ACTRESSES OVER 40: AGAINST ALL ODDS

They’re always busy. Ballet and stretch classes by day, acting classes by night. Their conversations are punctuated by references to the people who love their work and to the roles that got away.

Yet these actresses are different. They worry more about what they eat and they look like they don’t eat much of anything. They watch for wrinkles and worry when they get tired too fast. On the far side of 40, they are Hollywood’s older women.

Eternally hopeful, they seek celebrity in an industry that generally considers women over 30 dispensable. Too old to play ingenues, too young for character roles, they join countless other women their age already languishing in Hollywood--or back home in Nebraska.

Most movies today mirror a larger society enamored of youth. Few roles are written for actresses over 40 and competition for those parts includes younger women as well as established stars like 47-year-old Jane Fonda.

“In the old days, even in the ‘40s and ‘50s, there were parts for great ladies of the cinema like Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford,” says actress Sylvia Walden, a co-founder of Room for Theatre in Studio City. “Today those parts are few and far between, and when they appear, they often go to major stars and the rest of us languish on the vine.”

According to the Screen Actors Guild, females over 40 get only 7% of all roles. And they earn less as they get older; SAG statistics indicate an inverse curve for women as opposed to men, with women actresses hitting bottom from 50-59, just as their male counterparts are reaching their earnings peak.

“It’s appalling,” says playwright Oliver Hailey. “We use 40- and 50-year-old men, and make sure their (TV and film) wives are 20, never over 30.” Adds Joel Thurm, vice president for talent and casting at NBC: “I don’t know if it comes from the performer’s ego or the producer’s desire to get away from reality and feed a certain kind of fantasy.”

Yet still these actresses head for Hollywood, sometimes returning to pursue a dream they had when younger, sometimes to actualize a newer dream. Often their life experiences have given them a better sense of both what they want and how to get it, but as Hailey puts it: “I can’t think of any area of entertainment where the odds are more against you.”

Calendar talked with five actresses about what got them started and what keeps them going after 40.

‘What I Had at Home Wasn’t Enough’

Housewife Judy Kerr was 36 when she left her husband and children to become an actress. She didn’t have any money. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life, but she knew two things: Her marriage wasn’t working and she wanted to act.

“I was leaving home to seek fame and fortune because what I had at home wasn’t enough,” says Kerr, now 46. “I wanted to have a career and make a mark in this world.”

Ten years ago, acting looked like her best bet. She’d started college at 30 and within a month after she started taking an acting class, she got a role playing a witch in a children’s play. “We toured auditoriums all over Los Angeles County, so there were these huge audiences to play to,” Kerr says, “and afterwards we signed autographs. And I got $5 a performance. I said, ‘Hey, if this career is this easy to get into, well, OK.’ ”

As she became more involved in acting, taking classes and performing on stage, she began to pull away from her marriage. Soon she and her husband separated, sharing custody of their three daughters, then aged 10, 11 and 12.

“I was disowned by my mother, my brother and my sister. My whole family. I was on the outs,” recalls Kerr six movies, 10 TV shows and 14 plays later. “I think my husband said I was crazy, and I know my mother-in-law said it. And maybe I was.”

But she was also both lucky and determined. Glendale-born Kerr has the look of a ‘60s flower child, with her frizzy blonde hair to her shoulders, but her laid-back, casual manner is deceptive. Luck has obviously been on her side since the start, but Kerr has also missed few of the opportunities that ambled on by.

Even before leaving her family, she met Joan Darling (“Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”), the actress/director/acting teacher who soon became her mentor. Kerr started out as class secretary for Darling’s acting class in exchange for classes, although as she tells it, the first year was rough. Kerr’s former husband bought her an old car and agreed to help subsidize her quest, she says, but she still lived on food stamps.

Life improved. Soon Darling’s assistant on directing assignments, she drove Darling’s car, sat through meetings and listened all the time. When Darling did a TV pilot, Kerr got her AFTRA card. When Darling did a movie, Kerr joined the Screen Actors Guild. Summarizes Kerr: “I had what you would call an old-fashioned apprenticeship. Coming in as a housewife, that was what I needed. Although I didn’t know it was what I needed.”

Darling, on location in Natchez, Miss., shooting the “The Huck Finn Project” for ABC, couldn’t say enough good things about Kerr: “She was an absolutely wonderful person to have around in every way. She would anticipate needs for me that I didn’t even know existed. She would spot something that was missing in my life that if I had would (make my life) easier and more creative. In many ways, she created the job out of her own imagination and inventiveness.”

