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March 2, 2001/Adar 7, 5761, Vol. 53, No.22
Actress drawn to Jewish roles
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
Actress Marcia Gay Harden is Texan, non-Jewish, and the daughter of a U.S. Navy captain who regularly moved his family around the world. So she has had to do her homework, she says, to portray the tough-yet-vulnerable Jewish characters who have won her wide acclaim on screen.
Harden studied 1920s anti-Semitism to play Verna, the two-timing Jewish moll to Irish mobsters in the Coen brothers' stylized gangster film, "Miller's Crossing." She read up on the laws of shiva (mourning) to portray Norma Berman, the eccentric daughter of a Jewish widow in Beeban Kidron's "Used People." She learned a thing or two about psychology to become the Jewish shrink Susan Silverman in A & E's "Small Vices." And she perused biographies to prepare for the role that's just gleaned her a 2001 supporting actress nomination: the Jewish-American painter Lee Krasner, the long-suffering wife of abstract expressionist giant Jackson Pollock (Ed Harris), in the Harris biopic, "Pollock."
"Lee and Jackson were the proverbial case of opposites attracting," Harden said during an interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles.
Verbal, matter-of-fact Krasner (1908-1984) was the daughter of Orthodox Jewish Russian immigrants, raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., and the tenements of the Lower East Side. Like many Jews of her generation, she rejected the old ways to become an American, specifically a New York Jewish intellectual committed to everything radical and modern. Pollock (1912-1956), conversely, was a taciturn, troubled, young man from Wyoming: alcoholic, manic-depressive, prone to frightening rages and swaggering boasts.
They met when Krasner saw his work in a 1941 exhibition, charged up the stairs of his Greenwich Village apartment building and knocked on his door.
"The fact that Lee was Jewish was part of the draw for Jackson," says actor-director-producer Harris, who bears an eerie resemblance to Pollock and is an Oscar nominee for best actor.
"He found that exotic, provocative and mysterious."
Harden ("Space Cowboys," "Meet Joe Black") regards Krasner as provocative. "She was a woman who broke all the rules," says the actress, who earned a Tony nomination for playing a valium-addicted housewife in "Angels in America."
"She was a Jewish woman making her way in a world of WASPy, macho artists. She was not a virgin when she married Pollock, which was unusual at the time. She was smart, tenacious, a survivor. I identify with her struggle, her desire to find her own voice."
For Harden, that struggle began in childhood, when she strove to upstage her sisters as the third of five children growing up in Japan, Germany, Greece, California and Maryland.
A Greek-language production of "Medea" at the Parthenon inspired her to become a performer, though the New York theater scene proved less than welcoming. Harden subsisted on a series of menial jobs, and was once left with only $1 to survive the weekend. One winter morning, Harden was so distraught that a homeless person comforted her on the street.
Her big break came after she enrolled in the graduate theater program at New York University, when she was cast as "Lucy, the Fat Pig" in a zany production of "The Comedy of Errors." All she did was oink, jiggle her huge, padded bum and her beanbag breasts, which were the object of several sight gags. But that was enough to catch the eye of the Coens' casting director, who was looking for an actress to play the Jewish vamp, Verna, in "Miller's Crossing."
Before long, the starving artist, dolled up in smoky dark make-up, was sitting across the table from Joel and Ethan Coen, salivating over a Lucullian smorgasbord of pastries and cold cuts. Fortunately, the assertive Verna took over: "I just grabbed a cookie, lit up a cigarette, and did the audition," she says. "I was uncharacteristically aggressive, which must have been the character speaking."
The Coens had just one question for the actress: "Is it a problem for you playing a Jewish character?" "I shook my head no and that was exactly the answer they needed," Harden says.
Nevertheless, she felt she needed to educate herself by reading about the kind of anti-Semitism her character would have faced during the Prohibition era. "I wanted to understand what made Verna feel like an outcast at the time, which informed all of her choices," Harden says.
To prepare for "Pollock," the actress studied painting ("I suck," she says), listened to audio tapes of Krasner and interviewed her surviving friends and relatives. "Her nephew told me, 'If you want to play Lee Krasner, start screaming from the minute you walk into the door until the minute you leave,' " Harden says.
In fact, Krasner focused much of her creative energy on keeping Pollock together and furthering his career.
But by 1956, the tension in their marriage had escalated; Pollock often stormed off to a tavern or to the arms of his mistress.
Harris helped Harden understand why Krasner put her own career on hold to nurture an abusive husband: "Lee realized this man had the potential to create art that she loved," he told the Journal.
It wasn't until after Pollock's 1956 death in a car accident that Krasner began one of the most productive periods of her career, Harden notes.
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