Frances Conroy: Mother courage of the mortuary
Jaime Jeske
Monday, March 3, 2003
Mother Courage of the mortuary
By GAYLE MACDONALD
Before he began the first season of his Emmy-winning TV series, Six Feet
Under, writer-director Alan Ball gave each member of the cast and crew a
book to read.
It was The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, written by
an accomplished poet and small-town undertaker from Michigan, Thomas
Lynch. "Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople," the book
begins. For the past two seasons, every episode of the HBO drama kicks
off with a fresh corpse.
Frances Conroy, who plays the Fisher family matriarch in the program,
says Ball - and his spellbinding series - was inspired by Lynch's poetic
take on the mysteries of grief and love. "It was a very good book for
all of us to read because it shows that death is not a ghoulish
business," says Conroy, a veteran of the stage before she landed this TV
role of a lifetime three years ago.
"An undertaker plays an indispensable role for people who are grieving.
Especially if a death is one where the person who has died is
unrecognizable, mutilated or badly, badly damaged. People, visually,
need to embrace that person once again. The poet/undertaker saw beauty
in the saddest things. Alan is like that too. His work is brilliant
because he is a student of human nature."
The 49-year-old Conroy is conducting interviews from her home in Los
Angeles, where she and the rest of the cast are almost finished filming
the third season of Six Feet Under, which premieres in Canada tonight at
9 p.m. on The Movie Network and Movie Central. Fans of the quirky TV
show have been promised a startling opener. Conroy won't divulge family
secrets, but she promises audiences will be intrigued.
"Alan read a lot of physics last summer, and the foundations of the
writing [for this season's early episodes] are based on the fact that a
number of world-renowned physicists believe that we exist in separate
realms of reality, simultaneously," adds the actress.
Intuitive, unpredictable and honest, Six Feet Under has been critically
hailed as one of the best programs ever to appear on TV. This season
promises more of Ball's peculiar brand of haunting realism. Conroy - who
was described this week in a Newsweek article as the "forgotten woman,"
one who never gets magazine covers and is rarely quoted in articles
about the show - will be allowed to explore the inherent contradictions
of her character.
In the first two seasons, the Ruth Fisher character that Conroy plays
has tended to be dismissed with eye-rolling sighs by her family, who
largely forget she's a real person, not just a Mom. This year, Conroy
says, Ruth is going to loosen her bun and apron.
"Ruth's going on a journey this season," says Conroy. "These news
friends she meets will take her to a lot of new places to experience
things. If she senses something she desires, Ruth is going to go for it.
She won't stop herself. Thankfully, Alan is not falling into the
Hollywood trap, where all women over 50 are automatically dismissed as
being uneventful or uninteresting."
Season three begins on a bizarre, light note, seven months after last
year's finale. Ruth's eldest son Nate (Peter Krause) nearly died, but
has miraculously recovered and is now blissfully married to an old
girlfriend, Lisa (Lili Taylor). The pair are raising their baby girl.
Nate's wanton ex, Brenda (Rachel Griffiths) is absent for the time
being. The rest of the cast is back: Ruth's teenage daughter Claire
(Lauren Ambrose); her gay son David (Michael C. Hall) and David's
partner Keith (Mathew St. Patrick).
Ball, who won an Oscar three years ago for his screenplay of American
Beauty, introduces some new characters to Six Feet Under, such as
Catherine O'Hara as Carol, a neurotic Hollywood producer, and Kathy
Bates as Bettina, a free spirit who becomes Ruth's new best friend and
gets her into a whack of trouble.
Conroy describes Bates's character as a "real life force, who bursts
into my life and presents me with all sorts of adventures that shake me
up."
Conroy welcomes the turmoil. "Ruth is a very important character. She
has a lot of colours and a scope that I don't think has ever existed for
a 50-plus woman on television, except maybe in some madcap comedy
series."
Conroy's Ruth Fisher is a paradox. She dresses dowdy and looks bland.
She cleans house and cooks religiously. And her kids seem to have
outgrown her. But she is also wickedly funny, and even experimental. In
the series opener, her husband was killed when the Fisher family hearse
was slammed by a bus. Ruth was devastated. She also had a dirty secret:
a two-year-old affair with her hairdresser. Her romances in season three
promise to get more complicated and racier.
Conroy, whose nickname is Franny, is a Juilliard-trained actress who
spent 15 years as a favourite of Arthur Miller and Edward Albee.
Indeed, she was finishing up Miller's The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (she
earned a Tony nomination in 1999), when her agent approached her with
the script for Six Feet Under .
"I very much wanted to meet Alan Ball,' says the actress, who has made
many movies (Maid in Manhattan and The Crucible in the past few years)
and has had guest appearances in shows like Law & Order (in one episode
playing a murderous dominatrix, in another, a murderous nun).
