Since her film début in 1968, Barbara Hershey has had to reinvent herself. She talks to Donald Clarke about her role as a troubled psychiatrist in Lantana - but not about when she insisted on being called 'Barbara Seagull'
The hands give her away. I have no idea if the rest of Barbara Hershey has been interfered with by cosmetic surgeons, but she still has the hands of a 54-year-old. The effect is disconcerting. Looking at the tautness round her eyes and the clean line of her neck, one might almost take her for a woman in her mid-30s. Then she lifts her coffee cup and reality cruelly reasserts itself.
Never a huge star, Hershey has nonetheless worked consistently since making her début in the 1968 Doris Day vehicle With Six You Get Eggroll. But it was not until she hit 30 that she received the respect she deserved. Putting embarrassing memories of her enthusiastic embrace of the Age of Aquarius behind her (about which more later), she brought her emotional seriousness to such fine films as The Right Stuff (1983), Hannah and her Sisters (1986) and A World Apart (1987). And now she shines as a troubled psychiatrist in Ray Lawrence's terrific Australian ensemble piece Lantana. It is a weighty, textured role - the sort of part women her age have trouble locating in Hollywood.
"That is hard," she says. "That always has been hard. When I was younger, I thought that by the time I hit this age it would be easier, but if anything, it's even worse for older actresses now. It's sad to me, because I don't think it's reflective of the world. People get more interesting as they grow older, there's more of them. To just negate that because your age has reached some number is really sad.
"But it isn't just women. It's a general problem in Hollywood. Older men have a problem finding parts that matter too." Well, maybe. But Sean Connery still gets cast as Catherine Zeta Jones's love interest. One so rarely sees that sort of May/December movie romance with the genders reversed.
"Yes," she agrees. "Or if you do, there are always these big quotes around it. It's always an issue of some sort - this very forbidden thing. Maybe the movies will eventually catch up with life." That's also the case with inter-racial relationships. "Yes. And I have both in my life. The love of my life is 20 years younger than me and he is Indian. And I'm . . . not. But it's no big deal for us."
Revolving around the discovery of an unidentified body, Lantana reveals the insecurities and neuroses of an intricately connected band of characters. Hershey and Geoffrey Rush, for example, play a husband and wife whose relationship never recovers from the death of their child. In common with recent films such as Magnolia, Happiness and John Sayles's upcoming Sunshine State, Lantana uses multiple narratives to paint a bleak picture of the disconnectedness of modern life.
"Oh I don't know if it comes to any such conclusion," Hershey says. "One of the things I liked about it when I read it was that I was thinking: What is this? A thriller? A mystery? Then I realised it's about the mystery between people. The ending is ambiguous, but I think there is hope in it. I don't see it as pessimistic. Then again that's my nature. I'm not wrong, you're not wrong."
Why are so many film-makers returning to the structure that Robert Altman pioneered in the 1970s? What is it about a collection of disparate lives that appeals to today's directors? "People do ask that," she says. "And if you had to liken it to films then those comparisons make sense. But it is so different to Altman's sensibility. It is perhaps a bit more like [P.T. Anderson's] Magnolia, but the story is much more specific than those films. It is focused on love and trust.
"For me, the movie is all about trust. The youngest, poorest couple trust each other. Even though they have troubles they still believe. Another couple - Leon and Sonya - are struggling with trust. Our characters - Valerie and John - have lost trust." Intelligent and slightly severe, Valerie is exactly the sort of character Hershey has made her own over the past two decades. But she began her career as a carefree surf-kid in the TV series Gidget, before going on to that Doris Day début.
Actually born in Hollywood, Hershey was surely always fated to end up in the business.
"Oh God no," she exclaims. "Very few people born in Hollywood become actors. Actually a lot of crew members come from there, but I very rarely come across actors who grew up there. There's a couple - Richard Dreyfuss is from there - but not many.
"Also, I didn't come from a show business family. Obviously those show business kids - Carrie Fisher, Angelica Huston - they grew up in Hollywood. I always knew I wanted to act, but I could have been born anywhere and known that."
Notwithstanding her appearance in 1969's soppy hit Last Summer, Hershey's most interesting early credit was the title role in Martin Scorsese's début film Boxcar Bertha (1972). Did the film, which also starred David Carradine and was produced by low-budget maestro Roger Corman, feel like the start of something big?
"Absolutely not," she says. "I'd already been working quite a bit before then, but it was the first thing Marty had done. The only thing that did seem significant about it was Marty. He was great, just brilliant. You knew immediately that he was going to be terrific. He's very vulnerable and he expresses that openly. Plus, of course, he was incredibly knowledgeable about film. You can name any film and he'll tell you the year it was made, who directed it, who edited it, how long it is. You'd make a gesture and he'd say: 'No don't do that. Such-and-such did that in 1936'."
This is where things got peculiar. Carradine and Hershey embarked on the sort of relationship that is routinely described as "tempestuous".
It being the law in 1970s California, they had a child named Free, wore shells round their necks and set about proving that hippy couples can be just as shrewish to each other as suburban golfer couples. Noting how her mouth pursed when I mentioned Boxcar Bertha, I sense that she knows where this line of questioning is headed.
"If you wouldn't mind. I'd really rather not talk about this." Of course I do mind. We are clearly both thinking about the hilarious incident that led to her changing her name between 1972 and 1974. Driving home from filming one day, Hershey ran over a seagull, killing it stone dead.
Guilt-ridden by her involvement in the early demise of this blameless creature, she let it be known that henceforth she would answer only to the name Barbara Seagull. What was she thinking? The muscles in her face tighten: "Look, I would really rather not talk about it." So does she regret her behaviour then? "No, not really. It's just had too much focus over the years. It's like looking at photographs of yourself in the sixth grade. It was just something I went through along with a million others."
Her eccentricities did her career no favours. But, against the odds, Hershey prevailed. She stood out in the 1979 comedy The Stunt Man and proceeded to reinvent herself as a disciplined performer. In all her best films, and even in some of the weaker ones (the Bette Midler weepie Beaches comes to mind), she remains a steady, intelligent force. There's nothing frivolous about her.
She fixes me with an unhappy stare: "I've done comedies; Hannah and her Sisters, Tin Men. I was in the Eric Idle comedy Splitting Heirs. I don't like being pigeon-holed like that. I've done a variety of roles. I've been real silly in some films.
"I feel like I'm defending myself, but it would be awful to be just one thing. I've earned better than that description, haven't I? Haven't I?" Ironically, though she is smiling, she is now exhibiting exactly the sort of scary focus to which I was referring.
Maybe what I mean is that she has an intensity. One sees it in Lantana during the psychiatric sequences as Valerie absorbs her patients' traumas and psychoses.
"Yes, that one really was a challenge," she says, lightening up a little. "An actor reacts: it's our nature, we're emotionally responsive people. But a psychiatrist isn't supposed to do that: they're supposed to be a funnel, to not react. To have everything they say affect me and not show it, but have the audience feel it, was an incredible challenge.
"There's this great quote that I apply to acting. Hemingway was actually talking about writing when he said: 'If you know something really well, you can leave things out and that thing will still be there; but if you don't know something well, you will probably over-describe it.' And film is such a microscope, you can't do too much. You just have to let go of the life raft.
"That's the closest I can get to saying how I do it."
Lantana opens at the IFC in Dublin on Friday