Feeling Six Feet Tall

Patricia Clarkson is what’s known in the business as an actor’s actor, someone who her friend playwright Richard Greenberg says “has always been a cult fixture on the New York theater scene” but relegated to playing the obligatory love interest on film. That’s about to change.

After years of perfecting the wife/girlfriend/appendage opposite leading men including Kevin Costner (“The Untouchables”) and Clint Eastwood (“The Dead Pool”), the actress finally is coming into her own. She’s got a new boyfriend (actor-director Campbell Scott) she’s too shy to talk about. She just won an Emmy Award (for her role as freethinking Aunt Sarah on “Six Feet Under”) and is working on a whopping nine film and television projects. And, mind you, all at the dewy young age of 43.

This fall, she co-stars in two buzzed-about indies. In “Far From Heaven,” Todd Haynes’ paean to the ‘50s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, she plays Julianne Moore’s bigoted Connecticut confidante.

“There’s a connection between that character and the women I knew in the South,” says the Louisiana native. “It crosses the Mason-Dixon line. In high school, we would have to have slumber parties at my house because some of the white girls’ parents would not allow blacks to sleep in their house. I saw a lot more prejudice there than I care to remember.”

In “Welcome to Collinwood,” a remake of the classic Italian heist film “Big Deal on Madonna Street,” Clarkson plays Rosalind, a tough Cleveland street chick on the skids looking for a piece of the action. To get into character, she says, all she had to do was slip on the clothes. “She wore a hideous ‘70s leather jacket, just brown-orange horrible, suntanned panty hose and wedgies,” Clarkson says, reducing her voice to a whisper. “And a water bra.” Then, after another smoky-voiced gale of laughter, she adds, “Oh, come on! People change their hair, why not change your bust size?”

Clarkson loved the all-guy atmosphere of working with actors George Clooney, Isaiah Washington and especially Sam Rockwell. “Sammy’s like my brother,” she says. “I’ve known him for 13 years.” They met in 1989 in Wilmington, N.C., on different film sets. She was filming “Tune in Tomorrow” and he was playing a bit part in “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” The actors stayed in touch and ended up neighbors in the West Village, friends long before both their stars began rising.

“I call Patty when I get stage fright,” says Rockwell, who says Clarkson helped him when he performed “The Zoo Story” and “The Dumb Waiter” in repertory at last year’s Williamstown Theater Festival. “I call her to calm me down. She helps me through a lot of actor’s stuff,” he says. “I would love to do something on stage with her. She really takes stage, as they say. She knows how to get into it.”

Lately, it seems Clarkson has a harder time getting out of it--commitments, that is--the list of upcoming projects is impressive. Just in time for November sweeps, she stars in a revisionist TV remake of “Carrie” in the classic Piper Laurie role as the Bible-thumping mother from hell. “It’s very cinema verite, close and dark, not sweeping and operatic like” Brian De Palma’s, she says. “But it will inevitably have humor because you can’t say, ‘I can see your dirty pillows’ without it being funny.”

Then there are the film roles, almost all the kind of shoestring independents in which wardrobe changes take place in gas station bathrooms. “Dogville,” Lars Von Trier’s latest wrenching melodrama, is set in the Rockies circa 1930 and stars Nicole Kidman. All she will say about that experience is, “I’ll be honest with you, there are moments in this movie where I went through hell.” There’s also “All the Real Girls” from experimental filmmaker David Gordon Greene (“George Washington”) and a whimsical Canadian fantasy called “The Baroness and the Pig.” Plus three more movies, each coincidentally featuring one of the kids from “Dawson’s Creek.” In “Pieces of April,” she plays Katie Holmes’ mother who’s recovering from a double mastectomy, and she’s in “The Station Agent” opposite Michelle Williams. In “The Safety of Objects” she plays a lonely neighbor who beds Joshua Jackson. “All my nieces, I am God to them now,” she says.

Born and raised in the upper-middle class suburbs of New Orleans, Clarkson grew up in a sprawling, politically liberal family dominated by women. She’s the youngest of five sisters, and mother Jackie Clarkson is a former real estate agent, current New Orleans city councilwoman and regular fixture on the society pages of the Times-Picayune. “She’s incredibly gregarious, she coined the word,” says Clarkson. “She knows people from all backgrounds because that’s how she grew up. And I do love that aspect of acting. I love meeting new people.” The only actor in her family had been her late grandfather John Patrick Brechtel, a football coach and English teacher who by night helped run a local repertory called the Algiers’ Little Theater.

