The Tennessean from Nashville, Tennessee • Page 171

niThfc Futjeraigns df Shelbyville's Calculating Cinderella -wurwt. i 1 Of ft lV Jit ri M1 I If 13 I iU II i-jwgiMWmti- "i M'filf 1 Il-flfri By HARRY HAUN TENNESSEAN Motion Picture Editor HOLLYWOOD In a town that thought everything had been tried in the way of role-campaigning, actress Sondia Locke is busily rewriting the rulebook, adding her own share of eccentric tricks to the trade. The Locke principle of How To Win Roles and Influence Producers calls for extreme strategy, much of it stemming from a star-struck Shelbyville childhood. She and Gordon Anderson, a-beau who subsequently became her husband, grew up on a steady diet of movies, fantasized about their favorite films and replayed scenes they especially liked for their own amusement. Happily, they never grew out of it.

The Andersons still play the same game. The difference now is that it is played in earnest, and it has paid off in one Academy Award nomination for Son-dra already and the strong possibility of a second one on the way. Film Entrance An out-and-out charade got Sondra into the movies in the first place. Three and a half years ago, while a promotional assistant at Nashville's WSM-TV, she learned that Circle Theater was helping Warner Bros, find an unknown to play the gawky 14-year-old Mick Kelly in Carson Meddlers' "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter." At the long-distance insistence of Gordon (who was appearing at the time in the off-Broadway "Until the Monkey she ventured forth and flunked the audition. That first-step setback prompted Gordon to withdraw from his play, return home and "design" Sondra in the likeness of Mick Kelly for a very unofficial meeting with the film's casting director in Birmingham.

Stanislavski's "An Actor Prepares" has nothing on The Anderson Overhaul: Gordon "tackied up" two Rich Schwartz dresses for Sondra, painted on her a sunburned nose, a skinned kneecap and freckles and even applied a dab of collodion behind each of her ears so thev'd stick out. The casting director bought the disguise Locke, stock and barrel. And so did the film's director, the studio, the critics and the public. The calculation that went into this role-winning somehow never surfaced above the Cinderella success-story that the studios spin so easily. When the Mot'on Picture Academy posted its list of Best Supporting Actresses of 1968, there was a nomination for Sondra.

But she never bothered to prepare an acceptance soeech because she figured (correctlv) that the award would go to veteran Ruth Gordon for "Rosemary's Baby." Under a general heading of Now It Can Be Told, Sondra admitted that her debut performance was completely undirected. "The director who signed me for the part was fired three days before we were to begin filming 'The Heart Is a Lonely she said, "and the studio replaced him with another man who never told me if I was playing a scene right or wrong. I was really lost. Finally, after two weeks of that, I complained to the producer that this man wasn't giving me any help. And the producer said that he wasn't supposed to help me, that New York had instructed him to give me no direction at all for fear he would jar the quality that the studio had liked in my screen test." Undoing an Image After her first-film success, Sondra's next career hurdle was to rid herself of the plainjane image that she and Gordon had so elaborately invented.

Mick Kelly parts were coming at her from all sides, but she went out for only one of them (Mattie Ross in "True What she really wanted was the antithesis of Mick Kelly, and, for this reason, she accepted two glamorous-ingenue parts opposite Robert Forster in "Run, Shadow, Run" and Bruce Davison in "Willard." Neither role required a preliminary ruse, but then neither role is a particular source of pride for her. I UrtJnftPf. Sondra Locke, as one of the deranged LOCkeldj in MadneSS: tite characters in "The Daughter," hovers darkly beside an elaborate doll house that contains puppets of her father (Robert Shaw), grandmother (Signe Hasso) and mother (Mary Ure) Columbia studio is rushing the bizarre psychodrama into release for Oscar consideration. 5 resisting TV guest-shots. And that goes for TV-movies, too.

(She turned down Patty Duke's Emmy-winning role in "My Sweet Charlie" on those grounds.) It's a rough, uphill row to hoe, and Sondra is painfully aware "there aren't that many good movie roles being written for young actresses these days." Rewarding Role Her perseverance, it is good to report, has paid off handsomely with the picture she just completed, a complex murder-melodrama called ''The Daughter." Robert Shaw and his actress-wife, Mary Ure, star as Sondra's parents, and the supporting cast includes Sally Kellerman (of "MASH" fame) and Signe Hasso (in her first film in 14 years). But the film rises or falls on the strength of Sondra's performance. And the advance word from Columbia Pictures is that there may be an Oscar in it for her, in the starring category. On the basis of 40 minutes of assembled footage, the studio's sales executives decided to yank a previously scheduled release and concentrate on an August premiere for "The Daughter." When it does come out, the film will probably have a new title and "Mar "Run, Shadow, Run," a psychological thriller about a student filmmaker, has an especially troubled history: it has been completed for more than two years but rarely seen outside of New York and Los Angeles; and its title has been changed from "Run, Shadow, Run" to "Cover Me Babe" back, at last word, to "Run, Shadow, Run." "What's on the screen," Sondra confessed, "is not the film I agreed to do. It was far-out material at first, but there were lots of script changes during the filming and what emerged was rather conventional.

It was a disappointing experience for me, because I know the movie they intended to make and didn't. "As for it doesn't have much of a role for me just a girlfriend part anyone could have played. I only did the film for the money, something I said I would never do. Basically, I'm very uncommercial. I don't like show business, per sc.

I like acting. Last year I was committed to a film at Universal, but it never got before the cameras. They finally paid me off and shelved the project, which was hardly a happy alternative for me." Sondra has been concentrating exclusively on a screen career and steadfastly guerite" are the leading possibilities this week). Sondra's role, one of the strangest ever written for the screen, is difficult to describe without giving away the plot (in this instance, a definite no-no). Suffice it to say, it is a dual role, and she literally turns in two different performances.

The movie's trick-ending, reminiscent of the one in "Psycho" yet weirdly original on its terms, should be the most controversial since "Rosemary's Baby." Currently, it is one of the most cautiously guarded secrets in the industry. "When I first read the screenplay," Sondra said, "I couldn't imagine how they could film it. Parts like this one come along maybe three times in a lifetime, if that many. It's the best role I've ever seen in script form." Significantly, it's the first role that she and Gordon felt worth reviving their fiendishly involved charades for. Their victim this time was the film's director, William Fraker, a splendid cine-matographer "The Fox," "Rosemary's Baby," "Paint Your who recently turned director (with Lee Marvin's "Monte Sondra and Fraker share the same agent a happy coincidence that made all the dif- 5 tu IS) $1 9 i 2 4-S.