The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 37

C-7 'Unless you break into her inner circle, she's strictly business' The GAZETTE, Montreal, Saturday, September 22, 1984 She slough and By PHILIP WUNTCH Dallas Morning News I Mrr, i vvl -M aw Mini, dfoMlllfc ffilllMUmi Sally Field in a scene from 'Places in the Heart1: It may put her in the running for another best-actress Oscar. of whom were' real Southern women." Edna's maternal instincts also came naturally to Field. She has two sons Peter, 15, and Eli, 12 from an early marriage to her high school sweetheart. "It was painful to be away from my children during the filming. They came up every third weeJcend, which wasn't enough.

But that pain was useful. It kept my feelings at my fingertips. Everything else about the role was difficult. It was just hard to create a woman who had come from another era an era that placed such impositions on women, blacks and children. And the women, at least for the most part, didn't think to question those impositions.

Take role home "It's harder for me than for some actresses because I just can't let a role go when I finish a day's work. I take the role home with me. I still don't know who Edna is based on. The popular assumption around the set was that she was based on Benton's grandmother. But he never told anyone for sure." Compounding the emotional difficulties was the unexpected weather.

Shooting began in Waxahachie in September of last year. With various re-shoots, it wasn't completed until almost Christmas. "We wound up shooting a lot of the summer scenes in the winter. It was dry. There wasn't any snow.

But you know how the weather was last winter. It was cold. A lot of us stayed in the Gingerbread Village development in Waxahachie. I got so upset with the coldness, I stomped out on the back porch and yelled at the top of my lungs, 'It's not supposed to be this cold in The lights in the development all blinked and I thought, 'Oh, now I've done it. I yelled so loud, the lights are going to go 'I've made mistakes' She is, she says, the worst possible judge of her work.

"Only after maybe seven years have passed can I judge my work. Even when I watch Norma Rae now, I get a sense of the film but not of my own performance. I'm aware that I didn't give an embarrassing performance in Norma Rae, but I'm still not sure what I did right. The same with Places in the Heart. I haven't read a single review yet, but I don't feel like I embarrassed myself.

Even so, I have a great feeling for the film as a whole but very little feeling about my performance. "I've made mistakes. I would starve before doing Beyond the Poseidon Adventure again. But I thought Kiss Me Goodbye was a fun, enjoyable movie. But I find it hard to plan a career.

For that matter, I find it hard to plan more than one week ahead. I am not one of the great risk-takers of the world. To hear her talk, she leads the most unpretentious life of any Oscar-winning actress. (She won the Academy Award for Norma Rae, and should be a frontrunner for Places in the Heart.) She lives in the San Fernando Valley, not far from where she spent her teenage years. She laughs about having stood in line with her two sons for the opening day's performance of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom don't know why some of the critics were hard on it.

I thought it was great. Maybe not as great as Raiders of the Lost Ark, but still For six years, she drove a station wagon because it was so useful for carpools. "So it had six years of car-pool residue you can imagine! all over the inside of the car. So finally, after some soul-searching, I bought a BMW. That's my idea of taking a.risk." THE THEATRE SEASON Look off the beaten track for the gems ALLAS Maybe it's because newspaper articles always mention that Sally Field played Gidget and The Flying Nun before she starred in Norma Rae and Places in the Heart.

Maybe it's because interviewers never have forgotten that she and Burt Reynolds were once an item. Maybe it's because Places in the Heart is her first really challenging role since Norma Rae five years ago. Whatever the reason, Sally Field is one tough lady. Her smile still radiates warmth, but make no mistake. She sits erect, her spine seemingly made of steel.

She moves her hands with short, emphatic motions. When she speaks, her voice is unexpectedly low and firm. Her attitude, basically, is cautious and guarded. "There's a lot of warmth in Field, but you have to be part of her inner circle to feel it," says a crew member from Kiss Me Goodbye, the unsuccessful comedy that was her last film before Places in the Heart. "Unless you break into her inner circle, she's strictly business.

But I've seen her be very warm with the people she cares about." 'Working steadily' Field implies that the tough shell was formed out of necessity. "I've been in this business 20 years. I started when I was 17, and I've been working steadily, ever since," she said in ah interview. "I was so young when I started, and everyone in power seemed so male. The business side of the entertainment industry really is male-oriented.

I felt too vulnerable. So I took what I considered the softer parts of my nature and pushed them into the closet. Part of it was subconscious, I suppose, but I have to admit some of it was a conscious effort on my part." She feels her Places in the Heart role as Edna Spalding, a Waxaha-chie, widow fighting to hold her family together during the Depression, allows her softness to come out of the closet. "Seeing Edna on" screen, you realize it's OK to feel afraid. Half the time, Edna's terrified.

She doesn't know what she's doing. She's never been anything but a wife and mother, and now she has to make active choices. She's scared out of her wits, but the movie says it's perfectly all right to feel scared. Nothing I had played recently had this quality of vulnerability. In Norma Rae, the union organizer provided a mentor for Norma to turn to.

