From Grease to The West Wing, actress Stockard Channing has proved to be a a resilient survivor. At 58, she is in more demand than ever, but is taking celebrity in her stride. "I'm kind of used to being occasionally famous," she tells Michael Dwyer
The ideas that shape and inform The Business of Strangers, the absorbing, acutely observed first feature film from writer-director Patrick Stettner, were prompted by his early experiences working as a temp in a various New York offices. "One of the few advantages of being a temp," he says, "is that you are invisible, a witness to the conversations not usually afforded the rest of the permanent staff. This gave me the opportunity to observe the subtle rituals and complex games of power in the business area.
"I was particularly drawn to the stories of older women executives. I was curious about the personal and psychological trials these trailblazers had to endure, working in an environment that was, at times, openly hostile. It's a story not many films explore, but one that women of a certain generation experienced."
In casting the leading role - the self-made, highly successful executive, Julie Styron, who is inwardly insecure - Stettner was fortunate to attract one of the finest actresses of that certain generation, Stockard Channing, a woman with a great deal of experience in the equally competitive and notoriously fickle business of film-making, one which has mostly underused her evident talents over the past 30 years.
Unlike so many of her contemporaries, who risked and lost everything pursuing a major film career, Channing wisely spread her skills across television and theatre, generally securing meatier roles and broader recognition, most recently in her recurring role as the feisty First Lady, Abigail Bartlett in the riveting TV series, The West Wing.
Channing is, at 58, a resilient survivor. When we met recently, she reflected on those experiences with an outlook that clearly remains positive. "It seems to me that the tide is either in or out," she says. "It really goes in waves and for some reason right now, it's in. I think I'm fortunate to be around at a time when people are interested in women playing characters of a certain age. It could just be a coincidence that it's happening now.
"To be honest with you, some people are in competition with their own past, I believe, which I'm not. If you are tremendously famous or a brainy beauty, you have to live up to some kind of past persona you maybe didn't even intend to have, which may have been just handed to you. That can make life a little bit more difficult. I'm just an actress. Sometimes I've been more famous than others, and sometimes less so. People say, 'Oh, you're back', even though I've never been away. So I'm kind of used to being occasionally famous."
Has The West Wing made a difference, being such a high-profile, prime-time network TV series? "I don't really think so because I've been around for quite a while and there are some generations who will know me only from Grease and others who will have seen me in Six Degrees of Separation. I've been around long enough that when you look at the honeycomb of work, it's cumulative but people will always relate to a particular role or film you've done. But I've never been a huge celebrity. I've never been massively comfortable with that kind of life. So I don't think I carry a lot of baggage." In The Business of Strangers it becomes clear that her character did not come from a wealthy background, and that she had to work hard to reach her present executive status. It was different for Susan Stockard, as Channing was born in New York on February 13th, 1944. "My father was a businessman," she says. "I'm not from great wealth, but I went to a private school and I went to Harvard and all that stuff. You're not dealing with American royalty here, but I was raised with every comfort. I know people say that they don't talk about class and stuff in America, but, you know, money has become the upper-class now.
"I read this very good book recently called The Seventies and it dealt with this shift in American culture since the '70s. This engine that drives people to make money and move up the corporate ladder has only become louder and noisier. We have businessmen running this country now and it has taken its toll on people. There really isn't any encouragement for people to go into another kind of profession. It's not glorified in the media. It's not glorified in the culture."
She became interested in drama while a student at Radcliffe College and started working with the Theatre Company of Boston after she graduated from Harvard with a BA in history and literature. When she was 19, she married Walter Channing and kept that surname professionally after they were divorced four years later. She has been married and divorced four times.
In 1973, after a few minor movie roles, she attracted critical attention with her portrayal of a plain young woman who, transformed by cosmetic surgery, wreaks revenge on the men who wronged her, in the TV movie, The Girl Most Likely To . . ., which was written by Joan Rivers. Two years later, she beat off formidable competition to secure the female lead opposite Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson in the Mike Nichols comedy, The Fortune, and she more than held her own, but the film flopped.
She went on to display her flair for comedy in The Big Bus, an underrated 1976 spoof on disaster movies, and in 1978 she stole the show from John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John in the mega-hit musical, Grease, in which she played the high school student, the bitchy Betty Rizzo - even though Channing herself was 33 when she made it. Over the next decade, however, she found her best opportunities in theatre, earning four Tony nominations and winning the award in 1985 for A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and in television where she recovered from two short-lived sitcoms with her name in the titles.
In 1993, Channing finally received her sole Oscar nomination to date, for her sharp and subtle portrayal of a Manhattan socialite in Six Degrees of Separation, a role she had honed on stage, but most of the movie parts that followed were in supporting roles, including Mrs Allworthy in the Daniel Defoe adaptation Moll Flanders, which was shot in Ireland.
"That was great," she says, "just to work in Ireland. Did you know that I'm half-Irish? On my mother's side. I really don't know where my grandfather was born. It may have been Cork, or maybe he just got on the boat in Cork. His surname was Inglis, which was turned into English when he got to the States."
Not surprisingly, she speaks warmly of The Business of Strangers, in which her character, Julie, ends up spending an eventful night in an anonymous out-of-town hotel with a brusque, ambitious junior consultant (Julia Stiles). "I could identify with Julie," she says. "I didn't want her to be one of those stereotypes that I call the piñata parts. It's usually a female of a certain age who's massively neurotic and bitchy - dragon ladies. We see a fair amount of those parts in movies and I try to steer clear of them.
"The balance of this role was to create a woman who was neurotic enough that within a few hours she would flip out and go to the places where she goes in this story. She's very intelligent, but part of the pressure on her is to present this executive face to the business world. It's a pressure that's been put on so many women in that area, to talk in a certain way as she goes through this endless routine of appointments, luncheons, business trips, airports and hotels. She has spent her life doing all that in what is a very sterile and conventional and rather oppressive world that so many people still live in. When she meets the young woman played by Julia Stiles, she begins to loosen up and improvise and we getto see the real woman inside."
Her route to playing the formidable Abigail Bartlett in The West Wing reveals the distance Channing keeps from the business side of film and TV production. "When you're younger you go out and audition for things, so you know what is going on." she says. "Now, fortunately or unfortunately, I'm insulated from a lot of these machinations that go on in my name. I gather there was a lot of conversation between my television agent and my manager and Aaron Sorkin, who devised The West Wing, but I knew nothing of it. They were trying to work out dates to fit it into my schedule and at the time I was making a little film in Canada, but they juggled dates eventually.
"I had seen a pilot on television for The West Wing and I thought it was terrific, and then suddenly I was asked to do it at very short notice. I flew back from Calgary where I had been filming. I was still wearing my hiking boots and there was Martin Sheen in white tie and tails. I said, 'Hi, I'm Stockard. We've never met, but I gather we've been married for about 30 years' and that was the beginning of it. It went on the air and it all went very well. I had lunch with Aaron and he said, 'Would you would like to be a doctor? I think I'll make you a doctor.' He had decided that the president should have MS and that I should be his doctor as well as his wife." Can she disclose any titbits about what we can expect to see in The West Wing? "To be honest with you, I can't give you any because of this major pickle Aaron has put me in. He wants the story to unfold gradually, and each episode is usually not written until very soon before we shoot it. That's the way it works with The West Wing. I'm sorry that I can't tell you anything more than that, but I couldn't, not even if you put needles under my fingernails!"