‘Sex and the City’ star Cynthia Nixon relishes her unlikely role as the patron saint of shy people.
‘Sex and the City’ star relishes her role as the ‘patron saint of shy persons’
Cynthia Nixon has been preparing her whole life to play Emily Dickinson. As a child growing up in New York, she recalled, eating breakfast on a Saturday or Sunday, she never watched television or listened to the radio. Her mother had something else in mind.
“She would put on a vinyl record called Poems and Letters of Emily Dickinson Read by Julie Harris,” Nixon said. “Those poems penetrated my psyche. Those words lived in my head. Her poetry was so beautiful and her words jolted me awake.”
It took decades, but finally Nixon got the chance to play Dickinson in Terence Davies’ A Quiet Passion, now in limited release.
It may not be immediately obvious how Nixon, a movie and television star who’s politically active and a married mother of two, can relate to Dickinson, a virtual recluse who never moved out of her father’s house. Nonetheless, the actress insisted that she can.
“Garrison Keillor calls Dickinson ‘the patron saint of shy persons’,” Nixon said, speaking by telephone from her New
The idea of me playing Emily is just the loveliest compliment ever paid me
CYNTHIA NIXON
York home. “Even as a child I related to how much was going on inside of her, because I was shy. I was also that girl who wanted to shout, ‘I might not look like much but, if you come over here, you’d be amazed’.
“That’s Emily Dickinson.”
Written and directed by Davies, A Quiet Passion traces the iconic American poet’s life, with Emma Bell as the young Dickinson and Nixon as the adult version. Keith Carradine plays her father, with Jennifer Ehle as Lavinia “Vinnie” Dickinson, Emily’s younger sister.
In a separate interview Davies — best known for The House
of Mirth (2000) and The Deep Blue Sea (2011) — explained that he’d fallen in love with Dickinson’s words as a young man working in an accounting office.
“As a poet, she touched something deep in the human mind and certainly my mind,” he said. “Emily Dickinson asked, ‘Why are we here? How do we live? How do we love? How do we experience loss?’ All of those things we experience as humans are in her poetry.”
Dickinson was both eccentric and prolific, writing 1,808 poems, most of them untitled. Only seven were published within her lifetime.
“The interesting part is, she never let herself fall into total despair,” Nixon said. “There was always a little bit of hope.”
Nixon first auditioned for Davies more than a decade ago, for another project that never got off the ground. It was years before she heard from him again.
“Out of the blue, in 2012, another script came across my desk that he had written, about Emily Dickinson,” she recalled. “I was completely stunned that he wanted me to play her. I read it and loved it.
“When I met with him again in New York City, I told him, ‘The idea of me playing Emily is just the loveliest compliment ever paid me’.”
Nixon didn’t get her hopes up, though.
“I thought this film would never go anywhere,” she admitted. “I was almost too afraid to start the researching process, because I thought I would spend all this time and nothing would come out of it. How was he going to get financing for this film if it starred me?”
The success of the films Sex and the City (2008) and Sex
and the City 2 (2010), however, have left the stage and television veteran with a certain degree of big-screen marketability, and finally Davies secured the financing he needed.
Given the green light, Nixon immersed herself in Dickinson’s life.
“I submerged myself in the biographies,” she said. “I had already read and listened to readings of her letters.” Then there were the poems — all of them.
“I set out to read all the poems,” Nixon recalled, “but over 1,800 poems is a lot. I read as many of them as I could, including the greatest hits over and over.
“I would open more unknown poems at random. It was such a treat. There were these poems that were new to me that were just extraordinary. I couldn’t believe that I had
never heard of them. They were breathtaking. When you have a writer who writes for a long time, critics have a chance to grapple with that person’s work while they’re alive and argue about it. The work can change. Her work is so pure that many scholars are still playing catch-up.”
Beyond the poems, however, much of Dickinson’s life remains a mystery.
“We don’t know enough about her life, which was one lived in such obscurity,” Nixon said. “We don’t know the nitty-gritty of what went down there, and there is a lot of arguing among the scholars.”
Born in 1830 to a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson attended Mount Holyoke College briefly before sequestering herself in her father’s house. She was considered a local oddity because she wore only white clothing and spoke to visitors only through a closed door. She never married and conducted her friendships through writing letters. Later in life — she died in 1886 — she refused to leave her bedroom.
“Through it all, she led such a rich interior life,” the actress said.
“And there are so many opinions of what happened to her in life. We do know that she endured a lot of pain and heartbreak. A lot of the issues she was grappling with are questions everyone asks: What is eternity? What happens after we die?
“She was also very brave for her time period. She didn’t marry or have children. Most women didn’t even question those roles — they assumed they would marry and have children.”
Nixon’s life has been very different. Born in New York, she began her career as a child actress and made her first television appearance on the game show To Tell the Truth, on which her mother, Anne Knoll, worked as a researcher.
Though she has worked most steadily on stage and on television, Nixon made her big-screen debut in Little Darlings (1980), at 14, and went on to such films as Prince of the City (1981), Amadeus (1984), The Pelican Brief (1993),
Addams Family Values (1993) and Marvin’s Room (1996). Her big break came on the small screen, however, when she was cast as brittle, cerebral lawyer Miranda Hobbes on the HBO series Sex and the City (1998-2004). The show was a career-making hit, and also brought her back to the movie screen for two Sex and the City films.
Will there be a third? Nixon laughed and insisted that she has no idea.
“I do get asked the question almost every single day,” she admitted.
Next up for her is the film The Parting Glass, in which she, Melissa Leo and Anna Paquin star in the story of a family dealing with a sister’s death during a cross-country trip to collect her belongings.
When she isn’t working, Nixon lives in New York with her wife, Christine Marinoni. They are parents of a fiveyear-old son, Max, and Nixon also has two children with her ex-boyfriend, teacher Danny Mozes: 20-year-old Samantha and 15-year-old Charles.
She has been an outspoken advocate for various liberal causes, but insisted that otherwise she and Marinoni keep to themselves.
“We lead a really quiet life, staying off social media,” she said. “All these people with their heads buried in devices. You never look up!”
Nixon survived a bout with breast cancer in the 2000s, and she turned 50 in 2016. Many actresses find that a difficult age, but she insisted that she enjoys it.
“You really know yourself at this age, which is refreshing,” Nixon said. “I embrace each year.”
After a career of more than 40 years, Nixon added, she also still loves her work.
That came home to her on her first day on the set of A
Quiet Passion, which was shot in Belgium.
“I was so tired from the jet lag,” Nixon recalled, “and went to the set only to be handed a list of poems we were going to record that day to play under certain scenes. We did a random scratch track in the room that would serve as the living room of Emily Dickinson’s house.
“I remember looking around and thinking, ‘Life is really interesting’.”