Breaking barriers Broadway star tackles ageism and sexuality in Netflix series By: Randall King  Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, Apr. 29, 2020

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/04/2020 (1738 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Patti LuPone. Broadway superstar. Double Tony Award winner for Evita (1979) and the 2008 Broadway revival of Gypsy. Grammy winner.

Hockey fan.

That latter point is worth touching on, if one is looking for a link with Winnipeg prior to an interview with a theatre legend.

“I love hockey, I certainly do,” she says. When asked about the Jets, she responds: “Have they ever played the New York Rangers?”

Yes.

“Well then I’ve seen the Jets play.”

LuPone is speaking on the phone from her home in Connecticut, where she is sitting out the pandemic on a property that boasts its own “Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Swimming Pool,” named for the composer from whom LuPone won a substantial settlement after a troublesome engagement on his musical Sunset Boulevard.

On May 1, LuPone will be in Sunset territory again as an older woman consorting with a younger lover on the Netflix series Hollywood, set in the years after the Second World War. Her character, Avis Amberg, the estranged wife of a studio magnate, finds sexual consolation from stud-for-hire Jack Costello (David Corenswet) in the first of the series’ seven episodes.

In one scene, Avis lets her guard down with Jack, admitting she too had wanted to become a movie star but was told she was too Jewish-looking.

Born in Long Island, N.Y., LuPone is of Italian ancestry; her grandparents emigrated to America from Sicily and Abruzzo. Still, she could understand Avis’s feeling of rejection. In her 2010 book Patti LuPone: A Memoir, she describes coming off her Tony Award-winning performance in Evita: “People think that if you have a success in a Broadway show, the doors open up, that it’s a stepping stone to Hollywood,” she wrote. “Not in my case.”

Asked if she could relate to her character’s plight, she says: “I actually did, even before Evita happened.

“I just didn’t have the Hollywood face at the time,” she says. “My nose is too big. My lips are too big. I have dark hair and I’m not a pert blond.

“And so I did feel as though I was rejected on the way I looked a lot when I was a kid,” she says. “It is a profession of rejection, but it’s hard not to take it personally. I think a lot of it had to do with the way I looked. I look more European than I look American.”

In Hollywood, LuPone’s look is as fabulous as it gets, reflecting the outré opulence of glamour in Hollywood’s Golden Age. LuPone may be known for her soaring mezzo-soprano voice and her intense acting style, but wearing clothes is one of her more unsung skill sets. In fact, according to her memoir, she was cast in a supporting role — Dan Aykroyd’s “clothes horse” sister — in Driving Miss Daisy pretty much exclusively on that basis.

“I do wear costumes well. My body is built for costumes,” she says. “And they were very happy because my character is the one who has the money to buy those clothes. I’m the one who is able to wear the jewels, the hats, and the furs, and I could not have been happier.

“I want to wear the costumes,” she says. “You don’t want costumes to wear you. They are pretty much a part of your character and it helps form and (bring) elegance to the woman.”

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While LuPone has done much work in front of cameras, her principal medium is the stage. She has had a long career to observe the divide between the East Coast theatre scene and the West Coast movie scene.

In the latter, homosexuality has long been treated as a shameful secret, in contrast with the comparatively liberated realm of stage. That secrecy is a key component of the series Hollywood, which features a reality-based subplot in which the young gay actor Roy Scherer (Jake Picking) falls into the sphere of notorious talent agent Henry Willson (Jim Parsons) to emerge as leading man Rock Hudson.

LuPone says Hollywood was more concerned with creating illusion around its stable of movie stars.

“If the studio system is creating a star, they are not going to create a homosexual star. They’re going to create a heterosexual star,” she says. “They’re going to create somebody who is manly, that men are not threatened by and sexy enough for women to fall in love with.

“I think there’s still a little bit of that left: ‘Don’t be so gay!’ “

The series was created by Ryan Murphy, a writer-producer (Glee, American Horror Story) who has had a successful career busting taboos. For the purposes of this show, and LuPone’s part in it, that involved tackling ageism and sexuality. The show has quite a few sex scenes, and they include LuPone, who turned 71 last week.

“I was thrilled that I had them,” she says, laughing.

“I’m only sorry that they cut the sex scene out with Dylan,” she says, referring to Dylan McDermott, who plays the chief stud at a Hollywood service station that supplied handsome young men to clients of either gender.

While LuPone has never found sex scenes especially uncomfortable to film, she says the process is totally untitillating.

“I remember we were on location and after, I got in the van with Dylan and I went, ‘That was strangely unsexy.’

“And Dylan is a sexy guy. But it’s not sexy. It may be sexy for the first kiss but it’s not sexy at all,” she says. “It’s a pity.”

And with that, the interview is done.

“Thank you,” LuPone says. “And go, Jets.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing