Taken to the Stage (eBook)

The Education of an Actress

Mimi Kennedy (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
332 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-9779-0 (ISBN)

BRAND-NEW SECOND EDITION Acclaimed actress MIMI KENNEDY (Mom, Dharma & Greg, Homefront, Midnight in Paris), releases a new edition of her long out-of-print memoir, TAKEN TO THE STAGE - THE EDUCATION OF AN ACTRESS. Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein called this mid-life autobiography 'one of the great theatrical memoirs.' Oscar-winning actress Allison Janney called it 'a hilarious and touching memoir.' John Lithgow says that Mimi 'addresses her reader in snappy, delightful prose, like a warm-hearted friend with a hundred stories to tell.' 'I was raised to go to heaven. That was the main thing...' With both humor and savvy, Ms. Kennedy reveals the complex and inescapable forces that pushed her onto the stage even as a child.

BRAND-NEW SECOND EDITION In the second edition of Mimi Kennedy's (Mom, Dharma & Greg, Homefront, Midnight in Paris) long out-of-print memoir, the acclaimed actress reveals the complex and inescapable forces that pushed her onto the stage even as a child. In a new preface, Mimi shares news of an upcoming memoir chronicling the latter half of her life. Kennedy's acting career began at 12-years old in a community theater production of Agatha Christie's "e;Spider's Web."e; Her first professional job was on a summer stock tour with TV legend Sid Caesar in Neil Simon's "e;Last of the Red Hot Lovers."e; After graduating from Smith College with a degree in Theatre Arts, Mimi held the usual day jobs as she tried to establish her career as an actress. Eventually, she made her way to Broadway, but not before being cast in an Andy Warhol play - "e;because Andy likes your face"e; - and dropping out for hilarious reasons detailed in this telling. Her debut on 45th Street at the Royale Theater was as Jan, a Pink Lady in the original Broadway run of Grease. This led to beating out 250 peers to star with Debbie Allen and Ellen Foley in "e;3 Girls 3,"e; a new musical variety show about overnight success. Thus began her long TV career, starting when sitcom was king and excess was the norm in Hollywood. Her first comedy sketches were with Carol Burnett and Bob Hope. She went on to "e;The Big Show"e; where her fellow players were Dean Martin, Monty Python's Graham Chapman, and Sid Caesar, who was so happy to see her again that he demanded she be written into all his sketches. Long-running sitcoms like "e;Dharma & Greg"e; and "e;MOM"e; sealed her presence in the sitcom world as iconic characters Abby Finkelstein, Dharma's hippie mother, and Marjorie, veteran 12-step sponsor to Allison Janney and Anna Faris' characters. In between were movies like "e;Midnight In Paris"e; and "e;In The Loop."e;She explains, early in the narrative, that she memorized the Baltimore Catechism in Catholic grade school and absorbed its doctrines with fervor: "e;I was raised to go to heaven. That was the main thing. Life was just a means to an end, and that end was death, which sent you to heaven, where you really belonged. But to get to heaven you had to die sin-free."e; This doctrine conflicted with the real-life desire to be an actress, for "e;the stage, when I found it, was a blessed relief Emotion was real onstage, passion was real, but taking action caused nothing more real to happen than the delightful effect of applause."e;

Cousin Ruth

Cousin Ruth entered our home with a force so powerful it caused air displacement in the living room where I sat. I was eight years old and surrounded by relatives, all of whom had gathered to greet our family star, actress Ruth Warrick. When the door dosed to contain her, the chair beneath me shook.

Most of my adult relations who lived within a day’s drive of Rochester had assembled and braced for this event. It was our one chance to clasp Cousin Ruth to the family bosom, and we wanted to make sure that by day’s end she’d feel completely and inextricably wedged. She was “Cousin” by marriage only, to a relative of my father’s whose family tie was distant to the point of inscrutability. This made our connection to Ruth fragile, we knew, not just because the man to whom we owed it was obscure, but because we owed it to him at all, through marriage. Marriage was as good-as-blood-for-glue in most of our Irish Catholic clan, but actors, we knew, tended to regard it differently. They married repeatedly and for pleasure, more as recreation than sacrament. We sensed that if we wanted our claim on Ruth to last, we’d have to stage this memorable welcome, then hold on like terriers in a death grip.

Ruth had accepted my father’s invitation to meet her husband’s extended upstate family probably because Daddy had a past that elevated him above the level of boring relation for even the most sophisticated of persons. He’d interned at The New Yorker magazine in his youth, a protege of Alexander Woollcott’s. Woollcott had admired Daddy’s editing and writing in the humor and literary magazines of Hamilton College, their mutual alma mater; this won Daddy the internship, a summer seat at the Algonquin Round Table, and invitations to Woollcott’s cottage at Lake Bomoseen, Vermont, where Daddy had played croquet with Harpo Marx. Surely this history is what lured Ruth to our suburban living room that day; the rest of us could not have been objects of much fascination. Yet we were relations, drawn like moths to the flame of Ruth’s celebrity. She must have known this would make us an attentive and adoring audience, and the appeal of such audiences for actors can never be underestimated. They are our antidepressant of choice.

The tock! of Ruth’s heels and jingling of her jewelry set up a clatter in the foyer that roused us in the living room to our feet, as if commanded by the din. The noises intoxicated me. They announced that, at midday, Cousin Ruth was dressed to the nines.

