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Actress returns to her Texas roots in 'Dr. T. and the Women'
Tribune Media Services
NEW YORK— If Texas is like a whole other country, then Dallas is like a whole other Texas, according to Farrah Fawcett. “It doesn't mean Dallas people are bad, they're just different," she says diplomatically. Fawcett is from Corpus Christi, and while she has mostly lost her accent—she'll let slip an occasional “awl-raht” or “hay-ave”—she still has a strong sense of hometown pride. And it was only strengthened when she went to Dallas—for only the second time in her life—to film “Dr. T and the Women,” which opens Friday. “They're very materialistic,” says Fawcett of the Dallas debutante set represented in director Robert Altman's film by Fawcett, Helen Hunt, Laura Dern, Shelley Long, Liv Tyler, and others. “They'll say, ‘I'm wearing the burgundy suit, so I'm going to take my Mercedes, because it's burgundy, as opposed to the black Porsche.’ When I was in college, and the girls would come from Dallas, it was one of the first times I heard a group of girls talking about good marriage material. ‘He's in law school, he's good marriage material.' It was like they were talking about, I don't know, sausage. ‘Good marriage material’ meant: has a good job, has a good car, has an oil well. That was when I knew I definitely wanted to be a woman who supported myself. I never wanted to have to say, ‘Honey, is it OK if I buy a new coat?’”
If Fawcett is far from the stereotyped Dallas socialite she plays in “Dr. T. and the Women,” she knows the breed well enough to do a convincing portrait in Altman's ensemble comedy. Fawcett plays the ultra-pampered wife of a Dallas gynecologist (Richard Gere), a woman who is so adored and waited on that she starts to regress toward infancy —often at awkward moments. In her big scene, she sheds her clothes and prances naked into a shopping mall fountain like a little girl. “It was hard,” says the former “Charlie's Angel,” who has gone nude before (in Playboy and elsewhere). "But you know, it would have been so much harder to do if it wasn't justified. Which my whole career, people have done. They want you, in one scene, to get out of bed, and you're sleeping in nothing, and you're walking to the bathroom. Why? That, to me, is gratuitous."
But she was willing to bare all for Altman, not only because he's the highly regarded director of such classics as “M.A.S.H.” and “Nashville,” but also because appearing in his film takes her yet one step farther from her cheesecake origins. As Jill Munroe—otherwise known as the Blonde—in “Charlie's Angels,” Fawcett achieved pop stardom, but at a price. Her fluff-haired, pearly-toothed, swimsuited figure, immortalized in that popular 1970s poster, was hung in male dorm rooms across America. But Fawcett -- then married to “Six Million Dollar Man” Lee Majors and billed as Farrah Fawcett-Majors—had trouble being taken seriously when it came to more substantial roles. "I had to go back to New York to do ‘Extremities’ off-Broadway, and then go back (to Hollywood),” she says. Her “Extremities” role, as a gutsy woman who turns the tables on her would-be rapist, earned her good critical notices. So, too, did her performances in the made-for-TV movies “The Burning Bed,” “The Margaret Bourke-White Story,” “Murder in Texas,” and the feature film “The Apostle,” in which she starred with Robert Duvall. But she knew that an Altman movie would be a real feather in her cap. So even though she was filming the TNT movie “Baby” in Nova Scotia when the Altman offer came, Fawcett found a way to make it work. In the end, she hired a private plane to ferry her back and forth from the Canadian “Baby” set to Dallas, where “Dr. T” was being shot. But it wasn't only the travel. In "Baby" Farrah was a brunette, and in “Dr. T” she was a blonde. “On the plane, we had to do my hair blond, so that when I arrived (in Texas) to start night shooting, I was blond,” she says. “The minute I finished at five in the morning, I had to get back on the plane, and do it brown. But there would have been no other way to do it.” Though her marshmallow image may have hindered her acting career at times, she has no wish to bury her past. In fact, she has nothing but good wishes for Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu, the next generation of angels appearing in the big-screen adaptation of "Charlie's Angels," opening next month. “I wish them luck,” she says. “And, God bless them, I hope it does as much for them as it did for me.” Back to top | Home Webmaster: Sal J. Barry The Columbia Chronicle is a student produced publication of Columbia College Chicago and does not necessarily represent, in whole or in part, the views of Columbia College administrators, faculty or students. |
October 23, 2000
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