On Shire Ground : Movie Jobs are Fine but Family Comes First for Character Actress

Talia Shire experienced an eerie moment during last year’s filming of the Disney Channel’s “Mark Twain and Me.”

The real-life daughter of the late Oscar-winning composer, conductor and musician Carmine Coppola and sister of Oscar-laden director Francis Coppola was recalling a scene in “Mark Twain” in which she, as embittered, sickly Jean Clemens, makes peace with her father, Mark Twain (Jason Robards).

“I was doing the scene and said to myself, ‘Oh my God. I am feeling very weird,’ ” Shire said slowly and deliberately. “It had to do with my father. It was not anything that could be an inner voice. There were no words attached to it. It was a kind of feeling.”

She felt as if she was playing the scene with her own father.

“I felt as you feel when the autumn comes and it is going to be a rainy season and it is time for darkness,” said Shire, 45. “I felt I was in a season where a parent would go. It was just a feeling.”

Less than six months after her premonition, Carmine Coppola suffered a stroke, on March 25, the night of the Academy Awards.

“He had a big stroke two days later,” Shire said softly. “And another a month later. But he was pulling out. My father, he was tough. The nurses and doctors loved him. It was time of enormous intimacy with my father. My birthday was April 25 and I stayed with my father two nights in the hospital and he died the 26th. It was a profound time.”

Family is everything to Shire. Shire has put her acting career on the back burner for her family. She’s known to film audiences as Connie Corelone in “The Godfather” trilogy and as loyal, loving Adrianne in the five “Rocky” movies. (She received two Oscar nominations for her work in those enormously successful film series.)

“I love my family,” Shire said, clasping her hand to her heart. “I love my children. I love my husband (film producer Jack Schwartzman, to whom she’s been married 11 years) and I love my stepchildren.”

Shire took a sip of water and propped her feet on the coffee table. “I love, really truly a dore my family. You have regrets that you can’t play that role or you can’t do this or that, but you know the years, the taking care of some young child. ... I would love any child. I love young people. I love people, but the rearing of children and family life is very dear to me. We are a very close family.”

Shire, who has produced such films with her husband as the James Bond adventure “Never Say Never Again,” has decided it’s time to return to work. “My children asked me to leave the house,” Shire quipped.

The actress said she’s not looking to do a star turn. “I am a character actress and the body of work I am looking for can be 10 minutes or five minutes,” she said. “I can sing, dance, wear a wig. I would love to do a comedy. I just don’t want it to be in a certain kind of role I got stuck in. I have played the witchy godmother, the sour woman and the vulnerable wife.”

But she wouldn’t trade her experience playing Connie and Adrianne. “The sequels kept me alive,” she said. And they gave Shire the rare opportunity to develop two characters over a period of nearly two decades.

“You don’t come into acting to make a buck,” she said. “You come because you love it. You come to service, you don’t come to be serviced. You come to give, not to take. So if you have a chance through the years to work with a team of people, you really delight in each other’s company. To see Al Pacino and Diane Keaton go from here to there--it is a joy. And it’s very exciting to take a character and refine it.”

Shire shot “Rocky V” and “The Godfather III” simultaneously, flying 10,000 miles between “Rocky V” in Philadelphia and the “The Godfather” set in Rome.

“It was a real test,” Shire said. “Could I go from part to part?”

Not only did she glide from Connie to Adrianne with ease, but making the concluding chapters of those movies “was a wonderful time of my life and a spiritual time. Both of these roles came together at the same time and both women were developing enormous strength. I thought that was really dandy.”

“Mark Twain and Me” premieres Friday at 8 p.m. on the Disney Channel. The film repeats Saturday at 2 a.m. and throughout December.