Interview for Garden Grove’s ‘Eve’ Gets McGillis’ Irish Up

Celebrity has its privileges, and haughtiness apparently is one of them. As Kelly McGillis declared the other day, asserting one of her prerogatives: “I’m a movie star. I can say no.”

Which is why officials of the Grove Shakespeare Festival must be gnashing their teeth over their recent attempt to court the press with what amounted to Kelly McGillis Day in the lounge of the Gem Theatre.

The high-strung actress, best known as Tom Cruise’s co-star in “Top Gun,” turned out to be unnecessarily defensive in her role as Visiting Celebrity, despite volunteering to help publicize “A Midsummer’s Night’s Eve at the Grove.”

Grove officials hope to net $25,000 from the fund-raiser, which is set for Monday at the outdoor Festival Amphitheatre. The benefit performance of Shakespearean scenes and readings will feature McGillis, along with Gregory Itzin, Kamella Tate, Daniel Bryan Cartmell, John-Frederick Jones and Carl Reggiardo.

Unlike the other players, McGillis has never appeared in a Grove production. But her connection with artistic director Thomas F. Bradac goes back further than any of theirs. She credits Bradac with introducing her to theater when she was a student at Newport Harbor High School, and he was her drama teacher.

“Tom was the sole reason I became an actress,” recalled McGillis, 32, who has also starred on screen in “Witness,” “The House on Carroll Street” and “The Accused.” “We’ve remained friends over the years. I really admire what he has done here. So when he asked me to be on the board, I said yes.”

But that didn’t mean she had to be pleasant.

Despite her predictably laudatory press-conference remarks about how happy she was to be at the Grove last week--both as a newly appointed trustee and as a cast member of the upcoming benefit performance--McGillis looked less and less happy.

Outfitted in jeans and a dark blue sports jacket, she chain-smoked her way through an interview with The Times, dismissing questions about substantive issues that might have elicited thoughtful answers and replying testily to other questions about the paradoxes of her career.

To a request for her opinion about right-wing efforts to dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts--following up her press-conference generalities on the need to support regional theater--she said: “I have views, but I don’t think this is the place to tell them.”

To a query about how she feels when “Top Gun” is decried as a symbol of Hollywood’s contribution to the decline of culture--and, by implication, her role in it--she snapped: “I suppose I resent the fact that people think I should be one thing or the other.”

And just in case anybody wanted to make something of her looks--though nobody did--she insisted: “I’m not Michelle Pfeiffer. I’m not Kim Basinger. I am not this beauty queen. I get to play interesting women. I like that. I’m very happy with who I am.”

Between refusing permission for a Times photographer to take a posed portrait of her (“I’m a movie star. I can say no”) and accusing this reporter of making erroneous assumptions about her (“You’re saying something stupid to me”), McGillis gave the impression of a blunt, temperamental star to whom the whole exercise seemed an uncomfortable invasion of her privacy.

At one point, she even turned down the theater’s request to have her picture taken with corporate donors for its own publicity photos.

In the meantime, McGillis curiously volunteered revealing aspects of her personal life with virtually no prompting.

Asked routinely about marriage and work--”Is your husband (yacht-broker Fred Tillman) supportive of your career?”--she said he was, and pointedly added that she had laid down the law: “When I first met him, I said, ‘Never tell me to quit my job because I won’t. I’ll leave you first.’ ”

Ironically, it was her pregnancy last November that caused her to terminate a year’s commitment to the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger in Washington a couple of months after getting there.

McGillis, who gave birth to a daughter at the end of May, had been brought to the Folger by another former teacher--director Michael Kahn, who had met her 13 years ago at the Juilliard School in New York.

After starring at the Folger as Viola in “Twelfth Night”--winning a Helen Hayes Award for her performance--she withdrew from her contract to play the lead roles in “Mary Stuart” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

“I was sorry I couldn’t stay,” said McGillis, who currently lives in Marina del Rey. “But I’m very happy to be a mother. It’s life, and you can’t deny that. Sometimes real life is bigger than theater. Just sometimes.”

In fact, she is already discussing a return to the Folger two seasons from now to do “Measure for Measure.” She also is executive-producing a television piece based on Kate Chopin’s novella, “The Awakening”--in which she will star--and is negotiating for a new movie.

At the Grove benefit, McGillis is to perform a scene from “Twelfth Night” with Kamella Tate and a scene from “Much Ado About Nothing” with Gregory Itzin, as well as solo readings from “Henry V,” “Twelfth Night,” “The Merchant of Venice” and “The Tempest.”

In all, the cast of five plans to present nearly 1 1/2 hours of highlights from 17 of Shakespeare’s 37 plays, woven together by a narrative text written for the occasion by Itzin.

“A Midsummer Night’s Eve at the Grove” will be presented July 30. It is to begin at 5 p.m. with a gallery showing of original works by artist Jean Pol d. Franqueil, followed by dinner at 6 p.m. and the stage presentation at 8 p.m. in the Festival Amphitheatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Tickets: $125 for the full evening; $50 for the stage presentation only (students and seniors $25). Information: (714) 636-7213.