‘A Woman Who Fights Definition’ : Actress Started in Convent, Cut Teeth on Shakespeare and Now Thinks Big Bucks

Heads turn when Joan Stuart-Morris, in jeans and a black leather jacket, strides through the lobby of a Costa Mesa hotel.

With her long legs scissoring across the carpet and her sharp features and pouting lips, she has a striking beauty--to say nothing of a bearing so regal that it virtually demands attention.

“Can you imagine heads not turning?,” asks Portland Center Stage producer Dennis Bigelow, who directed Stuart-Morris at the Oregon Shakespearean Festival during the early ‘80s. “As an actress, she has that great gift of presence. She looks like a prima donna and you expect her to be one. But you’re constantly surprised that she isn’t.”

To hear Andrew Traister of the Alaska Repertory in Anchorage tell it, Stuart-Morris has been turning heads for years both on and off the stage. “Joan sets up a mystique,” says Traister, who also directed her at the festival in Oregon. “She creates a mysterious distance around her. And she’s a helluva poker player.

“You sit there and look into those eyes and you don’t care what kind of hand she has,” he continues admiringly. “She’s a great bluffer. This is a woman who uses her beauty and intelligence as well as any woman I’ve ever seen.”

Bigelow and Traister might as well have been describing Stuart-Morris’ current role on the Second Stage at South Coast Repertory. In “Morocco,” she turns heads so completely that after being arrested for prostitution, disorderly conduct and drunkenness--mistakenly, it would seem--even her jailer is mesmerized.

So how did the actress get to be so accomplished? She smiles demurely, having slipped into a restaurant booth for a light lunch before a recent performance, and cracks open a fresh pack of Marlboros. “I’ll have to think about that,” she says.

After a pause, Stuart-Morris decides to start at the beginning. She describes her childhood. For one thing, she spent a considerable part of it in a cloistered convent run by a Spanish order of nuns in El Paso.

“It was surrounded by high walls,” she recounts. “We took baths with our underwear on. Can you imagine? All this really Gothic stuff.”

The loftiest figure in the convent, the mother superior, happened to be her great aunt. Not coincidentally, she doted on the little girl. This bestowed a certain status among the students of the Jesus and Mary Academy, Stuart-Morris notes, and with it a bit of privilege.

For another thing, she says, “I am part Spanish. I am bilingual. I have another culture to draw from. It is an advantage.”

It also helps explain her attraction to her role in “Morocco,” a three-act drama by Allan Havis with a political backdrop and an exotic setting. It runs at SCR through Dec. 11.

Stuart-Morris plays the alluring Abril Kempler, an unusual woman of Spanish and Arabic descent who was educated at Oxford University, speaks many languages and is married to a Jewish-American architect. Together, they travel the world, mixing business (she is, on top of everything else, an investment banker) and pleasure.

“This is a woman who fights definition,” says the actress, lighting a cigarette. “She doesn’t want to be framed by conventional expectations. That is what she rebels against. She is moneyed, sophisticated. She feels almost superior because of her education. But there is, perhaps, a psychic split. She has experience and intelligence. Yet she can never deny her family of origin, which is imbued with the values of a patriarchy.

“Let’s put it this way,” Stuart-Morris continues. “I do not think Mrs. Kempler functions with the same kind of morality that the men in the play function with. I think she has a different view of sexuality, for instance. I think she is a very sensuous, libidinous woman. At the same time, she feels she has a lot of integrity. That is a key to her character.”

A graduate of the acting program at UC Irvine where she received a master’s degree in theater, Stuart-Morris made her professional debut in 1978 at SCR as Davina in Simon Gray’s “Otherwise Engaged.”

Two seasons ago, she appeared on the SCR Mainstage as Charlotte in Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing,” and last season as Lady Sneerwell in Thomas Sheridan’s “The School for Scandal.” Over the summer, during SCR’s workshop readings for the Hispanic Playwrights Project, she had a featured role in Charles Gomez’s “Bang Bang Blues.”

But apart from occasional forays to such places as the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, where she originated the role of La Tartine in “Opera Comique,” the bulk of Stuart-Morris’ career has been confined to the Oregon Shakespearean Festival. She spent eight seasons cloistered there, from 1979 to 1986.

Between bites of a taco salad, the actress recalls the experience with warmth and, moreover, as anything but confining--at least in terms of her art. She got a crack at roles she might never have had the chance to play otherwise, she points out.

Indeed, Stuart-Morris became one of the festival’s stars, playing everything from Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing” to Maggie in Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and Lulu in Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party.”

“I simply wanted to do theater,” she recounts. “It was a dream that lured me on. I wasn’t thinking in terms of television and movies. Oregon was an incredible opportunity to work on the classics. I got wonderful roles. It was a good salary. I was raising a daughter and I was essentially a single mother. The festival provided me with a very nurturing environment.

“Plus, let’s face it, choosing acting as a profession was a scary thing to do in the first place. My family was not in favor of it. Not at all. My choices were to move to Los Angeles, where the options were very limited at that time if you wanted to do theater, or to New York, which terrified me because I had never lived in a city like that.”

With her daughter Maravillas now grown and studying art in Europe--”Her name means ‘marvelous things’ in Spanish”--Stuart-Morris, who is in her 40s but looks considerably younger, has shifted her goals. Though she still wants to maintain a theatrical career, it is time to make some “big bucks” in movies or television.

Thus, she moved to Los Angeles last year to be close to the action. “I live in what’s called Beverly Hills Adjacent,” the actress says, suddenly sounding like a Borscht Belt comedian. “It’s sort of the soiled petticoat of Beverly Hills. I haven’t made any big bucks yet. But I thought I’d give it a try. What I need is to run into a producer who believes his movie can’t be made without me.”

She laughs. In one respect, Stuart-Morris has already run into just that sort of producer, only he makes buildings instead of movies. In fact, she runs into him nightly on the Second Stage: It is Mrs. Kempler’s husband in “Morocco.” The trouble is he believes his life would be lost without her.

“Morocco” continues through Dec. 11 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Curtain times: Tuesdays through Fridays at 8:30 p.m.; Saturdays 3 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays 3 and 8 p.m. Tickets: $19 to $26. Information: (714) 957-4033.