Rue McClanahan Challenged by Role as a Cowed Wife in ‘Little Match Girl’

Rue McClanahan knew from the outset that she’d probably be upstaged by 8-year-old Keshia Knight Pulliam when they set out to do “The Little Match Girl.”

Young Pulliam, better known as Rudy Huxtable on “The Cosby Show,” gets the title role in a story loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale but set in New England during the 1920s.

She plays Molly, a homeless orphan who is peddling her matches on Christmas Eve when she meets playboy Neville Dutton (William Youmans), the younger son in a wealthy and powerful family, and is invited to the Dutton mansion.

There she learns that despite the facade of holiday fun and feasts, the family has a sad side: Haywood Dutton has just sold some land that will leave several families homeless, a move that his estranged son Joe (Jim Metzler), a newspaperman, plans to reveal in print.

Before she’s done, Molly offers the Duttons the gift of reconciliation, managing to get the family to repair its damaged and unraveled relationships.

“It’s mostly just a very vague resemblance to ‘The Little Match Girl,’ ” noted McClanahan. “That’s a very sad story: the little match girl freezes to death. Our little match girl is an angel from heaven--and then she disappears. At the end, she’s gone. It’s a real fairy tale.”

McClanahan plays Frances, the wife of powerful and conservative Haywood Dutton (William Daniels of “St. Elsewhere”), whose disapproval of their son’s wife--”poor white trash from the other side of the tracks,” McClanahan said--has left a schism in the family.

“We made my character old-fashioned,” explained McClanahan, “a woman who had grown up in the Victorian era and had retained that in her hair style and her manner and somewhat in the cut of her clothing, her whole demeanor.”

McClanahan also invented a profile of her character to explain to herself how Frances Dutton came to be so cowed by her husband. “She’s a nice woman, and she’s not a wimp. I found it very difficult to walk that middle ground, when you’re not playing someone flamboyant. It’s very difficult to play someone straight. I much prefer playing someone self-centered.”

So in McClanahan’s mind, Frances Dutton slips out occasionally to visit her son and daughter-in-law and grandson, and to bring them Christmas gifts.

Creating a background to help understand one’s character is something that stage-trained actors often do, she explained. “It’s something I always do. When I started out (in television), it wasn’t common, but the New York stage-trained actor learns to do this. . . . In fact, on ‘The Little Match Girl,’ Hallie (Foote, who plays daughter-in-law Mary Margaret Dutton), works that way.

“There’s that kind of break in a family’s fabric for people who are ostracized because of something that the father disapproved of,” McClanahan said.

Her own family, on the other hand, is a close one. Her 29-year-old son, Mark Thomas Bish, a guitarist, lives not far from her in Southern California, and so do two of her four nieces and nephews.

And then Rue McClanahan’s very name is testimony to family influence. She was known as Eddi-Rue until she was 21 and graduated from the University of Tulsa, about 200 miles from her hometown of Healdton, Okla.

“When my mother was pregnant, my Aunt Winona talked my mother into making an agreement that they would name one another’s first born. So Winona did: She named me after her brother (William Edwin) and my mother (Dreda Rheua-Nell), and then a year and a half later she had a daughter, and my mother named her Earla Sue. When she was about 15, she dropped the ‘Earla.’ ”

As a high-school senior, McClanahan ventured to far-off Washington to look at colleges. “I almost decided to go to Catholic U. My mother and I drove up that summer and looked it over, but I couldn’t convince myself to go that far away from home when I was only 18.”

She did well at Tulsa, graduating cum laude in 1956 and making the university’s academic honorary society--the school had no chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at the time, she said.

Then it was off to Pennsylvania to begin her career as an actress, debuting at the Erie Playhouse in 1957. She has worked ever since, winning an Obie for her off-Broadway role in “Who’s Happy Now?” in 1970 and an Emmy this year as best lead actress in a comedy series.