter's ageht and got her 'The Piano,' proceeded to send me 'Getting Out'by fax to my hotel room 120 pages of fax! And I read it and sort of sobbed the whole time, it was so multidimensional." The producers, however, weren't sure about her. "I think they had some concems like, 'Rebecca De Mornay's too pretty for this role.'And Steve was like, 'What do you mean? She's ?ot

soon as she read it. "I was in Paris, doing press on a film and leaving the next day," she remembers, "so Steve

of commodity called a star,' maybe

my choices would have been different. It's probably harder to become this particular kind of commodity
when you're constantly changing who you are in front of the camera," she says. "But I've had a career that's lasted 11 years because people can't pinpoint me or get bored with the one thing I might be able to do."

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De Mornay was born Rebecca

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radio and TV personality Wally George, who separated from her mother when Rebecca was 2. She
took her last name from her stepfather, Victor, a scientist who, she says,

George, the daughter of conservative

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Train"? She's not pretty at all!"' Dontanville sent the producers a tape of

helped develop microchips for the

Apollo space program. He died when

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'l've had a Cafeef g:i11,fri111#; that's rasted 1 1 v e a r s ii[["J'il'"ifJ."6,fl has placed the child in foster care, bgCaUSe people Can't and Arlene's ex-con boyfriend pinpoint me or get (Robert Knepper). one of the more malignaEt "It's bOfed With the One mother'daughter relationships that have been i,ritt"n ,toui,; iiys rie thtng I might be able Mornay, the piercing-eyed porcelain to do,' blonde of "Risky Business" (19q3),
son she bad while in prison;

ob-

De Mornay was 5, and her mother

took Rebecca and her 2-year-old halfbrother to live in Europe. Rebecca

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went to boarding school in England

and to high school in Kitzbuhel, Aus-

tria, graduating summa cum laude, before returning to the United States at 18 and studying acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles.

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"The Hand That Rocks the Cradle"

'

what," she notes, "a girl is always

(1992) and

other films. "But no matter

that

1985 movie,

in which she's a soot-

covered, tomboyish, brunette mechanic, "and once they saw that, they thought, yeah, she's certainly gruns/

looking for affection from her mother. No matter how angry a mother is at a daughl.er. no matter how abusive.

in this!" ticulate 31- or 32-year-old (reference sources differ) began her career with a blink-and-miss-it Iine in Francis Coppola's "One From the Heart" (1982). De Mornay soon burst onto male moviegoers' libidos as the bizwhiz call girl in "Risky Business."
Though she occasionally reprised her Sexy Young Thing in films like "And Indeed, the beautiful and tiighly ar-

child in a way in which she's

she'll always be connected to that

con

it's as different from Arlene as one can get. De Morna:y's own mother was a well-to do world traveler "who has passed away, who I absolutely adored,

nected to no other person. These are explosive, strong emotional currents a girl gets her whole idea of who she is from her mother." In the case of the actress herself,

months - to nqvelist-screenwriter ("Wild Palms"), and Bruce Wagner she recently broke up with poetsinger Leonard Cohen. In terms of career, De Mornay is trying to develop a film about a mythic female figure, and is otherwise ready to play well, anything, really, since she very well can. "l really didn't have a choice in becoming a quote-unquote chameleon," De Mornay says smilingly. "lt came with the territory when I decided fi-

She was married briefly

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nally and almost whimsically to

become an actress."
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1994

NEWSPAPER ENTERPRISE ASSN.

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God Created Woman" (1988), De jockey in "Runaway

who was beautiful and talented and intelligent and charming. I wish shed known it more," De Mornay says. "I think most people have a hard time
confronting the positive in thems6lves most of us are run down either by our parents or by our lives. I just find it's often the case that people don't realize the beauty they have." The beauty of"Getting Out," on the

Mornay daringly played a grease Train. a prim

STAR VIEW

Texas housewife in "The Trip to Boun-

other hand, struck De Mornay

as

tiful" 0985), and an expatriate arbitrageur in 'Dealers" (UK, 1989). "In retrospect, I have a certain physical look I could have capitalized on,' she muses. "lf somebody had said, 'You established yourself in "Risky Business," 60 keep playing that (kind of rol) and you can become that type