Corpus Christi Times
April 12, 1977
By GREGG KILDAY
April 12, 1977
By GREGG KILDAY
HOLLYWOOD - It was quite an affair, this citrus festival she's just come from held in the valley in Texas where her grandparents settled and her mother grew up. It was like a fantasy. She rode in the parade on this beautiful palomino horse, a $20,000 horse, the most wonderful horse she had ever been astride. And people were calling out "Sissy!" and "Carrie!" and just waving and handing her their babies and she just sort of wanted to cry. And there were these cadets a whole class of cadets, a bunch of real heavies, who thought she was 17 or 18 years old and they came over and asked her to go to a dance. She was going to be all of their dates. She was going to have about 40 dates. It was quite an affair.
Twenty-seven-year-old Sissy Spacek is laughing with a delight that is almost adolescent as she recounts going home to Quitman in the wake of her starring performance in "Carrie" which has already won her recognition as the best actress of the year from the National Society of Film Critics, an Oscar nomination as best actress and a cover story in Newsweek hailing her as the foremost of the new Hollywood actresses.
But Sissy isn't talking about any of that. She is more excited by the parade. By the fact that she just learned to snow ski while on a promotional tour of Europe. By the jokes that she is planning for an appearance as guest host on Saturday Night Live. Like wouldn't it be great if she did a skit in which she played little Amy Carter and...
Not that Sissy isn't grateful: She is willing to enumerate upon the advantages of her new-found celebrityhood. "You know," Sissy says in her wild, Texas twang, "the thing that's had the most effect on me's having made connection, it's a strange thing how you feel close to people very fast. You meet people and they've seen the movie and there's sort of a strange kind of bond. There's a lot you don't have to go through in meeting people in relationships. It's already — you seem to be through phases or stages.
"The other, I think, exciting thing about it is that it's brought me together with exciting artists and I hope that it gives me opportunities to meet more people who I can work with.
It has been the child rather than the woman in Sissy that has most captured the imagination of the directors with whom she has worked. In her first film, "Prime Cut," she was the hapless victim in a white-slave ring. It was just a warmup exercise. She costarred with Martin Sheen in Malick's "Badlands," bringing off a performance that many critics still consider her most subtle and compelling. Playing the uncomprehending accomplice of a mass murderer, Sissy acted as if she was just going along for the ride — out of a yearning for a true confessions romance and out of the need simply to get out of town.
In casting the part of a live-in maid who cleans house topless while pursuing rock stars as a sideline in the soon-to-be-released "Welcome to L.A.," Alan Rudolph was looking for a similar quality of innocent amorality. "Sissy understood. She was a combination of what I knew I wanted; she borrowed from her own life for the film."
As producer of "Welcome to L.A.," Robert Altman was so haunted by Sissy's performance as it emerged in rushes that he went home one night and dreamed a whole new movie in which she was to star.
The results will be seen in "3 Women," also about to be released. In it, Sissy plays a young girl from Texas who becomes so enamored with the more sophisticated manner of Shelley Duvall that she begins to take on the other woman's personality.
Since she is an actress who works by intuition rather than technique, her accent remains a problem. Brian De Palma solved it by instructing Piper Laurie, who plays Sissy's mother in "Carrie," to speak with corresponding inflections, a decision that dovetailed nicely with the characters' fundamentalist religion.
Jeremy Kagan, who directed Sissy in "Katherine," the televised biography of a rich girl turned radical, compensated for her accent by rewriting his script, moving Katherine's home from Philadelphia to Colorado.
Sissy herself cavalierly dismisses the study of acting. At 17, when she first left Texas for New York, she intended to become a singer. She turned to acting, she says jokingly, "when I discovered I was too short to be a model." She then studied acting briefly, but, she demurs, "A lot of my schooling and experience came on the walk home across 14th St. at 9 o'clock at night."
Don't be misled: Adds Kagan, "I know that after 'Katherine' she went back to acting classes. She has a real desire to hone the machinery."
