‘Avalon’ Star Is ‘Nothing Special’

There was nothing special about Elizabeth Perkins as a child, if you consider staring at people in restaurants, hopping freight trains and cheating on Rorschach tests to be nothing special.

Her career in films has been, so far, nothing special. She started off in 1986 with a hit, “About Last Night . . . ,” and then appeared in a pair of flops--”Sweethearts Dance” and “From the Hip.” Playing Tom Hanks’ girlfriend in “Big” earned her solid reviews, and the offers started pouring in--for Hanks.

“It’s like death out there,” Perkins, 29, said during a recent interview at a Manhattan hotel.

“There are no parts for actresses; they just don’t exist. Where’s Jessica Lange? Where’s Jane Fonda? Why did Meryl Streep make ‘She-Devil’? I just happened to be the actress in ‘Big’ so I got a few offers. I got offers to play up-tight actresses with a heart of gold, just like my part in ‘Big.’ ”

She was willing to beg for “Big,” and nearly two years later felt the same way about her latest movie, “Avalon.”

The actress had become friendly with director Barry Levinson while he was making the Academy Award-winning “Rain Man.” When casting began for “Avalon,” he offered her the role as the mother of a family growing up in Levinson’s native Baltimore during the 1940s and ‘50s.

“He said I had the cynicism, and I had the banter down. He said I looked like a woman from the 1940s. He said I had a very period face. I don’t think I have a contemporary face.”

Perkins was born in Queens, N.Y., but her parents divorced when she was a baby and she lived on a 600-acre farm in Brattleboro, Vt., with her mother and stepfather.

Basic acting and basic insubordination were her specialties. Drama awards, faulty attendance and expulsion from a boarding school are among her childhood memories. Under parental supervision she was liable to gaze at strangers. Free to do what she pleased, Perkins supplied erotic answers for her Rorschachs (inkblot analyses for personality testing) “just for shock value” and tried her jumping skills on moving trains.

“That was a big thing in my town,” she recalled. “Ride it and then hop off. How can a kid really do anything that bad? The things they kick you out of school for. When you get to be older, you realize that wasn’t so bad. Stealing food from the dining hall, skipping school, smoking a joint--they’re part of growing up.”

Acting in films is easy, she insists, just a matter of summing up a character in a few words or images.

For “Avalon,” Perkins played the part “worried,” seeing herself as a woman whose family was slowly breaking up. In “Big,” she relied on a visual effect.

“One of the things I did was to slowly lower the height of my shoes for the entire movie, so by the end my feet were completely flat on the ground,” she said. “That for me gave a physical aspect to the role.

“I started out the movie in four-inch high heels, and I ended it flat. I started with my hair up and eventually lowered it and lowered it until it completely went down. Hanks brings her back down to Earth. He brings the real her out.”