‘Bird’s’ Venora Ever on Trail of a Dare

Love has a way of being beyond explanation; the heart has its reasons, as the poet said, but they are beyond explanation too. Looking from the outside at certain relationships, you can only marvel at the magic glue that somehow survives injury, assault and all kinds of betrayals, including the terrible drive toward self-destruction.

One of the amazements, and the saving strengths, of the film “Bird” was Diane Venora’s portrayal of Charlie Parker’s longtime companion Chan.

Parker’s worth not only as a musician of genius but as a man was in the end defined and proved by Chan’s devotion to him, despite the large and almost continuous provocations for her to split for calmer turf. If that isn’t love, it will have to do, as another poet said.

The movie was one of the darkest--visually and thematically--of the year, but Venora is a kind of high-energy, high-intensity light within it.

Even when she is not being Chan, Venora is high energy and high intensity, an actress for whom the craft is a life-enriching search that scarcely begins with learning and saying lines.

“I’ll play the small part any time,” she said this week, “if it’ll bring something new into my life--a new color, a new essence.” She was in Los Angeles for an awards banquet honoring Clint Eastwood, who directed “Bird” and toward whom her feelings approach the reverential for the freedom he allowed her.

“In one scene I did three different things in three takes and I knew it wasn’t right. Clint said, ‘Good, now play all three things at once.’ I did, and that was it.”

She hasn’t worked since “Bird”--her choice, Venora says. She has elected instead to spend more uninterrupted time with her 9-year-old daughter. “I’m a single parent. I’d had to take her out of school in New York and move her to Los Angeles when we were making the movie, and I wanted to make it up to her.”

Venora, who is 36, was born and raised in Hartford, Conn., and spent two years at the Boston Conservatory studying singing and dancing for musical theater. It wasn’t really her goal but, she explains, she thought it might be a less expensive way of studying drama than acting classes.

At 21, she auditioned for Juilliard. “I said, if I make it fine; if not, I’ll become a cashier at Woolworth.” She won a scholarship and joined a company that included Robin Williams, William Hurt, Mandy Patinkin and Christopher Reeve.

Most importantly, John Houseman became her stern mentor for three years. He ordered her to drop her lesser reading and plow through all of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, to give her a deeper sense of the psychological contradictions of character.

“I began to learn the craft,” Venora says. “I figured out in a hurry that it wasn’t enough to be attractive or have a personality. It was heavy pressure, but I enjoyed it.”

Houseman watched her in rehearsal for “Madwoman of Chaillot” and said, “You are very talented but you must lose weight.” (The voice drops to a low alto and the plummy accent is pure Houseman, affectionately rendered.)

She did everything, from “The Cherry Orchard” to “The Rose Tattoo” at Juilliard. After graduation, she did “Miss Julie” at the Lincoln Center Institute, “Uncle Vanya” at La Mama and, quite extraordinarily, played Hamlet for Joe Papp at the New York Theater Festival.

By then, she had appeared in her first film, Michael Wadleigh’s “Wolfen,” and had found another mentor and friend in the film’s star, Albert Finney.

“He talked to me about protecting yourself in a film. He said you have to look at the whole thing as a puzzle and then find your piece in it and present it. If you chat and fool around, you’ll lose some of it. ‘If there are visitors on the set, talk to them after it’s all over. It’s your butt out there,’ he said, ‘and you better protect it. Make a 2x4-foot area that’s yours and let no one in.’ ”

Finney had ideas on performance as well, not unrelated to the Olivier-Barrymore doctrine that you’re only as good as you dare to be bad. “He said that between the peaks and valleys, you’ll find out where you ought to be. But he said the idea is to go far out, and then when it begins to shake, just pull it back a little.”

He had lately done “Hamlet” and remembered a dispute he’d had with the director over the stabbing of Polonius. Finney had wanted to slash away; the director said the tradition was one neat jab through the arras, in and out, and tradition would be observed.

When she came to play Hamlet herself, Venora found she knew exactly how Finney had felt about wanting to let loose. She and director Papp compromised. The prop man came up with a long dagger that she concealed in a boot. She produced it with a flourish that evidently astonished the audience. She made the dispatching of Polonius more than a polite stab and found it very satisfying.

Preparing for “Bird,” Venora studied Chan’s book about Parker, “Life in E-flat,” listened to writer Joel Oliansky’s hours of taped interviews with Chan and finally spent a week with her in Los Angeles, where Chan had flown from her home outside Paris.

Venora decorated a room with all the pictures of Parker she could find. She arranged them and the script in chronological order and then, she says, “I made a chart of where I had to go and put it under the pictures.”

With every job, Venora says, “I feel as if I’ve never had a job before, and the approach is completely different every time.”

Chan and her daughter sat right behind Venora at the dressy screening in the Palais during the Cannes festival. Venora strained for clues to their reactions and heard the odd sniffle from the daughter but nothing from Chan, who said she would have no comment until she’d seen it again, minus all the glossy hype. Later she told a magazine she thought Venora had played her “perfectly.”

Chan told her that Parker’s playing was the magnet that drew her to him: “I wanted to hear the music.” Everything thereafter was permeated by their love for the music. “When I lost the child, I lost my heart,” she said. “When I lost Bird, I lost my soul.”

“She said she thought she would never recover,” Venora says, “but you learn to cope, and she did. She’s 64 but she’s still there, with the music. She’s very gentle; she even wears soft shoes; and her touch is gentle, but there’s always something going on there. She has a backbone of steel.”

Venora is now preparing to do “A Winter’s Tale” for Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival. “I’ve spent three days on three pages. Big lines, big breaths; the music is powerful and there’s no way you can cheat on it. I’m grateful for the job. It dares me and I like to be dared.”