Madeleine in the Hill Country
Can a Hollywood actress keep up a successful career living in Central Texas? As Madeleine Stowe has discovered, it depends on how you define “successful.”
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Stowe’s career could use another good movie. After the success of The Last of the Mohicans in 1992, Stowe had a certain amount of bankability in Hollywood. Having spent the previous years playing characters whose most memorable attribute was their beauty, she became more discriminating about her roles. When Robert Altman approached her to play the part of an unhappily married painter in Short Cuts, she turned it down because of a scene in which she’d have to appear nude below the waist. That part went to Julianne Moore. When Short Cuts opened in 1993, the joke about Moore’s being a natural redhead appeared in almost every review of the film, and the scene got her noticed in more ways than one. Stowe chose instead to play Moore’s sister Sherri, a savvy, sardonic housewife married to Tim Robbins’ philandering cop. In the end, Stowe did appear nude in one scene, posing for her sister the painter. Though Stowe’s part was not nearly as memorable as Moore’s, it showcased what Lynda Obst describes as her “wicked, low-key sense of humor.”
Stowe continues to pick and choose roles on her own terms. And while she has done her share of interviews over the years, she hasn’t taken a traditional path in promoting her career, either. “I really don’t understand the nature of it,” Stowe muses. “Some [actors] are very, very good at expressing what’s going on or inventing things in order to be interesting,” she says. “But I never quite understood how to do that and do that comfortably.”
Back in the house, a copy of the latest Vanity Fair lies next to her on the couch. It is the magazine’s annual Hollywood issue, and a posse of up-and-coming young actors slouch across the cover. Stowe mentions that she occasionally watches Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio, and she seems genuinely curious about the industry in which she has worked for the past two decades. She has more respect for Hollywood’s past than for its present, however, and she’s concerned about its future. “What worries me is that life experience is something that’s not cherished or valued anymore,” explains the actress. She has little tolerance for what she sees as a lack of context in contemporary acting. “I think that an older generation of actors like Pacino, they’re very, very articulate and very thoughtful,” she says. “I think they’ve lived lives. They have a sentimentality. They’re self-educated in a way, incredibly well-read. They understand what’s going on in the world. They understand the past. My generation and younger have very little context.
“Basically,” Stowe concludes, “I don’t find it interesting to hear any of my contemporaries talk about acting. It’s not interesting when I talk about it. I haven’t heard anyone in my generation say one interesting thing about it.”
Stowe freely admits that she fell into acting. She grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles, and the glamorous Hollywood images that provided the backdrop for her adolescence motivated her plan to major in journalism at the University of Southern California, where she briefly considered a career in film criticism. As a freshman at USC, she was “discovered” in 1977 by the veteran Hollywood agent Meyer Mishkin, who at the time was representing Richard Dreyfuss and had come to see his client perform in Paddy Chayefsky’s The Tenth Man at the Solari Theatre in Beverly Hills. Stowe was passing out programs when she met Mishkin, and he signed her as a client almost immediately. She became one of the first actresses to be represented by the agent, who was better known for handling macho actors such as Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin.
Stowe had been hanging out at the Solari as a way to prepare for her future career as a critic, cutting classes to be there. She found the actors exotic and felt accepted in a way she never had during her awkward high school years, which she sums up with characteristic self-deprecating humor: “I used to hang around the circle [of popular girls] all the time, and if I said one thing, that was like a really, really good day.”
For many years after her opportune meeting with Mishkin, Stowe was cast in television movies and miniseries. In 1987 she played the object of Richard Dreyfuss’ voyeuristic affections in her first feature film, the cop-buddy movie Stakeout, and this led to a steady stream of roles—Stowe was always the girlfriend or a woman in distress—in films such as Revenge and Unlawful Entry. Although she was often cast in nondescript parts, her reviews were usually strong. As Stuart Klawans, a film critic for The Nation, once wrote, Stowe “always makes whatever picture she’s in a little better.”
Then came Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. The movie was a box-office success and brought her to the attention of directors like Terry Gilliam, with whom she would later work in 12 Monkeys. Stowe has called Mann the most driven director she’s ever worked with. “He would want us in hair and makeup just to say some lines of dialogue with him. And that’s how he would make his wardrobe choice,” she remembers. “That’s the way a lot of people did it a long time ago, but it’s sort of a forgotten art.”
Stowe has worked with both male and female directors, and while she acknowledges that all directors are different, she prefers to work with men. “In all frankness, there’s a part of me that really likes the slightly more dogmatic approach that certain men have,” she says. With the women directors, on the other hand, “There was a tendency to talk about a scene or take over and over and over after it was done, asking other people, ‘Well, what did you think?’” Stowe says. “I think that you have to run certain things more like you would an army.”
Stowe is equally forthright about another complaint commonly voiced by actresses. “People always ask me, ‘What about the fact that there are no women’s roles?’ I don’t have an answer for it. I don’t feel like bitching about it. I’m not doing anything to [make it better]. When I feel that I have something that’s really, really wonderful on paper and somebody’s not wanting to do it—then I’ll bitch!” she says, laughing.
Stowe hints that she and Benben would like to work together again, perhaps to produce and direct a Texas-themed project, but neither actor offers specifics. When asked if she’d like to move beyond acting, however, Stowe is more candid. “I’ve always been interested in directing,” she says. “I don’t particularly relish the thought of, between takes, going back to my trailer and amusing myself with something,” she says of the tedium of an actor’s life on the set. “I feel really ungrateful saying it, because acting is an incredible opportunity to have in life. But that’s a part of making movies that is such a crashing bore. And there’s a lot of it.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Stowe goes on. “In some ways I think that I’ve picked a path that is not as easy for me in terms of generating tons of work. I mean, there’s a certain path I could take that is a far more sociable and traditional thing.” Such a path might include living in Los Angeles and making the rounds socially, something she has rarely enjoyed. But there are those Hollywood insiders who support Stowe’s decision to have a life outside the film industry. Says Obst, who witnesses career desperation on a regular basis: “She’s not on the hustle.”
WHILE DRIVING AROUND THE PROPERTY earlier in the day, Stowe recalled that, not too long after she and Benben moved to their ranch, a friend had phoned to ask when she was returning to California. As Stowe remembered it, her friend said, “You’re still living your Texas fantasy. Okay, well, just call me when you get back,” as if her move to Texas were just one more location shoot.
Stowe laughed at the memory and the idea that her life in the Hill Country is just another role in her filmography. “I mean, it is a part. It always will be,” she admitted as she unhooked the last gate that separates the living quarters from the rest of the ranch. Then she paused as she climbed back into the Mule, shifted out of neutral, and looked toward the house, where Benben and May were playing in the sandbox. “Why not, right?”
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