Giving Voice to Her Role

“She needed to be needed,” says Marcia Gay Harden about artist Lee Krasner, whom she portrays in the film “Pollock,” which reopens Friday in Los Angeles after a brief Academy Award-qualifying run in December. This week Harden received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress for her role in the film.

Krasner was famously known as the wife of Jackson Pollock, the hard-drinking, hard-living Abstract Expressionist whose paintings revolutionized American art; he’s played by Ed Harris in the film, which Harris also directed.

For a decade after their marriage in 1945 Krasner protected and supported Pollock and made his career possible, while neglecting her own--not exactly the trendy ideal in the age of female empowerment, but Harden found Krasner a fascinating part to play.

“‘She wasn’t glamorous,” Harden acknowledges in a recent interview. In the film, the glamorous Harden wore a severe bob with bangs and did her best to look frumpy, the way Krasner did. “She had a taut little body and she had confidence, so it was an affirmation that a wonderful face isn’t all it’s about,” Harden observes. “She had this knowledge, this wit, this sarcasm, this strength--these things are more sexy than a perfect nose or eyes or lips.”

Getting Hooked on the Project

When she first heard about Ed Harris’ project to make a film of Jackson Pollock, Harden, 41, knew something about Pollock and little about Krasner. But she was intrigued. She auditioned for the role, and actively worked with Harris in the auditions to see if she could bring to the role what he wanted. After she got the part, his main advice: Not to oversentimentalize Krasner, whom some have seen as a martyr to Pollock’s ego.

Generally speaking, Harden’s choices in acting roles have run in the art-house spectrum. Her feature debut was the Coen brothers’ “Miller’s Crossing” (1990), followed by appearances in such films as “Safe Passage,” “The Spitfire Grill,” and Alison Maclean’s “Crush.”

Well, OK, she was in a few more mainstream hits, such as 1996’s “First Wives Club,” and last summer’s “Space Cowboys.” Once in a while she likes to tread the boards, and in 1993 she won a Tony nomination and a Theater World award for her Broadway turn in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Angels in America.”

Digging Into the Character

To prepare for her latest role, which has already brought her a New York Film Critics award for best supporting actress, she sought out Krasner’s friends and family, visited the Brooklyn neighborhood where she grew up, and watched videotapes that were taken of the artist later in life. Asked about the distinctive accent Krasner has in the film, Harden explains that it’s Brooklyn Jewish.

“There’s a different rhythm to it,” she says. The theatrical side of her personality emerges as she leans forward from her armchair and adds, “For example, a Brooklyn person would say, ‘Gimme da painting!’ Then she recasts her voice into Krasner’s accent, slower and more nasal, ‘Yo Vinnie, gihve me the paihnting.’ ”

Krasner was always gesticulating, says Harden, who now gets up and starts strutting back and forth, a hand stuck into the waist of her pinstriped jacket. “She didn’t face them forward, hers were here on the waist and back,” she says as she places her thumb forward and her fingers behind.

“She was walking like this, her hands were here and she was making her poihnts to you!” She says, laughing. “She was even more so in the videotape; it was like she was yelling at you.”

How much did Krasner give up to nurture great genius? When she met Pollock in the early 1940s, she was already a respected New York artist. “And she meets Pollock, and you don’t really hear from her till he dies,” Harden says. “I think what happened is that she didn’t have a voice, she was still learning, and then this loud orchestra of Pollock came. His painting was so loud and accomplished she couldn’t even hear herself anymore.”

Pollock was an alcoholic, a habitue of the local artists’ hangout called the Cedar Bar, and Krasner realized that they would need to get away from the temptations of the city if he were to be truly productive. Harden points out that, as in the film, moving to East Hampton on Long Island was very much her decision.

“She wanted to get away, she was tired of the [New York] scene,” she says. “It was a controlling move, but not controlling in the graspy, housewife way. She wanted him to paint. She wanted him to focus and have the time and energy.”

Indeed, Pollock attained the height of his creativity while living in East Hampton, discovering and mastering the so called drip painting style he is known for today.

“Basically, Lee ran the house and he painted,” Harden says. “I’m shocked people think that’s so different than most people’s relationship, as if everyone’s so intrinsically connected and talk about their relationships all the time!”

It was only after his death in a car crash in 1956 that Krasner’s own creativity took flight--in size, form and color.

Recently, she was honored with a major retrospective tour which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in October 1999 and ended just last month at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In the exhibition catalog, the introduction by Pollock biographer B.H. Friedman begins, “Lee Krasner had two profound commitments. The first was to her own art, beginning in high school and lasting until her death at 75. The second was to her husband, Jackson Pollock.”

Asked if she would sublimate her own career to that of another’s, Harden smiles quietly and says she’s not the type. “I’m too selfish, and I think I have a better self-image,” she says. “My voice wasn’t so hard for me to hear.”