Kerr also created plenty of her own luck. She spent $500 last year alone at acting showcases, performing before casting agents and others to try and drum up not just work but also a new agent to replace one who dropped her. She still doesn’t have an agent, but she did get work through the showcasing. One spot led to a part as a madam on “The Jeffersons,” another to a spot on “Divorce Court.”

Kerr, whom Darling refers to as “a very, very good actress,” played small roles in the films “All Night Long” and “Cannery Row.” On stage, she toured in “Chapter Two” with Jane Powell, playing San Antonio before many of the same relatives who she says once scorned her. Recently ( she directed an evening of poetry and prose about and by humorist Dorothy Parker at the Gardner Theatre in Hollywood.

She has done her own teaching, too, first with acting classes, then with private students, and can’t say enough good things about her clients. She keeps a videotape of TV personality and former Miss America, Debra Sue Maffett, that she calls her “inspirational reel,” and recounts how former client Maffett lost the contest for Miss Texas several times before moving here and getting the California crown. Kerr also plays a videotape of coaching client Edward Salazar, a hairdresser and cable TV host, even freezing a shot of Salazar to show how naturally he looks into the camera after her coaching. Pointing at the TV, she says, “It looks like someone’s home--in his eyes.”

Billed on some clients’ shows as “personality director,” Kerr drills herself with equal fervor. In the Hollywood Hills home she shares with her second husband, jazz trumpet player/composer Ron Gorow, there’s a huge star carved into the design of the wood-paneled bathroom where she dresses for job interviews, and she painted her bedroom walls green to simulate the “green rooms” at TV studios where guests wait before going on-camera. (“Seven coats of paint,” she tells a visitor.) On a recent trip, she packed a poster of Jane Fonda in a workout leotard as incentive not to overeat while on the road.

Has her age been an obstacle? “Yes, I believe so,” responds Kerr. “I felt it very much in the beginning, having no formal acting training, no background in Shakespeare or the classics or seeing theater and knowing people’s names. When you’ve been in the business since 18, it’s a lot different than starting out at 36. And I’d been told continuously that it was impossible. Until the last few years, when people saw that I could do it.”

She figures she made only $5,000 last year from acting, including voice-overs, down from her best years at around $12,000 annually. But it’s a lot more than the $1,500 she made her first year, and she has high hopes: “What I’m hoping for, what everybody is hoping for, is a part in a series, probably a second banana on a series. . . . I’d like a game show career--at Betty White’s age, I’d like to have had her career.”

Kerr admits to feeling the crunch of being a struggling actress in her 40s. “I’m willing to do something else, but I haven’t seen anything else that’s as attractive to me. I got a late start. I didn’t go to college until my youngest child started kindergarten. All I wanted to do was get married and have my babies. That was my big dream, and I did it.”

Those babies today are all in their 20s and two of her three daughters have done professional acting themselves. Although her youngest was only 10 when Kerr left home, she says that she maintained a “good phone connection” with all three. “All of them are more together right now than I was at 36,” Kerr says reflectively. “They saw how I got on the world, and they learned very fast.”

Meanwhile, life has gone full circle for Kerr. While she’s planning to continue acting on stage, as well as do more teaching and directing, she is also back to being a housewife, at least part-time.

Married a little more than a year now, she is no longer eager to do theatrical road shows, “and strangely enough what I enjoy about marriage most is being a housewife. I do need to have that mate. When I’m not working, I have grocery shopping to do, or the wash, or errands for my husband. And what I left the whole process for, I’m back in again. But I’ve married a musician who understands that when I’m working, the housewife job is off.”

Success--One Step at a Time

When H. Wesley Kenney saw Jane Romney perform in an acting showcase, he thought “she was quite good.” But so are a lot of people. He was pleased to get a thank-you note for attending the event, but a lot of people send thank-you notes. The difference, says Kenney, executive producer of “The Young and the Restless,” is that Romney also asked if she could come over and observe the show and learn from it.

Kenney agreed, and over the next several weeks, the aspiring actress spent time in the control booth and on the studio floor, sitting through tapings, asking questions. And when a role eventually came along (a three-minute scene as a travel agent), says Kenney, “I was more than happy to give it to her.”

He notes: “In every showcase I attend, there are talented people and they have to use every trick in the book to keep themselves visible to the people who are responsible for hiring them. If she hadn’t pursued this course of action, chances are that I wouldn’t have particularly remembered her.”

That’s what Romney figured. She may be starting late (she won’t give her age, but has a 23-year-old son) but she’s leaving little to chance. She is up at 6 every day typing letters to people who might be or have been helpful and she’s redone her resume photos three times: “I didn’t feel I had time to make a lot of mistakes. If you’re younger, you can jump in and be impulsive. You have a lot of chances. But at this stage, you don’t.”