Edna didn't really have a mentor." Unqualified praise Robert Benton, director and screenwriter of Places in the Heart, has unqualified praise for his star. "Sally's contribution to the entire film is as great as Dustin Hoffman's was to Kramer Vs. Kramer (which Benton also wrote and directed). She didn't stand away from the character and approach it from the outside. She inhabits her character the way very few actors do." Sally Field certainly feels an emotional kinship with Edna.

Her parents were divorced when she was a small child. Although she grew up in the San Fernando Valley, her mother, one-time Paramount Pictures contract player Margaret Field, was "very much a Southerner at heart." "I was raised completely in a Southern woman's environment, even in California. My emotional background came from my mother, my grandmother and my aunts, all Then there would be only women left." If the Victory Tour sells out its three-night run in Toronto, multiply 55,000 seats times three nights times $40 per ticket and you come up with $6.6 million, which, even if it's only in Canadian dollars, undoubtedly marks a world record for any three-night engagement by a single act. Will Toronto's CNE Stadium ever be the same? Pope John Paul was there last week, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth is booked in for a one-night gig on Sept. 29, and she'll be followed by the Jacksons, who will hold court Oct.

5, 6 and 7. Quickies: The Fine Arts Committee of the Negro Community Centre opens its fourth annual art exhibition at 5 p.m. today at the centre located at 2035 Coursol St. The exhibition runs until Wednesday, Sept. 26 One of Montreal's finest playwrights, award-winning Peter Madden, who wrote The Night No One Yelled, will teach a playwrit-ing course to beginners starting next month for the Playwrights' Workshop.

Madden will also lead a peer critique group for more experienced playwrights. For more Continued from Page C-1 tion of Americans in Paris. Gertrude, Alice, Nathalie et ce cher Ernest will premier at a small space called Atelier Continu, on Laurier St. The cast is anything but obscure. Monique Mercure will play, Gertrude Stein.

MicherGarneau, the burly, bearded writer, will play Hemingway. Michelle Rossignol will direct a cast that also includes Patricia Nolan, Louise Marleau and Julie Vincent. Opens Oct. 24. In Johanne Beaudry's Zelda, which has just opened at Theatre d'Aujourd'hui, Bernard Roy, at five feet two inches, is struggling with the role of the towering Hemingway.

Being featured on the French stage twice in one season must surely be a record for the legendary American writer. New musical Later in the season, Rossignol is scheduled to direct Garneau's new musical about the Second Empire musician Offenbach. It opens at Ottawa's National Arts Centre, but will probably move to Montreal later. Well-known Montreal TV star Louise Latraverse has taken over as artistic director of Theatre Quat'Sous this year. Anglophone audiences may remember her from the Elite Production's successful debut into French comedy last year, Meurtre an Hyatt Regence, where her talent as a comic actress shone.

Just a block north of Prince Arth New York and Toronto, but will create his own version of The Trojan Women at Theatre Conventum in December. The twist: Trojans of both sexes will be played by women. Anyone in search of a quick, painless entry point to the avant-garde of Quebec theatre need not speak French, but should have a street "plan including the East End. Two mime troupes and the eccentric Nouveau Theatre Experimental work from an old Fire Hall at 1945 Fullum St. called Espace Libre.

This year the very talented tenants are planning seven events, some new, others revived from previous seasons. Dark side The Espace Libre season opened last week with It, a brilliant, imaginative exploration of the dark side of family drama by Larry Smith that definitely ranks as one of the best, most imaginative creations the old fire hall has seen since it became a theatre in 1981. Espace Libre offers a strong, original kind of performance art where images and movement replace plot and spoken word, much closer to the movies than anything Shakespeare imagined. But Shakespeare is far from absent on Montreal stages this year. Two of his plays will appear in the language of Moliere.

Tuesday, Theatre Populaire du Quebec will open La Nuit des Rois (Twelfth Night) at Is Centaur Theatre for a five-night run before departing on a two-month tour of the province. With a cast of 17, TPQ is calling this the most important production in its history. Next spring, Theatre du Nouveau Monde's artistic director, Olivier Reichenbach, will direct Othello. He's said he wants to make TNM "the Stratford of Quebec." With a great tragedy of jealousy as his first brush with Shakespeare, and the theatre's building sold to McDonald's hamburger chain, that vow has taken on great irony. Working down the list of potentially very interesting theatre events leads, eventually, to the seasons of Montreal's largest subscription theatres, where Broadway hits in translation abound.

TNM is doing The Dresser. La Compagnie Jean Duceppe is offering four American plays at Place des Arts: Neil Simon's The Fools; Isn't it Romantic, a current off-Broadway comedy; 'Night Mother, the Pulitzer prize-winner by Marsha Norman and Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms. Bernard Slade and the West EndBroadway movie hit, Educating Rita, are at Rideau Vert while Theatre Denise-Pelletier will open in late October with Harold and Maude. Those are the schedule highlights. But a theatre season that began, effectively, in the Olympic Stadium can be counted on to produce surprises.

Stay tuned. THOMAS SCHNURMA CHER C'mon CBC. Don't give up the ship. Keep trying. We'll even settle for Pierre as a guest panelist if we can't have him as a regular.

