ON HER OWN TERMS
Veteran actress Stockard Channing reflects on her eventful career
It feels like Stockard Channing — now 73, but forever associated with the sassy Rizzo in Grease — is the living embodiment of the Joni Mitchell line “I’ve looked at life from both sides now.”
“I guess there is a little bit of the flower child in me,” she says, with her crisp Ivy League accent. “I drove my family crazy. I suppose you would call it running away to join the circus. I was raised in a very prosperous family — what you would call upper middle class, I guess — and they were appalled by what I did. But, you know, it was so liberating to have an alternative to what was imposed on me as a young woman.”
On completing her education at Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard), Channing was expected to be a society madame, dishing out cocktails and canapés to the great and good of New England. Instead, she became an actress, embracing the liberal agendas that dominated American campuses at the time. She was at the barricades, but despite the sense of liberation that protesting offered her, she was also aware that being a woman barred you from certain freedoms.
“Kitchen-table abortions existed. I knew people who had them. Now, of course, you realize that any freedoms women have gained can’t be taken for granted. This moment in American history (with the Republicans’ strong pro-life lobby) has proved that things can be taken away from you.”
Channing describes herself as a feminist, but says she gets angry with those who see it as a “combative state of mind.
“I get pissed off when I hear feminism being decried by younger people,” she says. “There are many different kinds. We don’t have to think of men as enemies. They can be friends and partners. Feminism should be about questioning what men have by birthright — and of course about deploring misogyny.”
She relates, in abstract terms, a conversation in front of her at one Hollywood casting when she was younger.
“Would you f--- her?” “Yeah. Give her the part.” Just like that? “That was the way people talked,” she says. “In one case, something like that happened and I just felt lucky to get the job. I needed the money.”
In the 1970s, Channing’s career as a young actress was inconsistent. She was touted, briefly, as the next big thing when she was cast in Mike Nichols’ The Fortune alongside Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty.
“That was a real life lesson because it wasn’t a hit and I did three movies in a row like that. I learned not to believe my own hype. So at the time Grease came along, I couldn’t get arrested.”
The 1978 high school musical is one of the most enduring films in cinema history. Channing is thoughtful about it and, behind that facade of emotional toughness, even a little affectionate.
“It was dismissed and envied at the time, which is a fatal combination,” she says. “Envied because it made so much money and dismissed because it was about teenagers.
“I was way too old (Rizzo was a teenager, Channing was 34), but pleased that I managed to pull it off. It’s true that my Shakespearean background didn’t come into play, but it all came good in the end.”
Recently, Olivia Newton-John, who played Sandy, has hinted that there might be a 40-year reunion. Would Channing participate?
“Reunion? Some of us are dead. We have lost three, I think. God love them. Maybe we should just leave that alone.”
Channing has built a career on her own terms. Theatre has been a constant and she has been nominated for seven Tonys (she won for A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in 1985) and 13 Emmys (she has won three). She always brings class and a certain amount of cerebral spikiness to her performances, and has never, she believes, had to worry about ageism in an industry where it is rife.
“The age thing was never a factor for me,” she says. “Well, it probably is now because I’m so f---ing ancient. But I have always been a character actress, so it never applied. I was always a bit odd and I still am.”
Odd in what way?
“I don’t fit a mould.” Certainly, Channing has never sought to be glamorous. She is, in a foxy academic sort of way, but clearly that was never going to get her very far in Hollywood, where stars are expected to look like fashion models.
Channing’s own experiences of “glamour” have been limited to the awards ceremonies she has graced with frequency over the past four decades. She says the events themselves prove troublesome.
“Awards mean dressing up and I am terrible at it. When I was nominated for an Academy Award (for Six Degrees of Separation), the only press I got was an article which said my dress looked terrible, and I thought: ‘F--- this. I’m just going to give up.’ “