Sissy's award-winning performance is all the more satisfying because, as she freely admits, she was not De Palma's first choice for the role. "I had read Sissy for all the parts, but I was leaning toward another actress for Carrie," De Palma recalls.
But "Carrie" is now behind her, Sissy insists. And she is ready for new roles in which the balance between girl and woman tilts more in favor of the woman.
Twenty-seven-year-old Sissy Spacek is laughing with a delight that is almost adolescent as she recounts going home to Quitman in the wake of her starring performance in "Carrie" which has already won her recognition as the best actress of the year from the National Society of Film Critics, an Oscar nomination as best actress and a cover story in Newsweek hailing her as the foremost of the new Hollywood actresses.
But Sissy isn't talking about any of that. She is more excited by the parade. By the fact that she just learned to snow ski while on a promotional tour of Europe. By the jokes that she is planning for an appearance as guest host on Saturday Night Live. Like wouldn't it be great if she did a skit in which she played little Amy Carter and...
Not that Sissy isn't grateful: She is willing to enumerate upon the advantages of her new-found celebrityhood. "You know," Sissy says in her wild, Texas twang, "the thing that's had the most effect on me's having made connection, it's a strange thing how you feel close to people very fast. You meet people and they've seen the movie and there's sort of a strange kind of bond. There's a lot you don't have to go through in meeting people in relationships. It's already — you seem to be through phases or stages.
"The other, I think, exciting thing about it is that it's brought me together with exciting artists and I hope that it gives me opportunities to meet more people who I can work with.
It has been the child rather than the woman in Sissy that has most captured the imagination of the directors with whom she has worked. In her first film, "Prime Cut," she was the hapless victim in a white-slave ring. It was just a warmup exercise. She costarred with Martin Sheen in Malick's "Badlands," bringing off a performance that many critics still consider her most subtle and compelling. Playing the uncomprehending accomplice of a mass murderer, Sissy acted as if she was just going along for the ride — out of a yearning for a true confessions romance and out of the need simply to get out of town.
In casting the part of a live-in maid who cleans house topless while pursuing rock stars as a sideline in the soon-to-be-released "Welcome to L.A.," Alan Rudolph was looking for a similar quality of innocent amorality. "Sissy understood. She was a combination of what I knew I wanted; she borrowed from her own life for the film."
As producer of "Welcome to L.A.," Robert Altman was so haunted by Sissy's performance as it emerged in rushes that he went home one night and dreamed a whole new movie in which she was to star.
The results will be seen in "3 Women," also about to be released. In it, Sissy plays a young girl from Texas who becomes so enamored with the more sophisticated manner of Shelley Duvall that she begins to take on the other woman's personality.
Since she is an actress who works by intuition rather than technique, her accent remains a problem. Brian De Palma solved it by instructing Piper Laurie, who plays Sissy's mother in "Carrie," to speak with corresponding inflections, a decision that dovetailed nicely with the characters' fundamentalist religion.
Jeremy Kagan, who directed Sissy in "Katherine," the televised biography of a rich girl turned radical, compensated for her accent by rewriting his script, moving Katherine's home from Philadelphia to Colorado.
Sissy herself cavalierly dismisses the study of acting. At 17, when she first left Texas for New York, she intended to become a singer. She turned to acting, she says jokingly, "when I discovered I was too short to be a model." She then studied acting briefly, but, she demurs, "A lot of my schooling and experience came on the walk home across 14th St. at 9 o'clock at night."
Don't be misled: Adds Kagan, "I know that after 'Katherine' she went back to acting classes. She has a real desire to hone the machinery."
Sissy's award-winning performance is all the more satisfying because, as she freely admits, she was not De Palma's first choice for the role. "I had read Sissy for all the parts, but I was leaning toward another actress for Carrie," De Palma recalls.
But "Carrie" is now behind her, Sissy insists. And she is ready for new roles in which the balance between girl and woman tilts more in favor of the woman.
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