Mike Nichols: The Metabolism of Success, Part Two (Seldes and Baranski)

Marian Seldes in the 2002 Lincoln Center production of Dinner at Eight.

Interview with Mike Nichols

Conducted by James Grissom

New York

1992

People often make fun of Marian [Seldes]. They imitate her voice and her way of floating through the world, her dramatic bows at the feet of those who have impressed her. Someone criticized her to me by saying that she was not of this world, and I thought of that great thing Tennessee said of Blanche--that she had abandoned reality, but what had reality ever really done for her? Well, what has reality really ever done for any of us? And what's so great of the world except what we make of it? 

To digress a bit more: Joan Didion was interviewed one time, and she said--and forgive my paraphrasing--that a place belonged most to the person who has loved it most. Didion said there were passages in From Here to Eternity where James Jones was a virtual cartographer: You were walking literal streets of Hawaii with him. Hemingway could do this, and, of course, California belongs so strongly to Didion. The bond and the loss is so strong in their relationship to these places. Well, I feel the theatre belongs most to Marian, because no one loves it so strongly, despite what it does to us, has done to her. The love she has for it, and all of us in it, is unconditional. Talk about your metabolism of success: To love most fully is to succeed most fully.

I trust her entirely. A friend of mine said she couldn't be trusted, because she will never criticize anyone, but she is, in fact, a master at elision. If I ask her about an actor--with whom she has worked or whom she has taught, and those two groups pretty much encompass all working people--and I then tell her about the project I have in mind, she will pause and move over to those things that are good about that person, alerting me to the fact that I am utterly insane to think they could do what I had in mind. She has been kind to me without any cruelty. That, I must tell you, is an art.

I asked her about Christine Baranski. I knew that Marian had taught her at Juilliard, and I had been told by someone that Christine has fashioned a performance after Marian--airy and elegant and high above the fray.  Marian had what I can only call a Martha Graham style of ejaculation when she spoke of Christine. She said something very perceptive and very striking: She said that Christine's will to act, to act well, to overcome whatever lack she felt she possessed was so strong that Marian was embarrassed to think of herself as her teacher. Marian learned from Christine. This will that Christine has is great, but it does not distort her work. There are a lot of bad willful actors, who just want a laugh or an award or center stage. Christine's will is to overcome herself, to shoot beyond what she did yesterday, to serve the play and her players. Do not, Marian told me, get in the way of this will: Let the will go to work. And I did. She was perfectly cast in The Real Thing, and I trusted her to walk to the right areas of both the play and her own history, which she brings to everything she does, in proper measure. 

Christine Baranski in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, which was directed by Mike Nichols, and for which Baranski won her first Tony Award, 1984.

I think she has the potential to be a great actress, and I don't mean to say that she isn't great now, but the world of the theatre and film keeps her in particular parts, and I think she has a palette that is larger than anything even those of us who love her can imagine. Intelligence and generosity and wit, all put to their proper use. And all of this Marian told me, and all of this apparent, apparently, when Christine walked into Juilliard and was told by several people that she wasn't at all right for that school. And so Christine went away for a time and worked on her speech and herself and came back and was admitted. She will continue to do the work and prove people wrong, even those of us who love and admire her. There's a box in her soul that has only partially been opened.

©  2018  James Grissom