But by the time she was 13, Clarkson knew she wanted to follow in his footsteps. She acted in school plays in her early teens and after studying speech at Louisiana State University for two years, she transferred to Fordham University in New Yorkl, where she graduated summa cum laude with a degree in theater arts. It was at Yale Drama School where she met classmates who would become lifelong friends, journeymen actors including Chris Noth and Dylan Baker, and playwright Greenberg for whom she’s appeared in five plays including “Eastern Standard” and “Three Days of Rain.”

At Yale, Clarkson had her pick of roles, complex character leads in such plays as “Pericles” and “Pacific Overtures.” Immediately after graduation in 1987, she got a plum supporting role as a deaf actress in John Guare’s Broadway play “The House of Blue Leaves.” But like many of her fellow alumni, she was wooed by Hollywood, where she nabbed the role of Catherine Ness, wife of G-man Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner) in Brian DePalma’s version of the Desilu TV series “The Untouchables.” “Brian took a gamble on me,” she says. “There wasn’t a lot to audition with. But I think he liked that I had this somewhat beatific look but this truck driver voice,” and she lets loose a husky laugh.

The following year, Clarkson got more high-profile film work, but she was again “the girl” in such roles as Timothy Hutton’s fiance in “Everybody’s All-American” and Clint Eastwood’s reporter girlfriend in “The Dead Pool.” She continued to work on screen in several projects including a couple of short-lived series (“Davis Rules,” “Murder One”) and occasional films (“Tune in Tomorrow,” “Jumanji”). But none of those roles afforded her the opportunities of the theater scene in New York where she made her home.

“I was doing these insane, expansive plays for Richard Greenberg and Nicky Silver, parts that would take me on these journeys,” she says. “I wasn’t getting those kinds of offers and opportunities in Hollywood. I needed something for my soul and spirit.”

That something came in the form of a $500,000-budget film called “High Art.” In the film, Clarkson played Greta, a washed-up ex-Fassbinder film actress who clings to her smack habit as her star photographer girlfriend (Ally Sheedy) ditches her for a much-younger art magazine intern (Radha Mitchell). “I was in L.A. and I got this call about this very small movie,” Clarkson says. “So I fly in and I had to go in the next day to play”--lowering her voice to a whisper--”a German heroin-addict lesbian. Lesbian I wasn’t worried about. I wasn’t one but I didn’t know how you play one. What does that mean? I had never taken any drugs. But I knew this German woman for a lot of my life so I had that in my ear. And I thought, ‘I’ll wing-ding it.’ ”

Debut director Lisa Cholodenko cast her in the role the next day. “My jaw dropped,” Cholodenko says. “Because she was such a fine actress, so astonishing. She had the whole snarky German lesbian thing down without any direction.” Despite the film’s dark subject matter, her ruefully funny performance got her an Independent Spirit Award nomination. It also was a hard role for Clarkson to shake. “I would just talk to my dog all the time with a German accent,” she says. “And he would wig out, I’d be like [in German accent], ‘Bo, come here!’ ” Cholodenko concurs: “Yeah, on the set, she didn’t want to switch gears. She just walked around in that creepy German haze the whole time and we just left her alone.”

“That’s the big thing about Patty,” says pal Richard Greenberg. “And I think that’s one of the reasons her career is blossoming now, 15 years into it. She’s always been a deeper talent than you would have expected. Back when we were out of drama school, the young, pretty girl existed mostly to prove the guy was straight. Patty didn’t necessarily do that. There’s something about her that’s more interesting and perverse and there always has been. She was always capable of playing fluffy, but she’s so not.”

Clarkson doesn’t claim to know why success has finally found her. If she’s learned one thing from more than 20 years as an actor, it’s to make up her own rules.

“And to think oddly I play hotter parts now then when I was younger,” she says. “For all the bad rep on Hollywood, I don’t think it gives up on women who aren’t 25. You might not make a lot of money and it does become a challenge. But I still think there are great parts. You just have to look for them.”