For De Mornay, Stage Work Isn’t Risky Business

Though she’s best known for her work in film (“Risky Business” and “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”) and more recently on television (“ER”), Rebecca De Mornay reserves a special passion for the theater.

“The two experiences I’ve had onstage,” she says, “were two of the best acting experiences of my career--and garnered some of the best reviews of my career.”

To indulge in that passion, De Mornay has taken the third stage role in her career, a lead in Patrick Marber’s “Closer,” which opens at the Mark Taper Forum on Nov. 9. In the production, she plays Anna, one of a quartet of wounded souls caught up in a modern-day war of the sexes that has been compared to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Debuting in London in 1998, “Closer” won the Olivier Award for best play.

“To be honest, I was just a tiny bit put off--for one thing, there was the graphic-ness of the language,” De Mornay says during a break from rehearsals. “Particularly I was worried whether it was misogynist. I have very strong feelings about what my responsibilities to myself and to a female audience are--the whole piece is more important than my part. If it doesn’t further illuminate something positive, uplifting, something to further understand the human condition, then I honestly don’t want to be a part of it.”

Discussions with director Robert Egan helped De Mornay see how Anna, a photographer and the older of the two female characters, could be shaped into a meaningful part--and that the play itself was “very interesting and, in the end, not misogynist.”

“Closer” tells the story of two women and two men who connect, break up and reconnect at various times in the name of love, lust or revenge--or a combination thereof. Anna meets Larry (Randle Mell), a dermatologist, at the aquarium. They date and eventually get married. But Dan (Christopher Evan Welch), the man who inadvertently introduced the couple, relentlessly pursues Anna, even though he has a girlfriend in Alice (Maggie Gyllenhaal).

“Rebecca’s an actress, through and through,” says Egan, who had heretofore only known her through her film work. “I was really surprised and blown away when she auditioned for me.”

The character of Anna, Egan says, is “one of those curious English characters you often see in British theater--very attractive, exceedingly smart, self-possessed and confident on the outside but on the inside vulnerable, bruised and somewhat guarded. Obviously to play the part the person has to be very confident onstage and fearless about their work.”

So what convinced him that De Mornay was perfect for the part? “She’s a very attractive, very smart woman, and she’s lived a lot of life, but there’s nothing hard about her.” That was key, he believes. “She understands the essential warmth of her character.”

She Gets More Back From a Play Than a Movie

Indeed, in real life the actress exudes an ease and lack of theatricality surprising for one whose career is about assuming surrogate identities. In conversations, she speaks in measured tones, thinking carefully, her blue eyes staring fixedly ahead, unblinking, as she speaks. “When you finish shooting a movie, there’s a sense of depletion, that your battery is exhausted, that they took it from you and got it on film, and it’s up to you to recharge yourself,” she says. “Whereas my experience on stage is that when I was done with it, I felt that I’d gotten so much more back.”

De Mornay also says she loves the process of preparing for a play--the readings, the rehearsals and the collective exploration of character and theme.

“I didn’t want to be an actress growing up; my mother wanted me to be one,” she says. “When I came ‘round to being one, [my childhood] conspired in a sense to give me a foundation for it.”

Born in Santa Rosa to Wally and Julia George, she spent the first five years of her life in California. Her mother remarried when she was 2, and she took on her stepfather’s surname. After her stepfather died, her mother packed up her two kids and moved to England, then on to Europe--with Mexico, Jamaica and Bermuda thrown in between.

“To say that she was in grief would be an understatement,” De Mornay says of her mother. “She began fleeing and wandering and taking us around the world on this odyssey that never really stopped for her--that’s why we were traveling so much.

“A lot of actors seem to have the same story in one way or another, this kind of rootlessness, this kind of travel.”

Along the way young Rebecca learned German and French, and picked up an English accent (which she doesn’t have today but can pick up at a moment’s notice).

“Slipping into other realities, in a way, is what I’ve been doing,” she says. “There’s this thing of having to fit into other people’s society, customs, language. It really fosters on the one hand this insecurity in a child, but on the other hand, tremendous tolerance for differences in people.”

De Mornay eventually moved to Los Angeles, taking acting classes with legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg and making the audition rounds. At a friend’s house, she happened to see the script for “Risky Business.” In a flash she saw how she could play the character Lana, a young, world-savvy call girl--even though she had had only a few months of acting training and one professional credit, a single line in Francis Ford Coppola’s “One From the Heart” that allowed her to get her SAG card.

“I was 19,” recalls the actress, now 38. “I’d lived all over the world and survived my stepfather’s death and a lot of stuff.” She laughs. “I felt incredible compassion and love for this little teenage call girl--it was like, ‘There but for the grace of God go I!’ ”

Writer-director Paul Brickman saw Lana in De Mornay and fought to cast her. She won the role over more experienced and bankable talents.

Since then the actress has been on the roller coaster of fame, riding high--in “Risky Business” (1983) and “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” (1992)--with some fabulous lows in between (“The Slugger’s Wife,” 1985).

“Success and failure are both jarring and are both illuminating,” she says. “I’ve been very fortunate to have both.”

Keeping Her Hand in TV and Theater

Throughout it all, she has kept working in film and television and the stage. In 1988, she appeared in “Born Yesterday” at the Pasadena Playhouse, followed two years later by “Marat/Sade” at the Williamstown (Mass.) Theater Festival. “De Mornay is mesmerizing,” wrote Kevin Kelly of the Boston Globe of De Mornay’s performance as Charlotte Corday in”Marat/Sade.” “Her talent, it seems to me, is extraordinary.”

Last year, she guest-starred in six episodes of “ER” and appears in two upcoming cable movies, “Range of Motion” on Lifetime and “A Girl Thing” on Showtime.

In addition to her acting career, De Mornay is busy raising a daughter, Sophia--with sportscaster Patrick O’Neal, son of Ryan O’Neal She’s also trying to direct her own movie, “Lilith,” a contemporary comedy based roughly on the ancient myth of the first woman on Earth. “Lilith” is a project she has been trying to get off the ground for some time. Earlier this year she had gotten together the funding and cast, only to see the funding fall through. Now the financing is in hand again, and De Mornay plans to start shooting next year--barring an actors’ strike.

It won’t be the first time she’s directed. In 1995, she directed “The Conversion,” an episode of the television series “The Outer Limits.”

“When you’re a director, you tell the whole story,” she says. “I’m a storyteller. Becoming an actor was something my mother wanted, and it is something I like doing. But what I really love is to tell a story, and I haven’t gotten to tell the stories I’ve wanted to tell yet.”

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* “Closer,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Also Nov. 20, 8 p.m.; Dec. 6, 2:30 p.m. Dark Nov. 23. Dec. 10, 2:30 p.m. only. Ends Dec. 10. $30-$44. (213) 628-2772.