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Chapter One

The spotlight that shined on my family in 1988 started on what was a typical February morning -- typical except for the TV crew sitting in my living room.

A couple of days before, I'd gotten a call at the theater where I worked. It was Entertainment Tonight (ET) and they wanted to know if they could come film "my reaction" when the Oscar nominations were announced. There was some talk that I might be nominated for my part in Moonstruck, but I thought wanting to film me on the off chance I might be nominated was an odd request, and I laughed when I told Bonnie Low-Kramen about it. She was the head of publicity for the Whole Theatre in northern New Jersey, a nonprofit organization I'd been very involved with for the last eighteen years. Ten couples -- including my brother, Apollo, and his wife, Maggie, and my husband, Louie, and me -- had been founding members of the company and Bonnie had, by then, been working with us for a number of years. She thought the ET idea was great. "Just think," she said. "You can plug the theater on national television. It will be great publicity for us." As a not-for-profit organization, we were always scrambling for money, so any publicity was truly helpful. I asked her, when she set it up, to have ET come to the theater so that we'd have the opportunity to get a good shot of the exterior of the building and our sign. However, they didn't want to interview me at the theater. They wanted to tape this at my home, at eight a.m. sharp, just as the nominations were broadcast live from Los Angeles at five a.m. I was disappointed by this but determined to figure out some way to promote the theater anyway.

On the morning the nominations were to be announced, I was up early, doing routine paperwork for the company and taking care of things around the house. I had already helped my mother, who was living with us by then, get dressed and have some breakfast.

I also let our dog, Sandal, out the back door for his morning dash over to our neighbor's yard, which, for some reason, he'd recently decided was the only place he could relieve himself. This was probably the greatest stress in my life at that moment, as our neighbor, who was always having his breakfast at the picture window that spanned his kitchen at the exact moment Sandal needed to go out, was threatening to sue us. Things had gotten pretty ugly between us, but I couldn't worry about that today. I had to get Sandal back into the house and see if Louie needed help with the coffee and bagels; we had a crowd to feed. Some of our friends and neighbors began showing up, as well as some of our colleagues from the Whole Theatre. I remember being vaguely annoyed as the techs from ET began dragging cameras and lights into the house -- I didn't want them to scratch the floor or bang the furniture. I started to feel that the whole thing was a ridiculous mistake and neither Louie nor I had time to play host to a bunch of strangers with heavy equipment.

But apparently, ET knew something we did not because sometime between eight-thirty and nine, there was my face, on the television, and I'm looking around my living room watching my family, friends, neighbors, and this film crew jump up and down. I was nominated! For Best Supporting Actress for my portrayal of Rose Castorini in Moonstruck. Louie was cheering and my mother, who still couldn't believe that I was actually paid to act, was beaming. Everyone was just so high. I think I must have been, too. I don't really remember.

What I do remember is that the phone started ringing off the hook after that. People wanted to interview me and, in particular, find out how it felt to be an overnight success. An overnight success? Either the media really believed this was the case or they just thought they would get more mileage out of the story if they presented me as the heroine of a slightly twisted Cinderella story because I was also a middle-aged overnight success. True, I was in my fifties at the time and Moonstruck was only my fourth movie, but what most people, especially those in the film industry, simply did not know was that I'd been working as a professional stage actor and director for thirty years. So much for overnight anything.

As the reality of the nomination set in, I did start to feel like this was some kind of fairy tale. What did happen overnight was that so many people became interested in my work, including what I had done in New York and with the Whole Theatre Company as both director and actor, and everything I had done before then -- all of it. Small tremors began rolling through my life and me -- but they weren't unpleasant. Something good was happening and I was the belle of the ball, albeit one with three kids, a naughty dog, and a big mortgage. Not to mention a mother who called my dining room home.

There were interview requests and job offers. Suddenly my asking price went up. I'd signed on for Look Who's Talking before the nomination, and one of the first calls I got was my agent telling me that the producers would up my salary if I actually won the Academy Award. I was beginning to like this.

It was Norman Jewison, the director of Moonstruck, who told me to take every call, do every interview. Sure, talking about the movie would bring people into the theaters and he knew that, but he was really telling me to seize this moment and promote myself. I took his advice to heart and spoke to everyone who called.

