A Formidable Presence

During a dinner at one of the film festivals this year, a middle-age female executive started rhapsodizing about a film called “The Business of Strangers.” Essentially she was saying, “That’s me!”

The character provoking such reaction is played by Stockard Channing. In “The Business of Strangers” (opening in Los Angeles and a few other major cities Friday), Channing is a businesswoman who is promoted to CEO of her company and comes to terms with the price she’s paid for her success while staying at one of those anonymous airport hotels. Acting as catalysts in this soul-searching are her slightly unhinged young assistant (Julia Stiles) and a slick headhunter (Frederick Weller).

But these days, whether it’s at a Toronto film festival or as millions of Americans settle in to catch her on “The West Wing” on Wednesday nights, Channing is turning heads.

Today she is sitting in the threadbare lobby of a Toronto hotel very unlike the sterile hotel in the film. She’s bemused by the tattiness of it and, by extension, the hotel lobby that has become her life, the crummy airplane food, the graveyard working hours, the babble of strangers.

Channing is, in short, a working actress, though not working at any one thing, which is a miracle at her age (57) or at any age. She has a flourishing career in films and telefilms and regular appearances on the critically acclaimed NBC series “The West Wing” as Abigail, President Bartlet’s (Martin Sheen) prickly physician wife.

“I’m fortunate at the moment,” Channing says with the air of someone having her arm twisted. “I can’t deny it. I feel great. I don’t have any illusion that it will last.”

It may be more a measure of how tired she is than of how great she feels that she’s prone to laughing jags, usually about her insanely peripatetic lifestyle and irregular working hours. A case in point is an anecdote about returning to Manhattan from an all-nighter on “Business of Strangers.” She was stuck in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike at 10 a.m., then had to sleep through the day while sunlight seeped into the room before finally returning to work that night to do it all over again.

“You’re sitting there at 3:30 in the morning, and you just watch your energy seep into the ground and your brain fry,” says Channing, trying to suppress a laugh. “Usually at 4:30 in the morning you’re playing a crisp little entrance. God forbid you should be playing the weird stuff. The point is, when you’re making a small movie like this, you’ve got to have some sense of [why you’re doing it] so you don’t turn into this ogre or weirdo.”

According to Channing and “Business of Strangers” director Patrick Stettner, she needed some convincing before she undertook the project.

Though she liked the script, the project was low budget and the director an unknown--and she’s getting too old for this kind of stuff. A viewing of his short films and a sit-down with him convinced her to sign on, but her casting presented another problem: What young actress could possibly play opposite her?

Or, as Stettner puts it, “I was suddenly realizing with Stockard, you can’t put any young adult against her. I was seeing these young girls and I was whispering to the casting director, ‘Stockard is going to pick her teeth with this actress.’”

“Attractive, isn’t it?” says Channing, both appalled and amused when apprised of Stettner’s characterization. “This image of Stockard at 3 o’clock in the morning picking her teeth, saying, ‘Why ... am I in this movie?’”

Channing has probably asked herself that question more than once over the course of her 30-year career. She has seen her share of ups and downs. Her first break came in 1975 when she was cast as a dizzy heiress opposite Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson in Mike Nichols’ “The Fortune.” The film didn’t click, and neither did her next two films. Suddenly, she couldn’t get arrested, and she was consigned to a “Where are they now?” column by a critic she won’t name who had previously been singing her praises.

“I remember as I sit here how I felt reading it,” she says. “Just awful. This is a lesson here because don’t listen to the good stuff and don’t listen to the bad stuff, because they’re both going to be there. But it really hurt. It scared me. I thought, I’m not going to be able to do this anymore. Oh my God, I just got here. I’m just getting my sea legs. I’m just getting used to maybe being famous.

“I’d been acting for a long time, but I was literally getting used to how you talk to your agent, how you figure stuff out. I was new to the neighborhood, and I was suddenly a has-been. I said, ‘What else am I going to do?’”

She hung in there. She appeared in a series of supporting roles in such films as “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh,” “The Cheap Detective” and, memorably, as Rizzo in “Grease.” She made innumerable TV movies and took a shot at series TV (“Just Friends,” “The Stockard Channing Show”). Finally she found a measure of recognition on stage, winning a Tony for “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” and appearing in John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation” as socialite Ouisa Kitt- redge, reprising the role on-screen and earning an Oscar nomination.

By the time Channing arrived on “The West Wing,” whether as a consequence of who she is or what she’d been through, she had become a formidable picking-her-teeth-with-neophytes onscreen presence. And that’s exactly what the producers of the show wanted.

“The most important part of the character is that she owns herself, and you feel that in the first episode,” says Thomas Schlamme, an executive producer on the show who directs many of its episodes. “You completely bought that she lived in that world and she was comfortable with whoever she would meet.”

Channing, an admirer of the show, initially thought it would be a one-shot deal, especially since Sheen’s character was originally intended to appear irregularly.

And though the character owns herself in that first episode, that’s the only thing she owns, to Channing’s way of thinking.

She says this Abigail bears little resemblance to the Abigail whom viewers have come to know because she wasn’t given a character to play, other than just be the president’s wife, which, as we’ve seen over the last 20 years, could mean anything.

“I don’t agree with her,” Schlamme says. “In some ways she was a character in that show. There was a real relationship between them. [But] as an actress [she] wasn’t working off all the dynamics and complications that she can work off now, so it feels totally different [to her].” Somebody clearly felt something, because Channing was asked to return. But first she had to have a clearer idea of who she was supposed to be. She had lunch with the show’s creator and principal writer, Aaron Sorkin, who initially was no help at all, saying, “I don’t work that way.” Then he began to brainstorm right there at the table.

“He said, ‘I’ve written the teaser for this episode, and he [President Bartlet] has a really bad cold,” Channing says. “And now I’m thinking--as he’s talking to me he’s thinking--’you could be his doctor.’ I’m not making this up. This is totally true. This is the way it’s done over there. It just comes together.”

During last summer, Channing signed a three-year contract to appear on 12 of each season’s 22 episodes, which allows her to do other things during the season. This freedom drives the other cast members who are stuck there crazy.

“Richard Schiff was like, ‘There’s barbed wire around this place,’” Channing says, to which she replied, “Just get over it.” To which Schlamme says, “She shouldn’t wear that too much as a badge of honor; I get to leave. But she deserves it.”

Contrary to popular belief, Abigail, who is flinty, opinionated, impolitic, not shy about making policy recommendations and certainly to the left of her husband, is not modeled on Hillary Clinton.

She does not terrorize her staff, nor does she terrorize--or use his infidelities as leverage on--the president. It’s a partnership of equals.

Channing says the character has evolved over the last two years, much of it based on how she and Sheen work together, but there is still a lot that is not known about her, even by the person playing her and the people who write her. Channing says the character just sort of took root. Say, like kudzu?

“No,” Channing says, grinning, “but I think I’ve turned from being an annual into a perennial. I’m a vine, a perennial vine, a deciduous vine, because I come back and I go away.”

“The Business of Strangers” opens in Los Angeles on Friday.

“The West Wing” airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on NBC.