TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040290/0402520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.3 KB | 254 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 62

Two Lives, One Ambition


With more than a hundred years of experience between them, HUME
CRONYN and JESSICA TANDY define acting in America

By GERALD CLARKE


    Everybody loves the Cronyns. Other actors hold them in awe,
audiences adore them, and the critics long ago exhausted the
ordinary words of praise to describe their performances. "Let
us celebrate the Cronyns," gushed the New York Daily News's
Douglas Watt when they last appeared on Broadway, in 1986. But
then who could say anything bad about Hume Cronyn and Jessica
Tandy, the husband and wife who, working together and
separately, define acting in America?

    Probably no one but Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, who have
been pointing out each other's faults, professionally at least,
for almost 50 years.

    "Hume's always taking notes on what I do wrong," complains
Tandy.

    "So are you with me, darling," responds Cronyn.

    "But I usually forget to tell you about them."

    "Not always."

    Such affectionate banter, as exquisitely timed as a medieval
court dance, cannot disguise the fact that, much as they might
quibble, they not only expect criticism from each other, they
want it. There is scarcely a conscious minute that they are not
thinking and talking about acting. Performing is not a way of
life for them, it is life. "Perhaps the Cronyns are the last
true theater professionals," says Mike Nichols, who directed
them in one of their biggest hits, The Gin Game.

    Unlike the Lunts -- Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne -- with
whom they are often compared, the Cronyns do not insist on
working together. Their most visible recent roles, in fact,
have been done separately. For playing the lovably irascible
lead in Driving Miss Daisy, Tandy was nominated for an Academy
Award. The biggest commercial success of her career, as well
as the most surprising hit of the past year, Daisy has so far
made $70 million at the box office, an extraordinary sum for
a movie without sex, violence or raunchy humor. Cronyn has not
swept the field as his wife has this year, but he has won
extravagant praise for his role in Age-Old Friends, a touching
TV drama set in a nursing home.

    Yet, as Tandy notes, "you pay a price for being separated,"
and they clearly prefer working together, despite the sparks
that sometimes ensue. "There is a tension that can build up,"
says Cronyn. "Sometimes I've been helpful to Jess, but
sometimes I've been a pain in the ass, and she will say, `Leave
me alone! Let me do it my way! I can't play your part; don't
you try to play mine.' We work differently. When Jessie gets
her teeth into something, she is totally obsessed by it. We
will go home at night after a rehearsal, and I will be so tired
that I will say, `Oh, please, God, show me to my bed and let
me forget about it until tomorrow morning.' Then I will hear
her still rehearsing in the bathtub. Literally rehearsing!
Absolutely literally!"

    "It's not a bad place for it," she mildly ripostes.

    "She's absolutely marvelous!" he continues, not a bit
deterred by the interruption. "We can be driving along the
highway, having closed a play six months before, and Jessie
will suddenly say, `I know how I should have done it!'

    "`What? What?' I will ask her. `What are you talking about?
That last turn?'

    "`No. In that last scene I should have . . .' Oh, God, and
I can't even remember the name of the play!"

    Cronyn, by contrast, goes to what many actors would call
ludicrous lengths to research a part, taking endless notes in
the process. "It's fascinating to watch them work," says Susan
Cooper, who together with Cronyn wrote the script for Foxfire,
another of the Cronyns' major Broadway successes. "Hume starts
from the outside, with how a character looks and acts, and then
goes inside. Jessica starts from the inside and then goes out.
She feels around between the lines and is more inclined not to
want an image of her character until she is through. `Be
patient with me,' she will say to Hume. `I'm getting there.'
But they both end up with equally powerful characterizations."

    Besides being their most severe critics, the Cronyns are
also their strongest supporters. "Jessie, I think, is the
definitive actress," says Cronyn. He is about to say something
more, but she flusters him by raising her left leg high in the
air and shouting Wheeeee! in mock celebration of such high
praise.

    "Well, you are!" he insists. "You love acting, you love your
garden, you love reading, and you love your children. But your
focus is that of a performer, whereas there are a lot of things
I like doing. I've been a producer, a director and a sometime
writer. I think Jess is a better actor than I am, but there are
things I can do that she can't. I'm more at home in television
and film than she is, for example. Now I'm going to say
something good about us. I think we have marvelously and
totally coincidentally been a wonderful team. I think I
complement Jess, and I know Jess complements me."

    At various points during their marriage, the career of one
has zoomed ahead of the other's. Has there ever been any envy
or resentment? "No!" they both answer. "I rejoice in Hume's
successes," says Tandy. "We're not really in competition. I
mean, I can't play his parts, and he can't play mine -- though
he tries to sometimes."

    Earlier this year, Tandy, who is 80 and suffers from angina,
took sick during their annual vacation in the Bahamas and was
briefly hospitalized. "I was terribly worried about her," says
Cronyn. "We don't have a telephone in the house. Until this
year I thought it was a blessing. But in the past few weeks,
we really could have used one." She soon recovered, and these
days Tandy is almost bubbly, vivacity itself. The best medicine
for any actor is a hit, and Driving Miss Daisy, which received
nine Oscar nominations, more than any other picture released
in 1989, has given her a megadose of Hollywood penicillin.
Although she has played character parts in several outstanding
films over the years, The Desert Fox and Alfred Hitchcock's
The Birds among them, until now she has never had the
recognition in Hollywood that the theater world has accorded
her for more than 40 years. Movie producers all but ignored her
extraordinary range and talent.