Then I got a call from the New York Film Critics Awards to tell me I had won their award for Best Supporting Actress and to please bring anyone I wanted to the award's ceremony. As it happened, we were, as a family, just emerging from a decade-long crisis, and we badly needed a reason to celebrate. So Louie and I and our three grown children, Christina, Peter, and Stefan, dressed up for the big night out.

It was a wonderful evening. I remember seeing this look of satisfaction on my children's faces, a look of recognition when they realized that what I did, day after day, and the work their parents were engaged in that was so different from anything their friends' parents did, had value.

I was also nominated for the Golden Globe Award. Jewison, who was now certain I'd win the Oscar, was equally sure that I wouldn't win the Globe, because the Globes are awarded by foreign critics and Moonstruck was a quintessentially American film. Just as I had earlier with ET, before the Oscar nominations were announced, I realized that attending the Globe Awards would give me another chance to promote the Whole Theatre, so Louie and I flew out to L.A. I had no idea what to expect, but I was curious to see how this would unfold. And then the damnedest thing happened -- I won the Golden Globe, which was more than a bit unnerving, as I had absolutely nothing prepared to say. I was so convinced I wouldn't win that I had worn an old dress from my closet back home, and had not bothered to have my hair or nails or makeup done professionally. Those little tremors I had started to feel back in New Jersey began to intensify.

For the first time in a long while, I found myself thinking about my career, which was something that I had not thought about consciously for years. All of the attention I was getting was lovely, of course, but I was more than a little confused about why it had come at this point, and with this role, which, to my mind, was not the greatest part I had ever played. On the contrary, and quite honestly, I had taken the part of Rose Castorini largely for the money it would bring in and for the chance to work with the director Norman Jewison. The script was excellent, but the character of Rose was a familiar one to me. Maybe it was the ethnicity -- I had played a lot of Italians -- but I felt comfortable with the character. What excited me was how beautifully the part was written, not the challenge of the role. I found it difficult to accept all the acclaim this one role had brought me. I had played so many great parts on stage and I felt that if I claimed only this role as my greatest success, I would be turning my back on all the other parts. I remember telling one of my friends, the great stage actor Austin Pendleton, about how confused I was by the attention I got for my work in Moonstruck, and he said something so wonderful to me that I've never forgotten it. He told me that he saw all of my work in Rose Castorini. I understood, for the first time, how sometimes we are rewarded for our efforts long after we've given up any expectation for external gratification or the need to be recognized for this or that particular piece of work. I had always focused on the process and aspired to do the work for the work's sake. I had, thankfully, over and over again during my thirty-year career, held to the belief that the work itself would provide its own gratification. I was stunned by how brilliantly this moment shone, how it seemed to come from out of left field, with no warning. And, truth be told, it took me awhile to get comfortable with the attention, with the impact it had on my life.

I did not become an actor in order to become famous or rich. I became an actor so I could play the great parts: the Greeks, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Molière, Racine, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Brecht. My dream, since college, was to have my own theater company and travel to capitals of Europe performing the classics. What I wanted was the chance to inhabit great characters whose yearnings and passions opened up for me a way of seeing the world and would help me to break free from the limitations I had struggled with that came not just from the world around me, but from the world within me. I had discovered that the stage gave me a safe arena in which to express my emotions. It was a place with firm enough boundaries that I could take emotional and psychological risks there. It was also a place where I could be physical, sexual, and spontaneous. It was the place where I felt the most alive.

One of the things I had to learn, over and over again, as an actor and as a person, was to resist the urge to be competitive, to moderate my continued drive to always want to win. This is another reason why winning the Oscar when I did confused me in some ways. I had finally learned to be less competitive, less combative with the world, and so it was more than a bit ironic in some ways that I found myself "winning" this award at all. But the pleasant tremors I had experienced since my Oscar nomination signaled to me that for the first time, really, I was at a place in my life where, despite the bills, the pressures of the theater company, the demands of my family -- despite all of it -- I finally felt comfortable enough with who I was as a person to just let myself enjoy this time.