Ready to Return to Acting--but Only on Her Terms

In the early 1980s, after a string of hit movies and Oscar nominations, Jill Clayburgh, a feminist icon for her strong and sensitive portrayals of women in an age of great social change, decided to play a different role, one that she fell madly in love with and stayed with for an extended run: mother.

At the time, she didn’t see it as a career-altering casting change. After all, she continued performing in made-for-TV movies, made guest appearances on TV dramas and snared a few intriguing roles in small films. But Hollywood’s reaction wasn’t as open-minded, seeing her lack of absorption in career as ingratitude. Clayburgh was at first oblivious to this perception, then indifferent to it because she was finding her new role so utterly fascinating, fun and fulfilling.

But now, at 55, with her children bounding through high school and into college, it might be Clayburgh’s turn again. Last season, she was in two short-lived television series: “Trinity,” a drama in which she played an Irish matriarch, and “Everything’s Relative,” an offbeat sitcom in which she played a divorced mother of two grown sons. The same shining talents that made her one of the brightest stars of the ‘70s, in such films as “An Unmarried Woman” and “Semi-Tough,” were once again in evidence. She was riveting, hilarious and compelling.

In returning tentatively to the spotlight, Clayburgh is a paradigm for millions of women who chose family over fame or fortune, and who once again are striking out on their own.

For the last five years, Clayburgh has made her home here in tony northwest Connecticut, where she lives with her husband of 20 years, playwright David Rabe (“Streamers,” “Hurlyburly,” “Stick and Bones”) and their two children: Michael, 14, and Lily, 17. Her stepson, Jason, 26, is a musician with the alternative-rock group Huge.

The twice Oscar-nominated actress is an elegant and natural beauty at any age. A cool vision in linen, she looks like a person utterly comfortable with herself as she curls up in a chair in her spacious country home and talks about her life, her career and her family.

Twenty years ago, Clayburgh was promoting the film “Luna,” in which she played an opera star and mother who is unaware of her son’s many problems, including drugs. In an interview then, she said the role gave her pause, “especially since I’m an actress, and you feel you might suffer from the same career involvement and selfishness. [The role] just scared me terribly, but I think I’ve learned something from it, too. That’s one of the reasons why I never had a baby right away since I’ve been successful. I would not like to be a mother who is thinking about when she should call her agent.” Clayburgh today finds the old quote haunting.

“That’s very interesting,” she says. “It’s kind of prescient. To do both [have a successful career and care for family] is very hard--at least for me. I’m not a very good juggler. When I had children--now that I think about it--I felt I really didn’t want to act. I was only passionate about my family. And it was hard for me to have two passions. I just fell in love with my children. The phone calls would come with offers, and I would say, ‘Oh, I’ll call back later.’

“I didn’t think very hard about the choices that I did make,” Clayburgh says. “I would try to sneak a movie in. I was definitely working all along, but people would say to me, ‘Oh, you stopped working.’ And I would say, ‘No, I didn’t.’ I worked about three months a year. I would get an offer, and I would say, ‘Oh, I can’t do that. That’s in the summer. That’s for the children because they’re on vacation.’ And I wouldn’t take the job.”

After several years of New York theater experience and a minor film role, Clayburgh tried her luck in Hollywood. She had little success until a part came that would change her life.

“There was a TV movie [in 1975] called ‘Hustling,’ ” she says, “and I couldn’t even get in to audition for the part of an 8th Avenue hooker. They said I could play the Lee Remick part, but Lee Remick was playing the Lee Remick part. I said, ‘No, I can play the hooker.’ It was a great part. I found out later my agent at the time was actually pushing someone else for the role, so I couldn’t get into the casting room.”

She changed agents and got the part. An Emmy nomination followed.

“And within a few years, I got ‘Gable and Lombard,’ ” Clayburgh recalls, “which received mixed reviews but was a part everyone wanted. And then came ‘An Unmarried Woman’ [in 1978]. It was very sudden and very weird.”

She became overwhelmed by her success.

“ ‘Oh, this is too much!’ I kept saying to myself. I did stupid things, like turning down ‘Norma Rae.’ Stupid. Everyone couldn’t understand why I turned it down. People thought I was nuts. And I was. But I had to be arty--although I would never trade in my experience with [Bernardo] Bertolucci [starring in 1979’s “Luna”]. But I didn’t have a sense of career and the commercial. . . . I didn’t make smart career moves.”

‘The First Generation

of Feminism’

When Clayburgh watches the careers of Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock, she sees young actresses with better master plans. And perhaps they learned from what happened to the generation before them, with actresses Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Sally Field and Clayburgh herself.

“Our generation was the first generation of feminism and the New Hollywood,” she says. “Hollywood became a whole thing that it wasn’t before. It was still star-making, but in a much more limited way. You had to do it on your own. You didn’t have the studios to do it for you. But, in a funny way, there was a sort of maverick quality to the people you’re talking about. They sort of did it on their own. Now, although it’s not a studio that’s helping Julia Roberts, there’s still a machinery, and maybe it’s of her own choosing. Maybe it’s having a manager. We didn’t have managers in those days. My God, what kind of person would have a manager? After all, you have agents, and you’re paying them 10%. No self-respecting actor would have a manager in those days. Now everyone has one.”

Life moves on, and for Clayburgh, it’s the natural evolution of family life.

“My son hit 13, and my daughter was looking at colleges, and I was able to focus,” she says. “ ‘Everything’s Relative,’ which was shooting in California, made this incredible deal with me where I would fly back here on the weekends. It was going to be grueling, but it could be done. But I wouldn’t have considered that before. And then ‘Trinity’ was shooting in New York.

“I have a friend who is a lawyer in Boston, and two years ago she was considering the possibility of being a judge. We’re both sort of 50ish. She was so excited about her future as a judge, and I said, ‘I’m so jealous. You’re looking at your life starting now as this extraordinary beginning.’ And last year she threw that back in my face, and she said, ‘Look at your career right now and all these interesting options and how excited you are about your work.’ And she’s right.

“I still couldn’t do a play. And I don’t want to leave for any great length of time now. But in the next few years? Sure. But you know, I don’t think that far ahead. I have friends who just have to work or else they would feel lost. I don’t have to. Some of the most intellectual women I know don’t have jobs. They have time to read. There is also intellectual satisfaction with their families and friends and from which they create for themselves. Now I finally know that I could do that.

“Michael Douglas asked me once which was more important to me: my career or my personal life. And I said my career. Of course, this was before I had a personal life. Now I would never say that. But I think maybe I needed the career to gain a kind of confidence. I think I needed, at that point in my life, the recognition. Now I would do it for the stimulation. I like the stimulation. And lately it’s been so enjoyable. I just have been so lucky.”