    She originated the role of Blanche DuBois in the 1947
production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and
Broadway gave her the first of her three Tony Awards. (The
other two were for The Gin Game and Foxfire.) But it was Vivien
Leigh whom Hollywood later tapped to play poor, doomed Blanche
in the screen version of Streetcar. Driving Miss Daisy has
belatedly righted that old wrong. It has transformed Tandy into
a movie star, and she is thrilled by the acclaim, which is even
sweeter because it is so unexpected. "Oh, it's wonderful!" she
exclaims. "It's just wonderful! I never before had a part like
Miss Daisy in a movie. I always played almost cardboard
characters."

    Born in London, Tandy knew early on what she wanted to be.
Her father, who worked for a company that sold rope, died when
she was twelve; yet despite hardships at home, her mother put
together enough money to send her to an acting academy. Before
the '20s were over she was acting in the West End, and in 1932
she married a colleague, the late Jack Hawkins. She appeared
in several Broadway productions during the '30s but immigrated
to the U.S. only in 1940, bringing her five-year-old daughter
Susan with her.

    Cronyn, who is 78, was also born in London -- London, Ont.,
that is -- but his family was as rich as Tandy's had been poor.
His father was one of Canada's most prominent businessmen, as
well as a Member of Parliament; his mother was a Labatt, as in
Labatt's beer. After making a brief bow to family sensibilities
by attending McGill University, he headed south in the early
'30s, to Manhattan, where he studied acting. The great George
Abbott gave him his first big break and taught him the
rough-and-tumble art of farce, an athletic, physical approach
to his craft that he has since used in more cerebral roles.
Cronyn has also picked up his share of honors, including an
Academy Award nomination for The Seventh Cross in 1944 and a
Tony for playing Polonius in the 1964 production of Richard
Burton's Hamlet.

    He too married within the profession -- he met his first
wife in acting school -- but by 1940 he was divorced and free
to court Tandy, which he did with his customary persistence and
energy. After Tandy's divorce from Hawkins in 1942, she and
Cronyn were married in California, and it was there that they
had two children. Christopher, 46, is a movie production
manager. Tandy, 44, who was given her mother's last name as her
first name, went into the family business: she is an actress,
and a good one. Through some miracle of casting she was even
given the part of her father's daughter in Age-Old Friends.

    Home for the Cronyns, besides scores of dressing rooms in
the U.S. and Britain, is a house in Connecticut, an apartment
in Manhattan and a rented house on the Bahamian island of Great
Exuma.

    A small, wiry man with wispy hair, a fringe of white beard
and seemingly inexhaustible energy, Cronyn is the organizer and
designated worrier in the family, the one who moves them from
place to place. "When we like to be rude, we call Hume `the
Cruise Director,'" says Cooper. "Because if you're not careful,
he will plan your whole day for you. He sometimes frets a bit
too much, but Jessica is used to it, and I think she enjoys it.
He's the one who has always made things work in their lives."

    While both Cronyns have enjoyed success in the movies and
television -- they even had their own TV series, The Marriage,
in the '50s -- the theater is their first and last love. "The
theater is Mother!" says Cronyn. "Thank God!" But Mother has
changed since they were young, and they are not altogether
pleased with how she looks today. "Very often people are not
used to going to the theater," says Tandy, "and they don't
understand that it's not the same as watching television shows.
Much more concentration is required of them. You can't just
turn and tell your friend what's going on, something that
happens a lot at matinees."

    "Our theater apes film and television," adds Cronyn. "You'll
see it in scripts. Audiences now have far less tolerance for
long passages of dialogue than they used to. And you can't talk
to me or to anybody my age in which you don't hear a sort of
old fart's moan about the fact that it's much more difficult
now for kids to learn the craft of acting. They don't have the
opportunity. They don't get it in TV or films. I think it's
important that actors do films, but I think they're way ahead
of the game if they've got a theatrical background. Actors like
ourselves should be able to reproduce the same effect again and
again and again and again. But actors who haven't had a theater
discipline can't do that."

    Aside from unemployment, the actor's worst enemy is
typecasting. The Cronyns have resisted it throughout their
careers, but now, in their advancing years, they are unhappily
discovering that even they are not immune. These days most of
the plays they are offered are set in nursing homes, dramas so
depressing they are instantly filed in the wastebasket. Nursing
homes? For these two dynamos? They have done enough of those
parts and are not eager for more. Tandy longs for a role in
just about anything by Athol Fugard, and Cronyn would like to
play Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and
Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. He is too old, he reluctantly
admits, to take on another Shakespearean favorite, Richard
III.

    When you are in love with acting, however, as these two
actors are, you will take any challenging role, even if it is
set in a nursing home. "Something comes through the air between
an actor and the audience," says Cronyn. "I think the right
word is empathy. You can tell immediately if you're not being
heard, or if a lady is rattling a paper bag over in the sixth
row, stage right, or if somebody has a bad cough. But the most
magical moment in the theater is a silence so complete that you
can't even hear people breathe. It means that you've got them!"