She’s a Puzzlement

Just before actress Donna Murphy was to meet with Steven Bochco early last year, when he was considering her for a role in “Murder One,” director Charles Haid took her aside.

“The producers want you, I want you, but there is this concern about you,” he told her. “You have this quality. . . .”

Murphy replied, “Oh, and what is that?”

“You know,” Haid said. “This kind of stick-up-your-butt, don’t-mess-with-me attitude. We just want to see what’s underneath that, OK?”

In an interview in her dressing room at the Neil Simon Theatre, Murphy laughs as she recalls the story, which was later corroborated by Haid.

Murphy won the role of Francesca Cross, the mysterious socialite she occasionally plays on the television series, and some of those same imperious qualities are now winning praise for her in the role of Anna in the hit Broadway revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s classic “The King and I,” opposite Lou Diamond Phillips.

Murphy’s surprise win at the Tonys last June showed the actress in action. Looking dazzlingly elegant in a skin-tight beaded gown, the statuesque brunet clutched the award that everyone had expected to go to Julie Andrews, and saluted the balcony as the audience roared its approval. This was Murphy’s second best-actress Tony--she won two years before for creating the role of the ugly and embittered recluse in Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion.” But perhaps because this time she had won under such dramatic circumstances, or perhaps because her current role is such a beloved character, this year’s triumph lifted the actress to the first rank of Broadway stars. It’s a place that almost anyone who’s worked with her agrees is her due.

“When Donna first met with me on ‘Murder One,’ ” recalls Haid, “I saw this woman in a beautiful, form-fitting white linen suit with black hair and piercing eyes who left me spellbound. I had been aware of her as someone who’d played weird character parts in theater but I wasn’t ready for the woman who entered the room. I would’ve sold my furniture for her!”

“Donna’s matured and I think ‘King and I’ is a big leap forward for her,” says James Lapine, who directed her in “Passion,” as well as in his own Jungian drama, “Twelve Dreams,” at Lincoln Center. “She has a dark, cool side and she’s very intense, so it’s nice to see her succeed in doing the kind of part that you wouldn’t think of her doing.”

So what is underneath that cool and sophisticated veneer? What emerges through a number of interviews with associates as well as with Murphy herself is the picture of a complicated, ambitious and insecure artist, a consummate professional who is as unsparing with herself as she is with others.

Regally perched on the edge of a couch in an elegant dressing room filled with theater and family memorabilia--not to mention Anna’s gigantic hoop skirts--Murphy is disarmingly honest, as likely to admit her impatience with mediocrity as she is to having a reputation for being difficult. Wearing little makeup, Murphy’s casual mop of hair is swept back and her lithe frame sheathed in black. Yet she is a lady who can cuss like a truck driver. Think Audrey Hepburn crossed with Susan Hayward.

“Oh yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that ‘ice princess’ thing before,” she says. “And it always surprises me. I guess when it comes to auditions or meetings, I come in very focused. But when the feedback is about showing more vulnerability, I wonder, ‘Don’t they see that?’ Maybe it’s what I feel I have to do not to be scared [expletive]. If you consider yourself capable of playing a lot of different types of people, you better be selective about what you’re going to show them when you walk in the door.”

In fact, few actors could navigate the range of characters she has in both drama and musicals. Just in the last few years she’s moved from the hideous Fosca of “Passion” to the big-hearted whore in Michael John LaChiusa’s “Hello, Again” to the frivolous and vain, funny woman of “Twelve Dreams” to the brusque and feisty Welsh schoolteacher in “The King and I.”

Her transformations are so complete that she has gone unrecognized even by those who know her. Director William Friedkin, who cast her in a small role in the movie “Jade” on the basis of a screen test, realized only later that she was the same actress he’d seen in “Passion.” At the workshop of the Sondheim musical, composer Mary Rodgers failed to recognize Murphy, who had been in a revue of her songs just the year before.

“I enjoy exploring different parts of me through the roles,” says the actress. “I’m interested in reinvestigating, reinventing, stretching myself. Otherwise I’d be bored.’

Those explorations come at a hefty price, given Murphy’s standards. Her comfort in the role of Anna was hard won. In fact, in the heat of final rehearsals for the show, she almost quit.

“I was feeling jammed,” says Murphy, “unable to find my footing in a way that served the production. I remember coming home one night and telling my husband, [actor] Shawn [Elliott], ‘I wish I were playing the King,’ because I’m used to roles in which the woman moves the action forward. Everybody kept saying, ‘It’s going to be fine, it’s going to be fine,’ and I said, ‘Well it doesn’t just happen, you have to take steps.’ ”

Murphy took steps. She brought in John Deluca, an acting coach, and following rehearsals, they worked together in her dressing room until three or four o’clock in the morning for weeks. “People, I’m sure, thought we were having an affair,” she recalls. “Or that I was fighting with the director because there was a lot of screaming and yelling going on. I just needed somebody to shake things up and John saved my ass with his clarity and insight.”

Phillips was aware of Murphy’s crisis during rehearsals. “The thing about Donna is that she never takes the easy answer and that’s why her performance is so layered,” he says. “It was difficult to witness the pain she was going through and not be able to do something about it. But she’s strong. She certainly didn’t need anyone to save her from drowning. She had herself.”

Murphy, who is in her late 30s, is the eldest of seven children born to a Long Island aerospace engineer and a housewife. Early on, she threw out her dolls and began agitating for opportunities to develop her talent for organizing her siblings into amateur family theatricals. She also took violin, piano and accordion lessons.

“I wanted to be taken seriously,” says Murphy. “I was very competitive, more so with boys than with girls.”