When she and Daddy stepped onto the hall rug, it muted everything but the bracelet jingling, which accompanied the pair’s advancing murmurs like sleigh bells. No one in the living room spoke. We were as intent on her progress toward us as farmers tracking a tornado. Suddenly, Ruth’s voice rang out like a bell. “Put them anywhere, Gerry, that’s fine.” Ever afterward, Daddy would refer to Ruth’s “pear-shaped tones” with fond nostalgia. A lifetime of Rochester accents had made him a sucker for beautiful voices, and Ruth had one. At Smith College, where I received training in Standard American English, I recognized it as the probable source of Ruth’s aural fruit. In her heyday, such training was given to stage actors and Hollywood movie stars. My own bid for beautiful diction failed, but I didn’t mind. By the time I went professional, actors wore their regional accents as badges of authenticity. Robert DeNiro made New Yawkese sexy. The cast of Saturday Night Live turned flat a’s into a television comedy norm. On my own TV series debut, Three Girls Three, I spoke so freely in my native tongue that one critic drubbed my voice as “so nasal as to be unintelligible.” Cousin Ruth, to my eight-year-old Rochester ears, sounded alarmingly and thrillingly phony.

When I saw them at last, Daddy was bending and bowing around Ruth, dispatching her outer gear – purse, gloves, and coat – to the proper places. He handled each item with the nervous piety of an altar boy, and it slowed him down. He seemed to be struggling through an invisible force-field radiated by her magnificent physical presence. Ramrod straight on towering spike heels, Ruth was topped by hair that, even in the shadows of the hall, lived up to the family legend. It blazed orange-red, a color seen in nature, not on heads, but autumn hillsides. Nor was it seen in Rochester hair salons, because clients and colorists lacked nerve. In years to come I’d try to colorize Ruth’s hair with my imagination, on our black-and-white TV screen, but I’d never conjure the hue I saw that day. In life, Ruth was positively flame-tipped, like a match.

Her accessories shed, she stepped toward us and stopped, waiting for my father’s formal introduction. This brought her, as if by instinct, to rest in that portion of our home which most closely resembled the actor’s natural habitat: a proscenium arch. Framed by the living-room entryway lintel, her face became visible to me for the first time, and I was dismayed to see it looked frozen in shock.

What had we done to alarm her, I worried, and so soon?! Were we so awfully rag-tag?!

Daddy surfaced beside her, took a deep breath, and announced with conclusive satisfaction, “Everyone – this is your Cousin Ruth!”

The adults broke rank and surrounded her, obscuring my view. As it became clear each of us would require some personal chitchat before relinquishing Ruth to the next guest, a line formed and I was shoved to the back. Ordinarily, my adult relatives were a generous bunch who could be counted on to promote the interests of a child above their own, but this gathering had not been deemed an event for small fry. Only my sister, her awestruck friend, my brother, and I were there, and then only because it was our turf I sensed the adults had forgotten us and become children themselves in the presence of this most fascinating of grown-ups: a Celebrity.

It was my father who presented Ruth to me eventually, bringing her forward, with her elbow cupped in his gentlemanly palm.

“And this is the one who wants to be an actress, Ruth,” he said jovially. “Ruth, my daughter Mimi. Mimi, this is your Cousin Ruth.”

Up close, I saw her startled look had nothing to do with emotion, but was the effect of her penciled eyebrows, which arched in twin peaks above her emerald eyes like mountains in a child’s drawing. I put my paper-cut, torn-nail hand in her be jeweled, manicured one and blushed. Even at a young age, I’d learned public declarations of my life’s ambition drew mixed responses from adults, few of them satisfactory. Supportive replies seemed patronizing, and discouraging ones annoyed me. Worst of all was the amusement with which they all seemed tinged. It made me feel silly and childish. Daddy had revealed my intentions to Ruth, I knew, to gauge her professional reaction; I wanted it too. I was hoping for her blessing, some word or look to carry into my future the way Dorothy carried Glinda the Good’s shining kiss on her forehead all the way to Oz.

Ruth offered no such token. “Aaaaaaah,” she said. And stiffened.

I have since experienced that same stiffening when faced with young people declaring their intentions to act professionally. I want to give my blessing, but first comes the pain-memory of my own pain; the pain of friends who tried and failed to achieve the dream; the pain of lost identity and lack of purpose that often accompanies its achievement. There is also the pain of knowing what a mercilessly gladiatorial business acting is. We actors learn to prize one another’s gifts in the mutually supportive atmosphere of acting classes and production, then find ourselves competing in contests only one can win. Young hopefuls may even find themselves rivaling idols and mentors – if not for roles, than for an agent, or publicity, or a network time slot. The pains of a professional actor’s life are varied but inevitable. That’s what made Ruth Warrick go rigid, and what has steeled me since. No actor is dissuaded from a true calling by anyone’s discouragement, and Ruth’s coldness did not dissuade me. Instead, it provoked an inner burst of autonomy that was rare for me as a child. Fine, I thought. I’ll do it myself. I don’t care what you think. And with that came hope, as if I realized for the first time that I’d have to be a gladiator, and that I had the right stuff.

“Well!” Ruth turned to my father. “How do you feel about that, Gerry?” They laughed together; it relaxed her and she turned back to me booming, “Good for you! I wish you luck!” with hearty dismissal.

Her perfume, her hair, her curvy body in its emerald-green cocktail sheath attracted me far more than her lack of faith could repel me. Nothing mattered except that I loved her unconditionally and wanted to be her.

After she’d met everybody, Ruth stood with an unimpeded view of the room, and her eyes swept it, coming to rest on something that made them light up. Opening her arms to it, she cried:

‘’A piano!”

My family knew a cue when we heard one, and we said our lines: “Oh, Ruth, play! Please play something!”

She obliged without fuss, sashaying to that corner of the room, which was our family’s domestic equivalent of Siberia. Only my sister and I ever went there, for...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	31.3.2023
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
ISBN-10	1-6678-9779-9 / 1667897799
ISBN-13	978-1-6678-9779-0 / 9781667897790

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