"My only concern was that they wouldn't consider me old enough to play
the part of Ruth because of the ages of the sons." After two readings,
she landed the part.
Conroy says she sees some similarities in the story lines and themes of
Six Feet Under and the works of major American playwrights such as
Miller and Albee - themes such as the Puritan tensions between virtue
and desire, and the idea of America as a tarnished Eden.
"Alan Ball was a playwright before he wrote television, and before that,
he was an actor," says Conroy, who is married to actor Jan Munroe.
The couple has a houseful of (mostly) stray cats.
"Alan's versed in the great works of American theatre, both the classics
and the new works. The richness of Alan's material does fall into line
with American plays that reverberate. Perhaps that's why this show has
had such wide, critical appeal."
Conroy says drama, at its best, forces people to stare truth in the
eyes. Six Feet Under , she believes, has developed a cult following
because it is remorselessly real.
"This show is about life. Life surrounding death. It is complex and it
is easily recognizable. There is nothing sugarcoated here."
Copyright 2003 "The Globe and Mail."
The Associated Press
February 28, 2003
Enigmatic 'Six Feet Under' matriarch pleasure for actor
By Frazier Moore
Ruth Fisher, the widowed matriarch of her funeral-home family, is as
much a part of "Six Feet Under" as any other character.
But there's something irresistibly off-putting about her. She is part of
the environment in which her fellow characters exist, seldom calling
attention to herself. So you focus on the people around her, even as she
absorbs you in everything she does.
Meanwhile, who she is remains in flux and in question. She is middle-age
and dowdy, with long red hair she is clearly proud of.
She is childlike; world-weary; nurturing; remote; quiet; explosive.
She's a prude who cheated on her late husband with a chef turned
hairdresser she met at church. She's a skittish soul (she has never lain
in a hammock: too risky, too liberating). Yet she's bold enough to face
almost anything that matters.
With these human contradictions, Ruth Fisher is authentically protean in
a way that TV drama doesn't often bother, or dare, to attempt.
The only trouble is, the actress who gives Ruth such a lifelike
portrayal is in the same boat with her: somehow overlookable in the
company of flashier behavior.
"I can't think that way," argues Frances Conroy, who plays Ruth. "I
think moment to moment about what she's going through, but I can't form
a total picture of things. Because then I'm not in her. I can't do
anything with that."
Understood.
Tonight at 9, HBO's "Six Feet Under" returns for its third season, with
Ruth, per usual, full of surprises, as are many of the other characters.
In particular, you may be startled to find that, just since season two
ended, Ruth's older son Nate (Peter Krause) has nearly died, then
miraculously recovered, then wed his long-ago girlfriend, the "mother
earth" Lisa (Lili Taylor), with whom he is raising their baby girl.
Nate's wanton ex, Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), is noticeably absent. But
very much in evidence are Ruth's college-age daughter, Claire (Lauren
Ambrose); her other grown son, David (Michael C. Hall), who runs their
Los Angeles funeral home with Nate; and David's romantic partner, Keith
(Mathew St. Patrick).
In the past, "Six Feet Under" has favored a brooding, foreboding tone.
But as season three begins, the mood is lighter, the action opened up.
This applies especially to Ruth, a wallflower who, in small but emphatic
ways, is blossoming. She has a brassy new friend, played by Kathy Bates,
under whose tutelage she is trying bold new things: lying in a hammock;
wearing a cheery shade of lipstick; even shoplifting that lipstick from
the department store.
"I think it's really wonderful!" says Conroy. "She has gone from being
shattered by her husband's death" -- he was killed at the wheel of his
hearse when a bus slammed into it in episode No. 1 -- "to finding an
identity within herself that was pushed aside, maybe as far back as when
she got married."
Of course, Conroy isn't suggesting that her character is part of some
warm-and-fuzzy "Six Feet Under" overhaul. She isn't promising any
long-term trend. With this show, you never know where things are going
until you know -- whether you're a viewer following each episode or
Conroy receiving the next script.
She says she likes shaping her performance to the incremental
here-and-now.
"I have all the information from what I've learned about Ruth previously
to know how she responds to each moment," Conroy explains. "It's like
real life: We don't get a preview of what's coming up, thank God, and we
don't build our own character from what we're going to be informed with
in the future."
Speaking with a reporter at HBO headquarters, the 49-year-old Conroy
proves chipper and pleasantly stylish. And younger-looking than Ruth:
"Some people ask me, 'Do they put aging makeup on you?' It's just this
very nice street makeup."
A New York-based actress who has made many movies (among them "Maid in
Manhattan," "The Crucible" and "Sleepless in Seattle"), Conroy has
concentrated on the stage, from "Othello" to Broadway productions of
Arthur Miller's "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan" and Neil Simon's "The Dinner
Party."
For her, episodic television is an exotic venue, something she is still
getting used to -- and, thanks to the life-and-death issues her
particular show tangles with, something that digs into her own past.
She recounts an odd but tender moment when, in 1997, she returned to
Monroe, Ga., where her father had been buried when she was a girl, to
bring him to New York's Long Island, where she now lives, for
reinternment.
At Conroy's orders, the body had been exhumed after 28 years, then
cremated. This gave the funeral home a rare chance to follow up on its
handiwork.
"I wish you could have seen your father," reported the funeral director
proudly after presenting Conroy with the ashes. "He looked so peaceful.
His lips were a little dry, and that's really all."
Conroy laughs affectionately.
"She wasn't being macabre. She was sweet, and I was very moved."
Any "Six Feet Under" viewer could relate.
Speaking with a reporter at HBO headquarters last week, the 49-year-old
Conroy proves chipper and pleasantly stylish. And younger-looking than
Ruth: "Some people ask me, 'Do they put aging makeup on you?' It's just
this very nice street makeup."
A New York-based actress who has made many movies (among them "Maid in
Manhattan," "The Crucible" and "Sleepless in Seattle"), Conroy has
concentrated on the stage, from "Othello" to Broadway productions of
Arthur Miller's "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan" and Neil Simon's "The Dinner
Party."
Copyright 2003 The Associated Press.
"The Star-Telegram"
Sunday, March 2, 2003
Frances Conroy digs her role as heart of the show
By Robert Philpot
Over the phone, it doesn't exactly *sound* like a zoo at Frances
Conroy's Los Angeles home. But you can certainly *picture* a zoo.
"If you hear an odd noise, it's my little dachshund, digging into my
husband's chair," says Conroy, who plays widowed matriarch Ruth Fisher
on HBO's Six Feet Under. "Nelson, relax!" Then she adds jokingly, "He's
working out his repression."
Maybe Nelson is repressed because he's in a household dominated by cats.
But enough about animals for a minute; let's talk about repression,
something that every member of Six Feet Under's Fisher family has had to
deal with. But especially Ruth, who practically had to reinvent her life
after her husband was killed in the series' jarring opening episode.
Ruth was already working out her repression, though; before her husband
died, she had an affair with her nature-loving hairdresser. Since then,
she has fended off the affections of her florist boss, joined and left a
self-esteem cult and tripped on the drug Ecstasy -- all the while trying
to maintain some semblance of a normal family with her three grown but
neurotic children.
"A lot of people come up to me and say they feel she's the heart of the
show," Conroy says. "I suppose because she's the mother figure, and [the
other characters'] experiences are those of younger people. I suppose
they see that when she comes into a particular episode in her scenes,
that somehow she is sort of the essential center of everything that's
going on around everybody else."
This season, Ruth will continue to struggle with her more free-spirited
sister (Emmy-winning guest star Patricia Clarkson), who figures into a
story line with Kathy Bates. Bates plays a woman who takes Ruth another
step down the road to liberation.
Some writers have said that Ruth goes unnoticed among the show's
flashier characters, which is a strange thing to say about a character
who has been on the journey she's taken. Perhaps it's because of
Conroy's quiet style and modest costumes, which make the 49-year-old
actress seem a little older than she is -- and make Ruth's occasional
explosions stand out all that much more.
"I think that Ruth has dimensions that perhaps have not been explored
with a female character in this position in a family, with grown
children and being middle-aged," Conroy says. "And I think that's good
that she's out there, being created in different ways. Maybe people who
say they can't get a handle on her just can't deal with how diverse a
woman can be in her life."
Conroy doesn't have children herself, but she shares Ruth's nurturing
side (the menagerie in her house wouldn't be there without her caring
side). And talking to her, you can detect how much of Ruth's burgeoning
spirit has long ago come through in Conroy.
The cats (and dog) fit in well in Conroy's home in one of the Los
Angeles canyons, where Conroy's husband Jan bought a home in 1990.
Conroy says that from her home, she can see the not-that-nearby Getty
Center to the west and Mount Wilson Observatory to the east. The
Juilliard-trained actress, who has done a lot of work on- and
off-Broadway, says she loves New York City, but she enjoys the sense of
spaciousness that comes with California living.
"It's quite spectacular," she begins to muse. "I'm looking out the
window now at this dramatic sky. It's breathtaking. You can see these
hawks flying around in the sky, and their wingspans are huge. And there
were coyotes up here again at 2:30 in the morning a couple of months
ago, and it was really a trip. They were really close. In fact, one was
on the front porch a month ago, eating the cat food, *two feet* away
from one of the cats! I guess he figured it was easier to eat the cat
food than to kill the cat."
Robert Philpot, (817) 390-7872 ro...@star-telegram.com
Copyright 2003 "The Star-Telegram."
Jaime