At age 11, Murphy’s father moved the family to the small town of Topsfield, Mass., and to her horror the budding actress discovered that there was no drama department at the local high school. She set about correcting the situation, adapting plays to avoid paying royalties, drumming up help to build and paint sets and, of course, taking the leading roles for herself. People, she says, thought she was “a monster or just crazy,” a Long Island babe wearing makeup and stockings in the land of Izod.

“I don’t think people thought I was hateful,” she recalls, “just this very pushy, skinny little girl with braces on my teeth. When I think about it, I had supreme confidence. There was nothing I couldn’t do, just a sense of well, if there’s a problem, let’s solve it!”

Murphy was knocked off that confident perch, however, once she moved to Manhattan to attend New York University and study drama with Stella Adler. The competition became substantially stiffer and the stakes higher, and she became more conscious of both her strengths and weaknesses. Fellow students in Adler’s class were older, more experienced. Though she says that Adler was “debatably abusive” with her intimidation and humiliation of students, she credits Adler as being one of her most important influences.

“Artists had the responsibility to enlighten an audience,” Murphy recalls of Adler’s style. “I was serious, but acting was fun for me, and [Adler] was intense and very opinionated about what was art and what wasn’t, what was worthy of time and talent and what wasn’t. ‘Your talent,’ she used to say, ‘is in your choice.’ ”

Murphy left NYU in her sophomore year for a featured role in the Marvin Hamlisch-Neil Simon musical “They’re Playing Our Song” and followed that with “Zapata,” a new musical at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House, where she met Elliott, whom she married in 1990. (He starred opposite Murphy in the HBO film “Someone Had to Be Benny.”) In the mid-’80s, she was hired to replace Betty Buckley in the musical “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” But the show that brought Murphy a first dose of fame was the 1991 musical “Song of Singapore.”

She played a sultry ‘40s nightclub singer with amnesia who turns out to be Amelia Earhart. To prepare, she obsessively studied the musical styles of the period and even read books on Earhart. Critics raved about her. She was miserable.

“They [the creators] just wanted a girl singer, and I felt we could take it to another level,” she recalls. “I pushed a lot and stood up for what I believed in and they resented it. I was working with fellow performers, some of whom I felt hated me. Some must’ve thought I was a selfish bitch.

“The issue of selfishness is a huge one for me,” she continues. “It pushes a button, maybe because when I was a kid, certain members of my family at certain times saw my aggressiveness and focused desires as being selfish. So on the couple of occasions in which directors have come to me and said I was being selfish, it was like a knife.”

“Donna is smart and uncompromising,” says Mary Rodgers, who has been a fan since she saw Murphy play Vera in a Boston production of “Pal Joey,” written by her father, Richard Rodgers, and Lorenz Hart. Impressed by Murphy’s versatility and sensuality, Rodgers lobbied Murphy into accepting a featured part in “Hey, Love,” a 1993 revue of her songs, as well as Murphy’s current role as Anna--also her father’s work. “It’s not about ego, it’s about perfectionism. She knows her insecurities and she knows what she wants and she’s pretty upfront about it. And if you don’t want to deal with that, then you get somebody else. God knows, the results are terrific.”

“I love working with her, although I could see how other people wouldn’t,” says Lapine. “In ‘Passion,’ she was very steady, and I don’t remember her being selfish in the least or that anybody felt that way about her.”

Lapine’s observation is particularly surprising in view of the fact that “Passion” had a very troubled preview period in New York--so much so that it could have thrown even the most experienced and secure actor into a downward spiral. Audiences were uncomfortable and impatient with the 19th century Italian story of the obsessive, sickly Fosca who grovels after a handsome Italian soldier, and some laughed and snickered during performances.

“It was a harsh experience and I was raw and emotional through much of it, because Fosca is so in touch with everything she feels,” Murphy recalls of the hapless character she played with an ugly mole pasted on her face, a shapeless brown smock and severe hairdo. “But I felt such conviction in what we were trying to do and I had such trust for the people I was working with that the dislike of Fosca and the laughter from the audience never destroyed me.”

Murphy’s ambition, she says, is “to have it all.” She wants to do more film work when her contract in “The King and I” ends early next year. Thus far, she’s done only “Jade” and “Benny.”

While few doubt that Murphy has the talent to get where she wants to go, her own versatility may well prove a detriment. “I think she’s terrific on film,” says Lapine, “but given the taste of Hollywood, I wonder if people will make way for her to have the big roles.”

For her part, the actress is hopeful that the powers making such decisions will realize that she is not just “some theater actress playing weird roles.” As to her volatile way of working, well, she says she’s mellowed, finding ways to take the onus off herself in order to concentrate more on the work. Still, from time to time, she’s reminded that the cool and confident Long Island babe has a lot of staying power.

Murphy recalls that not too long ago, she was in a recording studio, cutting “Leonard Bernstein’s New York,” a Nonesuch release featuring an all-star lineup of Broadway performers. During the recording of a particularly difficult trio involving Murphy, one of the singers lifted up Murphy’s headphone and urgently whispered just before a take, “Now, look, you have, like, this gloss of cool over you, like everything’s cool, nothing bothers you, so fine, OK. But I don’t have that. Just know that whatever I’m about to do is to save my ass!”

Murphy marvels at the perception: “First of all, I felt just as dissatisfied and insecure as this person did,” she recalls. “And yet I’m coming off like that? Maybe it’s because I have dark hair and I’m long and lean, people just assume that I’m fine, just fine. But, believe me, I’m not,” she says with a laugh. “I’m usually a [expletive] mess.”

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The “American Playhouse” production of “Passion,” starring Donna Murphy, will air Sept. 29 at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV.