FAMILY LIFE FOR LANGE AT HOME, WORK

For some future study on the varieties of the motion picture life, a scholar might want to compare and contrast the lives of Jessica Lange and the late Jean Seberg.

Both grew up in the Midwest at its most midwestern, Lange in small-town Minnesota, Seberg in small-town Iowa. Both lived in Paris, although at different points in their careers. Both had conspicuous and traumatic initial movie experiences.

For a long time after “Saint Joan,” Seberg told me several years ago, she could hardly bring herself to enter a room containing people she didn’t know. She wanted to hide.

For two years after she wriggled and screamed in King Kong’s paw, Lange said one morning earlier this month, she couldn’t get another film role. She returned to her interrupted acting lessons in New York, saved from having to wait on tables again by her contract with Dino De Laurentiis.

Seberg did good work later (I think of Godard’s “Breathless,” “Lilith,” “A Fine Madness”), yet it was as if the humiliation she felt--she was 17 when she was cast--at the negative responses to her Saint Joan left her permanently scarred and off-center. Her tragic death in 1979 at the age of 40 was sadder than any film.

On the other hand, after a striking but decorative role as the Angel of Death in Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz,” Lange has moved from strength to strength as an actress, with that uncommon double Academy Award nomination, for the lead in “Frances” and for her supporting role in “Tootsie,” for which she won the Oscar for 1982, and her subsequent best actress nominations for “Country” and this year’s “Sweet Dreams.”

She is serenely situated in Santa Fe, N.M., with actor-playwright Sam Shepard, and their daughter, Hannah, is 2 months old. At midyear, Lange is scheduled to star in the film version of the New York stage success “Crimes of the Heart.”

Meantime, with the inspiration of a mentor near to hand (or, possibly, despite the inhibiting presence of a star writer in the house), Lange has just completed the first draft of an adaptation of Jayne Ann Phillips’ family novel “Machine Dreams.”

Phillips, who had recently had a baby, didn’t want to do the script herself. Lange had bought the rights with half a notion that Shepard or she and Shepard together might do it, but he had other irons in the typewriter.

“I looked around,” Lange said innocently, “but nobody else came to mind.” She rented a small office in downtown Santa Fe and every morning, after she had dropped her 4-year-old daughter Alexandra off at school, she wrote for three or four hours. Now it is done; Shepard has pronounced it good, and she hopes a deal can be made to film it after “Crimes of the Heart.”

“Machine Dreams” follows the doings of an extended middle-class family from the West Virginia coal country during the last days of World War II and into the following tumultuous decades.

“What I wanted to address,” Lange said, “is the power of the family, and the intricacies of how families are woven together. That was what interested me about ‘Country,’ the strength of the family in desperate circumstances.”

The other aspect of “Country” that captured her was the almost mystical relationship of farm families to their land. “Land, family and God are so intertwined you can’t separate them. It is a spiritual attachment. It’s also primitive and mysterious.”

She was drawn to “Machine Dreams” additionally, she said, “because the dreams in it are as real as reality. I’ve always felt that in my own life, and the author did it so well. Yet the studio business types may not see it.” Lange does not say so, but it is possible that a star’s leverage will help them to see.

The film can also be, she believes, a chronicle of recent American history: “the weird decades of the ‘50s and then the explosive ‘60s. They’re sociologically fascinating.” In the book, external events inevitably intrude on the family.

Lange’s own family still lives in and around Cloquet, Minn. (pop. roughly 8,000), where she grew up. She was at the University of Minnesota at the height of the ‘60s’ furors and was caught up in their impatient excitements. She couldn’t wait to get away to Europe and, later, couldn’t wait to get back for rest and recuperation.

She bought and still has a cabin deep in the woods. She went back initially with mixed emotions. “I’d feel a cold hand grabbing my heart and starting to squeeze. That was the fear of not getting out again. But now it’s a haven, and others in the family who couldn’t wait to get away are retreating further and further into the woods. I think it’s a family trait. No, it’s something about the land, it’s that mysterious, inexplicable connection to the land.”

It seems paradoxical that actors should be unusually private people. Yet some of the best of them are, and the hardest part of playing country singer Patsy Cline in “Sweet Dreams,” Lange said, was the idea of performing in public.

“Playing a performer is completely against my nature; it’s totally different from acting, which can be very private, as you want it to be. I hate to have people on the set; I have a closed set if I can. But Patsy loved performing; that’s true of most country-Western singers. I watched Grand Ole Opry a lot, and it’s like one big family. They’re so relaxed with each other.”

To make the lip-syncing to Cline’s records perfect, she rehearsed to tapes constantly, did as many as 12 to 15 takes, feeling, she said, as if she were opening up and blossoming, becoming, for a little while, that quite different and extravagantly unprivate person.

She still finds herself crying when she hears one of Cline’s records unexpectedly.