It doesn’t hurt to come from a successful family, and the daughter of former Michigan Gov. (and once Republican presidential hopeful) George Romney says that she learned a great deal at home. She gave campaign talks for her father and accompanied her mother on civic and social forays. She’s always been attracted to the limelight, and when her 20-year marriage shattered four years ago, she turned to acting for “immediate self-expression” as well as for eventual income.

“Marriage and family were the world that I understood,” she says, somewhat awkwardly leading a visitor through the rented Beverly Hills duplex apartment that has supplanted bigger, better homes. “So when my marriage went to pieces, I went to pieces. I was totally unprepared for another kind of life.”

Acting, she says, provided an outlet for her “emotional energy, imagination and desire to get involved again with life.” First she worked with a tape recorder, “doing monologues for mental therapy. When I couldn’t stand it, when I was screaming and yelling or feeling so depressed about my situation, I found it was very helpful for me to turn that emotion and energy into portraying a character and trying to understand those feelings in terms of somebody else.”

She decided to pursue acting professionally. “I had spent so much of my life building, giving and nourishing others. I was very anxious to do something that was mine. It was very important that I have something that I felt expressed me. . . . I went for that part of me that most people back off from.”

She studied at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco the summer of 1981, then moved here the next year. Since then, she has appeared in three Equity Waiver plays, playing characters she describes as “a disillusioned idealist, a strong-minded career woman, and an arrogant, rich bitch.”

Romney’s conversation returns again and again to her earlier life as wife and mother--when she goes to the back of the house for something to show a reporter, she returns with a stack of family Christmas cards--and she is clearly relieved that her children and parents have stuck by her.

She said has tried to live on the money she makes from teaching tennis and from alimony, but concedes that her parents have occasionally helped with taxes and with college tuition for three of her four children. (Now 17, Tim’s the only child still home.) Yet she emphasizes that she hesitates to ask them for financial help “because this is my own venture and I want to do it on my own.”

Reached by phone in Michigan, Romney’s father was asked what he thinks about his daughter’s career choice: “I think it’s a very difficult undertaking. There aren’t many who succeed. But she’s always enjoyed a challenge and it’s quite a challenge.”

It is also a physical challenge to fight back the clock, and Romney’s datebook is filled with endless notations for ballet, stretch and aerobics classes. “Physical strength and stamina are really vital in this business to make you feel good and make you feel young,” she tells a visitor wedged between stretch and ballet classes. “When you start this late, you have to get on top of it. You have to feel as good as you did and have as much energy as you did at 20. When you’re in your 20s, you don’t have to feel young. You are young.”

So what’s the hardest part of starting out at Romney’s age? “All those young people who have all their lives ahead of them. I was very shaky. . . . I knew it would be hard to convince people to invest their time and energy in someone 10, 15, 20 years older. I haven’t had all those years to build a relationship with an agent and casting people. (But) I have maturity and confidence, won’t waste time on misguided choices, plus I have already raised a family. I feel that I can compete with anyone 30 years old and up.”

And if she fails?

Romney laughs at the question. “But I won’t fail. Success is something that you establish a step at a time. And so many of the acting goals that I set for myself, I have already achieved.”

She Put Her Kids Before Her Career

SEATTLE ---- In the Glacier Room of the Crown Plaza Hotel, just past 8:30 in the morning, seminar speaker Jan D’Arcy is priming a room full of women accountants on effective communication skills. Hardly ever stationary, she continually stalks the aisles, swooping in to look over a shoulder or two as her audience takes notes, even putting on a plastic mask to make her point. “Everyone has a certain image,” explains D’Arcy, “and yours can be by design or by default.”

Her image--poise, energy, self-assurance--is clearly by design. Her hour talk is laced with information that she got from audience members during a cocktail party the evening before and over coffee that morning.

But longtime actress D’Arcy, 46, also is drawing on a well-learned script and a familiar arsenal of acting techniques. As she tells a reporter after the talk, “You can see when I work with the audience. I use everything I ever learned in the theater.”

Jan D’Arcy has simply changed stages. Since moving here in 1970 to raise five children in a place “where the air was clear enough to see the Big Dipper at night,” D’Arcy has made several compromises. Although she still visits occasionally, she has pretty much ended her extended commutes to Hollywood searching for work, and she long ago agreed to do commercials that don’t pay residuals.

