From Laughs to Leading Ladyship

If there were a hall of fame for laughers, a statue of Joan Cusack would grace the entry. When Cusack laughs, she throws her head back until it looks as if her hair could touch the ground, then sends a raspy fanfare of guffaws trumpeting toward the heavens. It’s a laugh that sucks you in--the kind that used to land you and your school chum in detention hall, breathless and teary-eyed.

When asked about Kevin Kline, her co-star of the new movie “In & Out,” she goes on about his sensitivity, his improvisational skills, his acumen at the piano. But the bottom line is that he really makes her laugh. And, when it is suggested that she should walk off with an Oscar for her show-stopping eruptions in the film, she claps and chortles giddily at the sheer outrageousness of the concept.

When the storm breaks, she says, “I feel like I did at the jeweler when the lady said, ‘Now, let me look at your hand. Your husband wants to get you a ring.’ ”

As Kline’s bride-to-be Emily, stunned at the end of a three-year engagement to contemplate that her fiance might be gay, Cusack gets to do very little laughing. The progression of Emily’s emotions is, rather, from puzzlement to empathy, shock and, finally, a gasket-blowing gush of anger that sends the audience into cheers.

Combining the gangbusters physicality of a Lucille Ball with a tough-winsome presence, Cusack’s Emily caps a decade of memorable comic creations in such films as “Broadcast News,” “Working Girl” and “Addams Family Values.”

It also marks one more giant step out of the Thelma Ritter pit, in which Cusack seemed to be eternally marked to play the funny sidekick or confidant. “It’s a real leading lady part,” she beams, looking very leading-lady svelte and uncommonly tall in black. “And a nice one for me because she is sort of transforming herself into a leading lady in life, going from the 75-pounds-overweight woman to a really more attractive bride.”

Born 35 years ago into a demonstrative Evanston, Ill., family that includes film producer-dad Richard, actress-older sister Anne and hot shot movie star-kid brother John, Cusack eschews any hint of the cerebral or calculated in her acting. Her hang-loose conversational style follows suit: She recalls her “Married to the Mob” co-star Michelle Pfeiffer as “really cool” and describes giving birth to son Dylan eight weeks before her interview as “just awesome.”

There was little room for pretension in the Cusack household, where Mel Brooks movies reigned supreme. “One of my dad’s favorite movies was ‘The Producers,’ and we’d watch that, and ‘Blazing Saddles.’ And then ‘Monty Python’ came on television. It was a really bonding thing. There were a lot of kids [five], and we had a lot of stuff going on, but those movies were a time when we were really together and focused and enjoying each other.”

The Cusack kids were trundled off one by one to a theater school started by the Pivens, acolytes of the improvisational Story Theater method pioneered by Viola Spolin and Paul Sills. “I was kind of shy, and their technique didn’t allow you to be self-conscious. You had to get out of your head and trust your instincts. All through high school, which had 4,000 kids, it was the one place where I could really feel--’safe’ is a queer word--where I could really enjoy myself.”

Those years inform her high regard for brother John, with whom she has appeared in “Say Anything” and “Grosse Pointe Blank.” “People just don’t bug John,” she says, explaining what she has discovered working with him on the set. “Or at least he doesn’t let them. He accepts them for what they are. He’s an easygoing guy. I just love that about him.

“It’s great to have someone around as an ally. The movies are an illusion. You see the finished product, and it’s hard to know how they came together. It’s so political; people are always saying this one is great or that one is wonderful to work with, and you never really know. So when you have someone out there in the film who you really love and loves you, you can trust and respect them and get those honest insights about how everyone works. John’s a great politician. He gets stuff done.”

The family pull keeps her happily nestled in Chicago, where she prefers to hang at home with her husband and friends (“I’m not a big whoop-it-up girl”). If you came out for a visit, though, she might celebrate the occasion with a steak and martini at Gibson’s and a boat ride.

Given the sanguineness of her family-based outlook and the solidity of her film and stage career, one might guess that it has been clear sailing. One would be deceived. Cusack recalls with a palpable chill working on the comedy “My Blue Heaven” with Steve Martin and Rick Moranis. “I had a terrible experience with the director, Herbert Ross. I just didn’t get along with him. I don’t think I was difficult. I don’t know what happened. I think it was just a bad time in my life.

“I finished that and I was a wreck. I didn’t know what to do with my life. I gained weight during the movie and was gone so much. For five years I didn’t even have an apartment. It was a crazy, horrible time. It was at that point when I said, wait a minute, I have to stay in Chicago and figure out what I’m really doing and who I really am.”

With a little help from therapy, Cusack found her way. But she still admits to being confounded by the whimsicality of life’s turns, which included a post-college period wandering around Jerusalem and environs with her boyfriend of the moment. In the flush of recent motherhood, she wonders anew. “I think about, like, how if we had a baby at a different time it would have been a totally different baby, that this person is so random in a way, even though he’s a part of who we are. It’s just incredible.”

And, we speculate, had she stayed in Israel with her old boyfriend, she could very well have become the Carole Lombard of Tel Aviv. Cusack tosses her head back and lets spill another gusher of laughter, then goes suddenly quiet. “No. I think it’s good that one didn’t work out.”