The same Page
Angelica Page puts her mom Geraldine back in the spotlight
ANGELICA Page developed her one-woman show about her mother, Oscar-winning actress Geraldine Page, at the Actors Studio in New York. It was a fitting place to work, since her mother was a member of the famous acting company. As a child, Angelica played with coloring books at the theater while her mother worked on scenes with studio chief Lee Strasberg.
“I remember her saying to Lee that ‘Angelica is learning acting by osmosis,’” says Page, 53, whose father is actor Rip Torn. “I didn’t know what she meant, but she always laughed and said, ‘We’re going to work on osmosis today.’”
So imagine how she felt when she performed an early version of “Turning Page” at the studio — and her teacher ripped it apart.
“You should stop working on this,” she says the teacher told her. “I think it’s very unhealthy for you emotionally. It will also never have commercial success, because nobody knows Geraldine Page anymore. And one more thing: I really don’t think you’re meant to be an actress.”
Page then quietly gathered her things and left the studio, never to return. She moved to Los Angeles and spent the next three years working on “Turning Page.”
It debuted there in 2015. Here’s what the Los Angeles Times said about a show that wasn’t good enough for the Actors Studio: “For those who have been touched by Geraldine Page’s sorcery . . . Angelica’s virtuosic conjuring of her mother’s spirit is something to behold.” The show opened Feb. 24 at off-Broadway’s Dixon Place, where it’s set to run through April 8.
Page developed the show from her mother’s letters and diaries and from scraps of an unpublished memoir. Born in Kirksville, Mo., the future Oscar winner (for “The Trip to Bountiful” in 1986) started acting in summer stock at 17. NewYork critics discovered her in the now-legendary 1952 production of Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke.” Twoyears later she appeared opposite a then-unknown James Dean in “The Immoralist.”
Angelica discovered some notes about her mother’s relationship with Dean.
“She usually wrote with a brown [felt-tip] pen,” Angelica says. “But there is one page, all in red ink, that says, ‘People like to say that Jimmy was gay. Jimmy was not gay. At least not while I was around. I don’t think we
slept once in those two weeks before Jimmy went off to Hollywood.’”
Dean died in a car crash 18 months after he left New York.
In “Turning Page,” Angelica also deals with her parents’ tumultuous relationship. (Torn was arrested a few years ago after breaking into a bank that, in a drunken haze, he mistook for his house in Connecticut.)
Although they were separated at the time of Geraldine’s death in 1987 at 62, she and Torn still loved each other, as Angelica makes clear in “Turning Page.” Her father has yet to see the show. “He has a standing invitation, but I think it would be difficult for him,” she says. “He cries whenever he sees me, because he says I look so much like her.”