So it is that the afternoon before her talk, D’Arcy is in a recording studio down by the waterfront doing 20 seconds worth of a 60-second spot for scale of $100. When the commercial is done, colleague Ki Gottberg, 33, looks over at D’Arcy and says, “I really admire actresses like Jan for hanging in there because there are so many obstacles.”

D’Arcy has been hanging in a long time. She says she started acting at 14, organized the first dramatic club at her high school in Upstate New York, and worked summer stock at 16. She has an M.A. in speech from UCLA, began her Hollywood career, then got married and started a family. “I had leads, people who wanted to push me, but I turned around, got married, and got pregnant. Five times. I had four kids under 6, which didn’t leave much time for acting.”

It didn’t help that she and her husband decided to raise those children here in Seattle. She did dinner-theater for a while, she says, showing a visitor clearly dated photographs of herself in one show with Bob Cummings, another with Shelley Berman. She tries out for every movie or TV show “available in my age and character range” that shoots in Seattle and figures assorted small roles average one or two annually.

Last fall, for instance, she played “Dina Merrill’s friend” in NBC’s “Hot Pursuit,” and in 1982 she appeared in ABC’s “Divorce Wars,” a TV movie starring Tom Selleck and Jane Curtin. But D’Arcy definitely can’t make such work into a career here, says her longtime agent Lola Hallowell. “There isn’t that much work.”

For a while she commuted to Los Angeles regularly, making the rounds of agents and casting directors. She stayed a month at a time with her college roommate, today a Santa Monica physician, but found the commute exhausting and generally unfruitful. Not only did job opportunities always seem to come once she’d settled back home in Seattle, but “I was losing jobs up here while I was down there.”

Yet she seems comfortable with her choices. “I put my kids first and myself second,” she says as she pulls her car into yet another shopping mall on yet another errand en route to her home in Bellevue’s Cherry Crest housing tract. “The problem with women having it all is that it’s very difficult to do.”

You’d never know it from spending time with the efficient D’Arcy. She and a friend made her dress for the accountants’ talk--D’Arcy was still stringing beads and sewing in shoulder pads at midnight the night before--and she actively engages her children, now aged 10 to 22, in her work. Not only does speech and video consultant D’Arcy use the basement of her split-level home as a studio and office, but Shane, 14, often acts as his mother’s cameraman and Tyler James (T.J.), 9, clearly knows his way around video equipment.

All five children have acted, done modeling and assembled portfolios. “One reason that I got the kids involved is that I thought they’d understand what I do, and because I’d gotten so many rewards out of it. They took to it, although none will go into it professionally. . . . And I took every cent they got, and invested it in land to pay for their college educations, and that’s exactly what it’s doing.”

The money helps, D’Arcy adds, since none of her commercials here paid residuals. She counts up nearly 700 radio and TV commercials, quipping that if she’d done them in Los Angeles, she’d be a millionaire. So she supplements traditional acting assignments by making--and starring in--industrial and training films and by coaching businessmen and others on video and speech techniques.

Besides teaching at the University of Washington’s Graduate School of Business Administration, D’Arcy handles such corporate clients as Continental Telephone of the Northwest and is touring the country this summer with full-day communications workshops. She has just produced her first relaxation/communications tape and did a swift business selling tapes out of a cardboard box following her talk to the women accountants group. And she is already planning a series of additional tapes and perhaps a book.

Given all that, why continue auditioning for tiny film roles and taking on $100 radio spots? Why not drop acting entirely?

“I love to create,” D’Arcy says quickly. “You can teach people, but you’re not the creator, and I think I do a good job touching people’s emotions. . . . Once you get (acting) in your blood, it is very difficult to ignore it. It’s an area that I need to feed.”

Does she think it is too late now to go back to Hollywood? She’d drop everything for a good part: “Everybody has a price. Sure, I’d go back to do a series. If the right part in something like ‘Dynasty’ or ‘Dallas’ were to come along and I wouldn’t have to spend all my time scrambling for money and marketing myself, I’d start packing.”

But she concedes that such notions may be etched in fantasy at this point in her life and that conventional stardom doesn’t seem “realistic” anymore.

‘I’ve Played 50,000 Kinds of Mothers’

Blonde, sun-tanned Jay W. MacIntosh is dressed in a pale pink blouse and skirt, the skirt full and long. Her makeup is subdued, her nail polish muted, her manner motherly. She’s all set for her audition for the role of a “warm mom” in a Golden Grahams commercial.

MacIntosh, who is “in my 40s,” is no newcomer. She’s played dirt-farmer mothers on screen and alcoholic mothers on stage. Just this year, she had a juicy role in “Hollywood Wives” as a rich, lascivious Texan eager to buy some time with Andrew Stevens.

