‘Fisher King’s’ Catch : Actress Finds Humor in Unlikely Places

In “The Fisher King,” Mercedes Ruehl, playing Jeff Bridges’ girlfriend, turns in a critically acclaimed, bravura performance that runs from high, bantering comedy to an intense projection of pain and sorrow. Such versatility seems expected from Ruehl these days--she won this year’s Tony Award for best actress in a drama for her performance of the emotionally repressed middle-aged daughter in Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers.”

Ruehl says she found the key to that talent nine years ago when, rehearsing “Medea” at Denver’s Center Theatre, her acting coach suggested she look for the humor in the role.

The humor in Medea? A woman who kills her own children and her husband’s new wife for revenge? “I said it was like looking for humor in ‘Oedipus,’ ” Ruehl laughed during a recent interview. “But Tad (Danielewski, now professor emeritus of theater at the University of Southern California) told me that in all intelligent characters there is humor. He opened up the extraordinary gallows humor in the character which enriched my performance . . . there is no humor in the actual events but within the dialogue, within the deep sorrow bringing a person to perform dark acts like those, there are moments of very dark humor.”

Ruehl’s humor, perhaps the ingredient that makes her acting so accessible to an audience, has been part of her emotional armor since an early age. “Like Danielewski, I think a sense of humor is the best sign of intelligence. Where there is no humor I don’t find much.”

Her current string of attention-getting roles began about eight years ago, right as she was on the verge of taking a job making industrial films. “About the time I was 28, I started doing regional theater and became a strong character lead. I did Medea, I did all of Moliere’s maids, I did quite a bit of Shaw. I must have been 31 or 32 when I did several auditions Off-Broadway and didn’t get one callback. I thought ‘something is happening here that is bigger than me, a resistance bigger than me.’ And I was tired of living like a graduate student.

“So I said, ‘Damn it, I’m going to do something else’ and went home to talk about it with my dad. He had a friend who said there was a ‘gal’--I hate that word--who made industrial films for Baltimore Gas & Electric and said it would be a wonderful place to start a new career. With all the enthusiasm of ‘we who are about to die,’ I said I would call her.”

As if on cue, Ruehl’s phone rang instead. Playwright Albert Innaurato called and “said he had 12 days to get his reworked play, ‘Coming of Age in Soho,’ ready to open at the Public Theatre,” she says, “He said he wanted me, no audition process, just me. I said, ‘Fine, I’ll do it!,’ ” Ruehl laughs, emoting a sigh of relief. “Essentially I haven’t stopped working since.”

“Coming of Age in Soho” immediately lead Ruehl into Christopher Durang’s 1985 Obie-winner, “The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” which led, eventually, to a small part in the movie “Heartburn.” Then came her first large role, playing Tom Hanks’ mother in “Big,” and, “one thing lead to another, as it often will,” Ruehl says with typical light cynicism.

A show-stopping comic performance as the Mafioso housewife in Jonathan Demme’s “Married to the Mob” (She calls it “my first big film--that’s when the floodgates opened”) followed by “The Cosby Show” and then, after playing Gene Wilder’s wife in “Another You,” “The Fisher King.”

The Fisher King was, in mythology, the guardian of the Holy Grail; in medieval legend the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper. Ruehl believes her casting in the film, a contemporary reworking of the tale also starring Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges and Amanda Plummer, was more or less inevitable. “When I graduated from the (Catholic women’s College of) New Rochelle,” she says, “I chose as my thesis T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland.’ When you research ‘The Wasteland,’ you get heavily involved in Grail quest material. I stumbled on the story of the Fisher King and was fascinated with it, it became a sort of talisman.

“Then when Joseph Campbell (the late mythologist) did the series with Bill Moyers he talked about the Fisher King, and I thought, ‘Gee, there he is again.’ Actors are very superstitious, so when I got a script called ‘The Fisher King,’ it almost seemed like a postcard from fate,” she says. “Then I discovered a role in it that was written so close to my own personality, my own energy it got even spookier.”

Although Ruehl felt that she blew the audition by lecturing the director, Terry Gilliam, for an hour about the Fisher King (“I didn’t even let him say ‘hello’--I was off and running”), she got the part she calls her most challenging.

In spite of its mythological roots and modern setting, “The Fisher King” is, essentially, a buddy movie. Since women are frequently used more or less as ornaments in such films, the size of Ruehl’s part seems surprising. “The instinct for the weight of women in the film came from the writer, Richard LaGravenese.

“There is no story about the maturation of a man from boyhood into adulthood, and that is what the Grail quest mythology--and this film--is all about, that does not involve woman; mother, sister, lover. So Richard wrote women whose parts may not be quite as large as the male parts but they are of equal moral weight and complexity. I think that is what gives the film its power; we have an equal battle of the sexes going on as a subtext.”

A scene in which Jeff Bridges’ and Ruehl’s characters break up is among the movie’s most powerful; and it was among the last scenes the director and his stars dealt with. “Terry kept saying we’d get to it,” Ruehl recalls of the director’s delay in rehearsing the scene. “I think the emotional stuff is a little bit ‘terra incognita’ (to him). He kept putting it off, putting it off.

‘So, when the time came to film it, Jeff and I were like a couple of animals let out of the gate. I think no one expected what we did; I remember at one point you could hear a pin drop . . . . I don’t know what Terry was expecting, but it just burst out, all the pain, all the rage of the breakup. When we finished he cleared his throat and said, ‘All right, let’s do that again. So we went through it and gave it to him again . . . all day long. I don’t know where the energy or inspiration came from but that scene put us through one of the most exhausting, rewarding days I have ever had on a set, and I’m very proud of it. It goes from happy to tragic, from denial to rage, and when that’s spent, there’s just this unbearable ocean of pain.

“How did I do it?” asks Ruehl. “Most of the time I’ll emote scenes and then joke on the sidelines, but with this one it helped to stay in a serious state of mind. I think the way it happens in that scene is precisely the way it happens in real life.” Her life, also? “Sure, oh sure,” Ruehl, who has never married, says. “How else would I know it but to have loved and lost and loved and won? Most of us are familiar with the remarkable pain on both sides of that equation.”

Ruehl found working with Bridges fascinating: “There are still waters that run very deep in him,” she says. “On the set when we were working, he showed the ultimate respect of one actor for another . . . . He saw you, heard you and was totally responsive through every take.”

Robin Williams? “His is a different rhythm altogether, much more improvisory, but he has that quality of seeing and listening too, a free-wheeling pas de deux. When he is acting and not doing stand-up, you see the pentimento of the Juilliard student who did Shakespeare and you see a technique and discipline exclusively an actor’s.” Ruehl, who won’t discuss her age--”I tell people I was purchased from Gypsies in the mid-’50s”--is back in New York now, where she lives in the West Village and frequently escapes to a “little shack” she owns on Long Island. She’s also thinking about what’s next. “For one thing,” Ruehl says, “I’d like to do a character who lives west of New Jersey, because I don’t want to have Barbara Stanwyck’s career in terms of playing tough-talking urban women.

“And I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Simone Signoret’s character in ‘Ship of Fools’ and Greta Garbo’s ‘Camille,’ ” she says. “Both characters had a kind of total acceptance of life with no bitterness, and Camille, in spite of the darkness hanging over her, has a sort of worldly merriment,” Ruehl adds, again seeking humor in the unlikeliest places. “I believe wherever your meditation, it’s guiding you to your next job.”