Lange and the Land : ‘O Pioneers!’ Connects Actress to Strong Wills She Knows Well

The door of the trailer opens and in bounds Jessica Lange, ruddy-faced and breathless from a bitter cold that’s locking New York City in a deep freeze.

“Guess it couldn’t be colder for our outdoor shooting, huh?” Lange says to a production assistant on “Night and the City,” a remake of the 1950 Jules Dassin boxing film she’s starring in opposite Robert De Niro. Playing the restless wife of a bar owner, Lange is scheduled to spend most of this night running around the streets of lower Manhattan with De Niro, who plays a shady lawyer who has become the target of a vendetta. But she doesn’t seem to mind at all.

“Oh, no,” she says, settling into the coziness of her trailer, sipping on a cup of decaffeinated cappucino. ‘I love the cold. It’s so clear, so brisk, so pure.”

“Pure” is a good description of Lange herself, sitting here sans makeup, occasionally running her hand through short sandy-colored hair or shyly covering her mouth as she fields a reporter’s questions. And “pure” is also an apt word for Alexandra Bergson, the character Lange plays in ‘O Pioneers!,” the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” television production airing Sunday on CBS.

The TV film is an adaptation of a Willa Cather story of a determined and stalwart woman, the daughter of Swedish immigrants come to coax into bounty the unyielding Nebraska prairie of the late 19th Century. While Alexandra succeeds in fulfilling a promise to her parents to do just that, she faces other challenges that reap as much bitter fruit as blessings for the 40-year-old spinster. Reaps both bitter fruit and blessings in the process.

Lange has been as successful in playing fresh-scrubbed, close-to-the-earth women (“Country”) as she has been in playing the opposite (“Tootsie,” “Frances,” “Cape Fear”).

One wonders if her penchant for these hardy women might not partly stem from a desire to quell the glamour surrounding an actress who first starred as beauty to King Kong’s beast. Then, too, she is a Hall-of-Famer when it comes to her choice in her real-life romantic partners, from the late director Bob Fosse, for whom she played a glittering Angel of Death in the film “All That Jazz,” to the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, by whom she has a 10-year-old daughter, to playwright-director Sam Shepard, whom she lives with on a Virgina farm with their two children, a 4-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter.

Lange’s tickled by the suggestion that she plays these tough, simple women in part to compensate for the complicated and pampered life of a movie star.

“Look, I’d live a much simpler life if I could,” she says, with a full-throated husky laugh. “The only place in the world I truly feel at home is in the woods of northern Minnesota. I try to raise my children as simply as possible because I think this other stuff does them more harm than good. I’d live in Minnesota if I could, but I can’t convince Sam to live in that cold, cold country.”

Lange, the granddaughter of Finnish and Dutch-German immigrants, grew up in the small town of Cloquet, Minn., one of four children. She says she drew extensively on her background for ‘O Pioneers!,” casting the role of the quietly determined Alexandra in the mold of her maternal grandmother, a young Dutch woman, the eldest of 10 children, who wasn’t allowed to go to school because she was needed at home on the farm.

“I don’t mean this to sound mumbo-jumbo or weird,” she says, “but I kept getting a strong sense of my grandmother when I was making the film. As a child, I remember a picture of her standing in very much the same kind of clothes as Alexandra wears and it seemed to me that I felt the same things she felt for the land and for her family.”

The actress says she was motivated to make her television debut because she loved the Cather story and wanted to collaborate in interpreting a piece of literature.

“It’s unexpected and rather subtle fare for television,” she says. ‘It’s so out of step with today and I think that’s great. The MTV mentality worries me a lot. People don’t make the commitment to sit and listen, really listen, to the language. And in a country like America, which has no roots, I think one of the most beautiful and touching and tragic themes in the film is this idea of honoring the past, of keeping faith with the dead. It hearkens back to a time when life was based on that commitment to family. There’s nothing more important to me.”

Lange’s interpretation of these old-fashioned values has a decidedly contemporary cast. For her own private reasons, she has chosen not to marry the fathers of her children, revealing an iconoclastic temperament that fits Alexandra Bergson as well as the host of other individualistic characters she has created on screen, from strumpets (“The Postman Always Rings Twice”) to virgins (“O Pioneers!”). It a measure of both her versatility and fearlessness that upon completion of her role in “Night and the City” she will be making her Broadway debut this spring by playing Blanche Dubois opposite Alec Baldwin in a revival of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

“I’m probably a fool not to be scared, but I’m too excited,” she says about her scaling an Everest of acting for what is virtually her first time on stage, apart from a brief stint with the Paris Opera Comique early in her career. “To be able to play Blanche is such a gift. If you don’t invent challenges for yourself, acting, particularly film acting, can become, well, boring.”

While Lange enjoys the range of playing extravagantly emotional and marginally mad characters such as Frances Farmer and Blanche Dubois. They are, in many ways, easier to assay than a character such as Alexandra Bergson.

“I can play those characters easily, sometimes too easily,” she says laughing, lumping them in with the “manic-depressive, schizo” she plays in the late Tony Richardson’s last film “Blue Sky,” as yet unscheduled for release. “You can just go wild. But this (Alexandra) demands much more of you in terms of using your head. To have a lot going on and not be able to verbalize it, that was an interesting problem to tackle.”

Indeed, the pioneer woman exists on-screen more by virtue of the quiet authority Lange invests in her than by anything she says or does. Though the actress contends that the real love affair is between Alexandra and the land, there is also romance to speak of between her and an artist (David Straithern). Neither in the book nor the film is it clear whether the couple ever consummate their affair before the artist heads off to Alaska to find his fortune. It is telling, though, that for Lange they did not.

“I didn’t consciously play Alexandra as a virgin,” she says. “That would have demeaned her in a way. But I think it would’ve have been important for Alexandra to be very clear in her relationship with Carl and sex would’ve altered things a lot. There’s a difference between keeping things hidden and being a private person.”

Blanche Dubois, on the other hand, is anything but a virgin. When the seduction scene between her and the young paper boy is brought up, Lange sensually recalls a line from it: “Young, young man, you make my mouth water.” The word, “water” comes out “watuh,” and suddenly the trailer is transformed into a streetcar in sultry New Orleans.

But Lange makes it clear that she does not believe Blanche to be promiscuous. Her desire, she adds, stems from her denial of death, an affirmation of life in the face of “years of watching old women bury their old men in this long trip to the graveyard.”

While there are a few similarities between Blanche and Alexandra they share a capacity for tenderness and in the case of the latter, forgiveness. In fact, they are virtues of many of the characters Lange has played. When asked about the redemptiveness of these women, particularly in their relationships toward men, Lange grows thoughtfully silent. It was, she says, one of the things that most attracted her to Alexandra Bergson when she first read Cather’s story, one of the primary reasons why she wanted to play her.

“I come from an amazing stock of women,” she says. “All of them lived with really hard men. Not unlovable men, but very emotional, very difficult men who made terrible demands on their wives. The only truly positive partnership I observed as a child was the one between my maternal grandparents. Otherwise, the marriages were what you’d call ‘dysfunctional,’ but I hate to use that term because it doesn’t seem to include anything having to do with the human soul. But what I see in all these women in my family, through all their trials, is that they don’t carry blame or bitterness around with them. And I think that’s really important in life. I think it’s really great if you can do that.”

“O Pioneers!” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on ABC.