Jacki
Weaver stars in The Five-Year Engagement (second from right), one of the
many Hollywood offers since her Oscar nomination.
Liza Power, The Age, reports
Jacki Weaver says she's
never been the kind of actor to bemoan a lack of interesting roles for women in
their 50s. Last year, the sixtysomething star was nominated for an Oscar for
her turn as Janine ''Smurf'' Cody, the matriarch of a brutal Melbourne crime
family, in Animal Kingdom.
In the 18 months that
followed filming she performed in six plays, including the Sydney Theatre
Company's critically acclaimed production of Uncle
Vanya, a role she'll reprise when the production tours to New
York's Lincoln Centre Festival in July after its rave season in Washington last
year.
In between, she's
juggled her pick of the 20-odd film offers she's received in the aftermath of
her Oscar nomination, a situation she describes as ''very bewildering and hard
to believe. But fantastic.'' It's not that she doubted she would still be
acting in her 60s. More that ''it feels amazing to be in another country doing
it. There's still plenty of work to be doing here at home, but to be doing it
in a foreign country and speaking in different accents … is something else.''
Weaver was in Los
Angeles for the Academy Awards when Nicholas Stoller (director of Forgetting Sarah Marshall,
Get Him to the Greek)
stopped by her hotel room with a script for The
Five-Year Engagement, which stars Jason Segel and Emily Blunt. Soon
after came scripts for Stoker
with Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska, and The
Silver Linings Playbook with Robert De Niro. This year her schedule
includes four films and an HBO pilot. The offers have been so fast and furious
that she's considered relocating to the US.
''I've wanted to live in
the East Village in New York since the early '70s. But when I told my manager
he said New York was so far from LA I might as well stay in bloody Australia!
They talk about getting jet lag between New York and LA, you know. They're so
sweet!''
Weaver won her first
Australian Film Institute Award in 1971 and has been a mainstay in Australian
theatre and television for decades. This year marks her 50th as an actor; she
made her stage debut in Cinderella
at age 15. Her film debut was Tim Burstall's Stork
as the diminutive but sexy Anna. The film's phenomenal success prompted a
renaissance in the Australian film industry, with co-star Graeme Blundell later
saying: ''Stork
proved the commercial validity of Australian film and she was the face of it.''
Weaver has since appeared in such iconic Australian films as Alvin Purple, Storm Boy and Picnic at Hanging Rock.
A ''national treasure''
to many, and a ''national relic'' to the self-deprecating Weaver, her turn in The Five-Year Engagement
is being hailed as her ''Hollywood break'', even if she sees it a bit
differently. ''To be fair, my Hollywood break was the Oscar nomination. We tend
to take awards in Australia with a grain of salt but they take them very
seriously in America. It's understandable. I mean, in Australia the film
industry is, let's face it, a cottage industry. But over there it's a
multimillion-dollar business that employs millions of people. They take awards
seriously because it can mean millions at the box office.''
Weaver saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall
in Melbourne before heading to the US last February, so when her agent told her
Stoller wanted to meet her she was chuffed. ''He came to see me at my hotel in
Beverly Hills and he was such a lovely young man. I thought, 'Who could
resist?''' She plays Blunt's prim English mother in The Five-Year Engagement, the polar opposite
of the maternal figure she played in Animal
Kingdom. ''They're both bitches, but completely different,'' she
laughs. ''But I was really fortunate I wasn't typecast. I had a lot of offers
to play evil women.''
Stoker was filmed in Nashville and Weaver says she loved
exploring co-star Kidman's adopted home town and marvelling at the innate
theatricality of the Tennessee accent. She's a great admirer of Kidman: ''She's
such a beautiful person, not just to look at, and a fantastic actress. I don't
think she gets enough credit in Australia.'' Most Australian actors don't, she
adds. ''It's great [so many Australian actors are thriving in the US]. No one
seems to take the industry seriously over here. They think it's some frivolous
hobby … We regard the performance industry with suspicion.''
Filmed in Philadelphia, The Silver Linings Playbook
required Weaver to work with a dialect coach to master the local accent. She
says actors never stop refining their skills and learning, but the process is
more appealing when you're on set with De Niro, among others. ''I had to pinch
myself. I couldn't believe it.''
Finding herself suddenly
in the star-littered orbit of the Hollywood constellation hasn't, however, left
Weaver wishing she'd made a bid for an overseas career decades ago. ''I was
always perfectly satisfied and content with the career I had in Australia.''
Nowadays, she says, every ''young kid out of drama school goes straight over
for the pilot season. But that was something that happened the generation after
mine. Going to the US just was never on my agenda.''
And while there might be
advantages to arriving in Tinseltown as a mature star, she wouldn't overstate
them. Age is no insurance policy against the perils of stardom: ''I think it's
possible [to lose your head] in this industry, in any country at any age, if
you're too impressionable. [Acting] is a world of rejection and cruelty. It can
have huge triumphs and huge lows. Both can be deleterious to your mental
health.''
Starting afresh in a new
country doesn't mean you begin with a clean slate, either. Weaver arrived in
the US to find people as well versed in her acting accomplishments as her
private life. ''On the first film I worked on the director kept saying to
people: 'Do you know how many times she's been married?' There's no secrets in
America. I keep bumping into people on crews who've read my book. I'd have to
go to another planet for my life to be secret.''
Not that she minds.
She's being pestered by her publisher to write a follow-up to Much Love, Jac, her first
memoir, which details her four marriages, three de facto relationships and
wickedly endearing life philosophy: ''I believe in sex on the first date.
Otherwise, how do you know if a second date is worth the effort?'' she writes.
''Well, the book came
out in 2005 and an awful lot has happened since then,'' Weaver says.
In the next instalment
she might dwell on the roles she hasn't had the chance to play. ''I love all
the old ones. I always wanted to play Viola in Twelfth Night because I haven't done a lot of
Shakespeare. And I always wanted to play Nora in a A Doll's House because I think Ibsen is one
of the greatest dramatists that ever lived. I thought I'd make a great Eliza
because I'm a good transforming actor that can start out really down and out
and ugly and can improve a lot, which you can't do if you're too beautiful.''
That would be a brief
chapter because ''it's neurotic to regret things you can't change''. A larger
section might detail the virtues of enjoying the moment: ''if it all evaporates
tomorrow, it doesn't matter; I'm having the best time''.
The Five-Year Engagement opens May
3.
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