Wandering Spirit of Jessica Lange

Jessica Lange is looking at herself and wishing she were uglier.

Someone has just handed her a century-old edition of “Cousin Bette,” and she flips through the illustrations eagerly. The woodcut engravings render the title character as a forbidding crone with a beak nose and cone-shaped eyebrows, a fair reflection of how Balzac envisioned the vengeful spinster whom Lange is playing in the screen version that opened last week.

Hard as the makeup crew may have tried to de-glamorize its star with sallow pastes and a dark wig, all she has to do is break a smile and Bette melts from an aging “monkey in petticoats” into the ravishing young siren who was courted by a big ape named King Kong.

“She has a much sharper nose and chin than I did,” says Lange from a Carlyle Hotel suite, transfixed by the illustrator’s take on her character. “That’s the only thing I wished when I was doing ‘Cousin Bette.’ That I had a nose job.”

As she stakes her claim on this literary antiheroine, Lange is stepping onto a minefield of skepticism. And she knows it. While her skin is graced with a few of the telltale furrows that betray her 48 years, this two-time Oscar winner can’t entirely elude the crystalline beauty that has provided bait for a variety of high-profile co-stars after Kong, including Dustin Hoffman (“Tootsie”), Jack Nicholson (“The Postman Always Rings Twice”) and her longtime partner, playwright-actor Sam Shepard, whom she met making “Frances.”

“For me, more of it has to do with her emotional state than her physical appearance,” Lange insists, launching her defense. “There is a flood of emotions passing through this woman all the time. All those terrible barbs are flung at her, but she never lets them know they have gotten to her. I also wanted to give the audience the slightest moments, subliminal images of the girl she might have been had circumstances been different, rather than this closed-down, bitter woman.”

“You can feel the pain beneath the surface,” says “Cousin Bette” director Des McAnuff of Lange’s style. “I was stunned at how reptilian she could look in the role--and that’s from her acting. One of the things I love about Jessica is that she is one of the few actors who can really play a character with a secret. You always feel like there is something else going on.”

Lange’s facility for conveying the turbulence hidden behind the social mask has enabled her to assay a range of women who dwell in a state of emotional isolation, one that occasionally approaches madness. Beyond Bette, there has been her mercurial, blond-bombshell housewife in 1994’s “Blue Sky” (for which she won an Oscar); her tempestuous portrayal of actress Frances Farmer, whose independent spirit landed her in a mental institution; and her willowy Blanche du Bois, the illusion-besotted Tennessee Williams heroine in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” on Broadway in 1992, on TV in ’95 and, most triumphantly, in Peter Hall’s West End stage production last year.

The capstone to all of these manic characters may come next spring, when Lange returns to the London stage to play Eugene O’Neill’s narcotized matriarch Mary Tyrone in Hall’s production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

“Well, I think we’re all living about that close to madness,” she says with a diabolical smile, holding two fingers at a half-inch distance as she tries to explain her empathy for these women. “And it’s just how easily you move through the world without people knowing it. For me the interesting characters are the ones who are not holding on quite as tight, who can make that slide with greater velocity than the rest of us do.”

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The smile fades as she reaches back to her childhood, growing up in rural Minnesota, the daughter of an itinerant salesman who moved his family often. Despite two older sisters and a younger brother, “I had a real profound sense of loneliness all through my early years,” she claims, “something that only began to ease with the advent of my children. [Lange has a 16-year-old daughter by her former companion Mikhail Baryshnikov and a daughter and son with Shepard.] It’s not hard to tap into that.”

Lange would inherit her father’s wanderlust, relinquishing an art scholarship at the University of Minnesota after only a couple of months’ study to hit the road with a Spanish photographer named Paco Grande, the only man she would ever legally wed. The couple embarked upon a quintessential ‘60s hippie odyssey across the States and down to South America, living out of the back of a pickup truck. Lange concedes an intense nostalgia for those years.