But after 15 years and some 150 commercials, she’s still waiting in line to test for “warm mom” spots. And when it is MacIntosh’s turn to be taped cuddling up to the stranger playing the “warm dad” at their son’s basketball game, she is silently hoping that producer Aaron Spelling will turn on his TV set, see her face, assign her to “Dynasty” and make her a star.

MacIntosh has been seeking stardom since she left her university job in Gainesville, Ga., and headed for Hollywood in 1968. She had a singing role in “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”--she sang “She’s Leaving Home” with the Bee Gees--”and I was hoping that would be a break. But the film was a dismal failure.” Similarly, she had a running role on CBS’ “Sons and Daughters” in 1974, but the show lasted only nine episodes.

“I’ll be sitting in an office and I’ll see somebody with a bigger name and my heart falls in my stomach because I know they’ll go with the name,” says MacIntosh, born Janet Tallulah Jewell. “I was always No. 7 when they were taking 6, or 4 when they were taking 3. People who know my work think I am really talented, and ask why I’m not working all the time.”

The question is asked again: Why does she think she hasn’t made it? MacIntosh recites a litany of mistakes, recounting how a manager once raised her fees too high at the wrong time, how she retreated after her second divorce, how she failed to capitalize on earlier successes.

She refused early on to test for soap operas, for example--a decision she now regrets--and is aware that she can be obstinate. Take the time she was called in for a running role as a blue-collar wife. “They asked me what kind of roles I normally played. They needed me to say, ‘mothers.’ I wouldn’t say it. I said I play everything. I should have said, ‘mothers.’ I’ve played 50,000 kinds of mothers. They wanted reassurance, and I wouldn’t give it.”

So today she’s doing readings for writing workshops. Playwright Bruce Hickey recently cast her as a 40-year-old lesbian making a pick-up in a sleazy bar and says the actress “was able to just play it honestly and that’s very hard to do.” Adds Oliver Hailey, for whose workshop Hickey was writing: “What she did was enchanting, and the high point of that scene.”

Her one advantage over women in similar situations is that money doesn’t appear to be a problem. She works in real estate with her third husband, Doug Uhler--she has three grown children from an earlier marriage--and lives in assorted fixer-uppers before selling them and moving on. MacIntosh, Uhler, MacIntosh’s 20-year-old son, and, periodically, Uhler’s 11-year-old son are now living in a spacious home (also for sale) in the Palisades, with a nice view of the ocean from the hot tub on the back porch. MacIntosh goes off to auditions in a 1977 black Cadillac.

She says real estate supported “my acting habit” for years, reluctantly conceding that her acting income ranks in the very top percentage of Screen Actors Guild members. In good years, she says, she’s made as much as $60,000 from acting, and her lowest year was $15,000. This is an average year so far, she says.

That’s aside from print work, which MacIntosh calls “bread and butter money.” Almost apologetically, she puts her big black portfolio on the kitchen table, guiding a visitor through photograph after photograph showing her in a sexy pose (“my ‘Dynasty’ look”), in a business suit, as both before and after in a make-over article for a magazine. Her photo recently appeared on the cover of Dynamic Years magazine--”I’m not sure I’m happy about that”--and she just did a fashion spread for Modern Maturity magazine. She has spent a fair amount of money trying to make it. For instance, she estimates that it cost her $2,000 to make a high-quality video montage of her TV and film work. In rapid succession, she is shown as a psychology professor and a farm woman, a hooker and a waitress. At one moment, she’s the mother of a young cowboy--”my washed-out look is perfect for Westerns”--and, at another, the mother of a beauty queen dating Elvis Presley. Seven copies are usually circulating to producers, directors and casting directors.

She updated her video to include a clip from “Hollywood Wives,” which recently brought in enormous amounts of free publicity. During Andrew Stevens’ publicity tour for the show, MacIntosh’s three scenes with the actor wound up being played on several TV shows. And a still photograph of her unsuccessful seduction of Stevens in “Hollywood Wives” even ran in People magazine. With her name.

“I couldn’t believe it,” laughs MacIntosh, recalling “the thousands and thousands of dollars” she spent on promotion over the years. She’s now being considered for “a leading role” in an independent feature--she says she’ll know “any day”--and considers that opportunity a direct result of the “Hollywood Wives” exposure.

She’s also learned from her earlier brushes with stardom, she says: “I’m going to keep on going on. I have a good agent. I’ll keep my presentation tape in circulation and I’ll just keep hoping the phone will ring. I don’t want to be a big star anymore. I just want to work.”