Montreal rocker Corey Hart was a smash hit when he opened for Rick Springfield's three performances this past week at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Hart, whose video of Sunglasses at Night is a popular hit on MTV, had the crowd on its feet begging for more. The very talented and hard--working Hart is well on his way to the top. Just remember the lyrics from the song New York, New York "If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere Ottawa-born comedian Mike MacDonald, who will be performing Sept. 29 and 30 at the Club Soda, says, "If we were told we couldn't have sex anymore, half the population would kill itself.

mfi ur the 175-eat former synagogue has launched some of Quebec's most original and interesting plays during the past two decades. Latraverse says she wants to continue that tradition and has scheduled four plays from four corners of the dramatic spectrum, starting with a veritable sensation next week. Aurore, I'enfant martyre, is based on the true story of Marie Anne Houde who was tried and imprisoned in 1920 for beating her children, finally killing her stepdaughter. The original version premiered while Houde's trial was still in the news and went through some 6,000 performances before a film version in the early 1950s swept it offstage. Circulation (about a young woman wandering the streets of New York City) was a big hit last summer at La Quinzaine, Quebec City's international theatre festival.

It will play Quat'Sous in November, followed by a stage adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Theoreme, and 26 bis, Impasse du Colonel Foisy, a new play by Rene-Daniel Dubois. The final play is undecided. Putting international names on stage is nothing new to Romanian-born director Alexander Hausvater, who routinely infuses literary classics with his own highly personal vision. Hausvater won't be directing at Quat'Sous this year. He's off to for finals out of about 100 pianists originally considered.

The other finalists are from the United States, Bulgaria, South Korea and Japan. They all have to play one concerto of their choice with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra to be broadcast live on BBC television. The winner of the ($5,600 Canadian) first prize will be announced live after the 15 international jurors have had time to make their decision. But more important than the money are the concert engagements that go along with the competition. They will be shared by all six finalists, with the winner having his pick of the best engagements.

updates 7:00 p.m. OOEMIe fantaslique 8:00 p.m. (A) It Will Be All Right On The Night British humorist Dennis Norden presents a series of outtakes from movies and other serials. (Repeat) (30 min.) 11:30 p.m. Rue St-Jacques Trudeau passes up 'Front Page Montreal's Louis Lortie enters Leeds piano finals Challenge' info, call the workshop at 843-3685.

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, a 90-minute sci-fi comedy will have its world premiere show- -ing tonight at 8 p.m. on the CBC. The made-for-television film stars Broadway actor Raul Julia and Canadian actress Linda Griffiths. Why am I telling you this? Because the film was produced by RSL Films, the people who brought us the sexual titillation of In Praise of Older Women and Joy, not to mention Joshua Then and Now, which is shooting here in Montreal even as you read these lines. Overdrawn at the Memory Bank has already received its first accolade.

It is scheduled for an early 1985 showing on American Playhouse, a PBS show so presti- gious that even Gazette television critic Mike Boone would have a hard time finding fault with it. Madame Zubie was horrified when city council members told her that she could no longer per-; form chemical experiments in her basement laboratory. "They gave me three days to get my acid out of town," says Zubie. When Gordon Sinclair, the wittiest panelist on the CBC's Front Page Challenge, died recently, the CBC mandarins searched high and low to find a suitable replacement. The choice was finally narrowed down to three Canadian worthies: 'Southam columnist Alan Foth-' eringham, blustering Vancouver radio windbag Jack Webster and Canada's most charismatic television performer, Pierre Trudeau.

As you undoubtedly knowt the former PM opted to join a local legal firm and thus the loss to showbiz is the law profession's gain. Too bad, though. The curiosity factor alone would have driven the show's ratings through the roof. Just daydream for a second if you will, and imagine some of the possibilities. Mystery guests could include people like John Turner, Margaret Trudeau, Joe Clark and Barbra Streisand.

Can you imagine the question-and-answer period after the guessing? Be honest. Would you miss a show like that? Of course not. Front Page Challenge, without Pierre Trudeau, will return with either Fotheringham or Webster on Oct. 11 for its 28th season on Canadian television. LEEDS, England (CP) Montreal's Louis Lortie is one of two Canadians who have won places among the six musicians selected for tonight's finals in the Leeds International Piano competition, officials said yesterday.

It is the first time Canadians have reached the finals in the. 21-year history of the competition. So important is the competition one of the top three or four in the vliorld that just being in the finals will launch Lortie, 25, and Jon Ki-mura Parker, 24, of Vancouver, on concert careers." "They have both done extremely well to have got this far," a competi- tion official said yesterday. Lortie and Parker were chosen Television i The following a.re 4 changes' to this weekend's TV listingsmade after TV Times went to press: TODAY 2:00 p.m. CD Star Trek 5:15 p.m.

OO Madame el son fantome 6:30 p.m. S3 Again 7:00 p.m. 10:00 p.m. de domain SUNDAY 12:30 p.m. C6J 4:30 p.m.

CCO Mythical Of The 5:30 p.m. ChezSoi Happy Days Lou Grant Les Enfants Directions 0 Monsters Deep Chacun.