“And I tell you, I think I’m still happiest breaking camp. That thing of packing up and moving on. I do have the perfect job. As long as my kids will tag along with me. That’s the only thing. I went through that period with my oldest daughter when the most important thing is your friends. Now she’s come full circle and can’t wait to go somewhere new.”

Jessica Lange is looking at herself and making no excuses.

Her wizened seamstress in “Cousin Bette” is about as far from her screen debut as the babe-in-distress in “King Kong” as one could imagine. While her tongue-in-cheek performance had its defenders (Pauline Kael credited to her “the high, wide forehead and clear-eyed transparency of Carole Lombard in ‘My Man Godfrey’ ”), Lange’s work was swept away in the tide of ill will that greeted the picture. It would be years and her double-Oscar nomination in 1983 for “Frances” and “Tootsie” (she won for the latter) before she would be given full credence as an actor.

What was she thinking of when she took on the cheesecake part in “King Kong”?

“People say to me, do you think in retrospect that was a good career choice?” she says, then lets go a hearty laugh. “Career? There was no career! Look, I was 25 years old, I had just come back from living in Paris, I was completely broke. I was back in New York living in an apartment in the West Village that had no hot water. They hadn’t come to collect my rent in a long time. In fact, I think the building was condemned. I was working part time as a waitress at the Lion’s Head, and suddenly I’m offered this part. Why not?

“I just did whatever was expected of me, I thought, with a certain amount of humor. It wasn’t like I was taking the thing seriously, which is why I didn’t understand when the film came out how everybody took it so seriously.”

One audience member who took her “Kong” performance very seriously indeed was the late choreographer-director Bob Fosse. He befriended Lange and offered her the role of the Angel of Death in “All That Jazz,” a part that called for her once more to be voluptuous, albeit in a more cryptic mode. “He said to me, ‘If I had to face Death, I’d want it to be you.’ ”

Fosse would be the first of two seminal 20th century dance artists to play a key role in Lange’s life. She refers to her alliance with Fosse in support-system words, then adds, “With Mischa, that was a whole other thing. I fell madly in love with him.” The two continue to be on chummy terms.

Given her propensity for dancers, one can’t avoid the inevitable question: Can Sam Shepard cut a rug?

“Well, he can two-step,” she offers with a chuckle.

When they are not on a film set or rehearsing a play, Lange and her partner waltz between their horse farms in Virginia and Lange’s home state of Minnesota. Aside from “Frances,” the couple have teamed up for “Country” and “Far North,” which Shepard wrote and directed.

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Having tried her hand over the years at art, music (the cello), screenwriting (an unrealized script for Jayne Ann Philips’ novel “Machine Dreams”) and politics (speaking before Congress on the plight of the American farmer), Lange concedes she is still evolving as she inches closer toward her 50th year.

“Certainly the emphasis keeps shifting for me,” she says reflectively. “Something will happen, it will kind of break new ground, or else you feel like you’re going along on this plateau for a long time and then, boom, something has shifted and opened up, and you thank God. But I think a lot of that has to do with coming to terms with the impermanence of life, how fast things can change. And it’s very marked with children, as you see how fast they grow. One of them is within a year or so of leaving home. You start spinning: It seems like only such a short time ago she was just a baby. The time has gotten so precious. More than anything at this time in my life I’m making a conscious effort to recognize the impermanence of everything and pay attention to that.

“So it becomes harder and harder to say yes to projects. You’d think as your kids got older it would come easier, but it doesn’t actually. Really, it’s the reverse.”

Which is precisely why Lange carts her kids along wherever she works, just as her father once did when she was growing up. They will come with her once again to London in January, when they will enroll in school there for a semester as she begins rehearsals on the O’Neill play.

“One of the great things about living outside the center of the film industry and the spotlight is the fact that you can actually see how real life progresses. Do you know what I mean? So in coming up to 50, I don’t think that’s going to be a huge landmark. I’m past that. It’s just kind of an arc.”

Jessica Lange is looking at herself, and at the end of the day, likes what she sees.