Jessica Lange's Secret Passion

Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images Jessica Lange isn’t just an Emmy nominee for Grey Gardens, she’s also an acclaimed photographer. Amanda Fortini talked to the actress about aging, love, and her most iconic roles.

Only a handful of living American actresses belong in the pantheon of true talents: Meryl Streep definitely; Joanne Woodward, Sissy Spacek, and Sally Field, formerly; Jodie Foster, perhaps. And then there is Jessica Lange. In the course of her 33-year career, Lange has received six Oscar nominations and two statues (Best Supporting for Tootsie in 1983, Best Actresses for Blue Sky in 1995), earning her not only a place on the film world’s Mount Olympus, but arguably some astral plane of her own. Though she is a star in the Old Hollywood sense—the name Jessica Lange, whether or not you have watched her films, is familiar, even iconic—she is still known primarily for her gifts as an actress. Famous as she is, she does not suffer from the syndrome of so many celebrities today: Jessica Lange the person with a personal life never eclipses Jessica Lange the actor in a role.

On a recent bright, warm afternoon in Beverly Hills, Lange sat for a cup of tea in the garden of the Four Seasons Hotel. She had come to discuss her role as Edith Bouvier Beale (aka “Big Edie”) in the HBO film Grey Gardens, for which she is expected to receive an Emmy nomination next week, as well as an upcoming exhibition of her photographic work. ( “Jessica Lange: 50 Photographs” opens July 11 at the Rose Gallery in Santa Monica; it will hang through September.) “Oh, real tea!” she exclaims, as the waitress delivers a pot of loose-leaf English Breakfast, complete with tea-ritual accessories. Despite her dignified, almost-regal good looks—Lange is statuesque, with alpine-high cheekbones—there is something girlish about the 60-year-old actress. Her eyes smile with a sense of curiosity and mischief. Yet she also has the serene, centered air of someone who has lived her life on her own terms.

Her specialty is the seemingly fragile woman with, as she calls it, “a spine of steel.”

“I just came here for the day, literally,” Lange says, in that distinct voice, rich and caramel-smooth but with a faint lilt of the Upper Midwest. Unlike almost any actor with a full-fledged film career, Lange has never called Los Angeles home. Instead, she and her longtime partner, playwright and actor Sam Shepard, lived for nine years in Stillwater, Minnesota, a town not far from where Lange was born and raised, and then, for another nine years, on a farm in Virginia. “I left New York when my children were little, just to, you know, raise them in a different environment,” she says. “Then I figured I’d done enough of…” she trails off, as she tends to when the conversation turns personal. She and Shepard now live in Manhattan’s West Village, but they keep “a cabin” in Northern Minnesota.

As Lange talks, it becomes evident that, like most charismatic people, she is a tangle of interesting contradictions: sexy yet self-contained, straight-shooting but also skittish. Jack Nicholson, her co-star on The Postman Always Rings Twice, famously called her “a delicate fawn crossed with a Buick.” (He may also have been referring a certain emotional heft—in her case, a fragile concreteness—that frequently characterizes those from the middle of the country. “Good solid upbringing, isn’t it? she asks, upon learning of my Iowa roots. And then: “I think it gets you through some tough spots.”)

When I ask about the secret to her enduring relationship with Shepard—the pair, who met in 1982 on the set of Frances, have never married but have been together for more than 25 years—she coils up ever so slightly. “I don’t know,” she says, growing quiet and charmingly flustered, “You’ve got to have some deep connection… it’s a lot of history and knowing somebody really well, and… It’s being interested in somebody after 25 years; they still fascinate you.” (The couple has two children together, a boy and a girl, ages 21 and 22; Lange also has a 27-year-old daughter with Mikhail Barishnikov.)