Christine Lahti, a formidable, versatile talent across several decades and performance platforms and one of the true acting ringers of her generation, experienced a particular moment of fame destined to follow her around forever.
It was enough, in fact, to warrant a chapter in Lahti’s forthcoming memoir “True Stories from an Unreliable Witness: A Feminist Coming of Age,” available April 4.
In brief: She was finishing up in the ladies’ room when someone told her she’d just won a Golden Globe for “Chicago Hope.” She survived the embarrassment, and it immediately qualified as one of the more charming impromptu speeches in the history of awards shows.
Lahti, who turns 68 in April, is back in Chicago this month filming a Fox TV pilot based on “Gone Baby Gone” (title to be determined, along with the pilot’s series pickup prospects). In her career, the Birmingham, Mich., native has cast a wide net, and won wide respect for her dramatic and comic chops.
Her first Oscar nomination came for her droll turn as one of the riveters working the line in Jonathan Demme’s WWII romance “Swing Shift” (1984). The release version of that picture was put together without Demme’s input or approval; star Goldie Hawn wanted to ensure a certain kind of star vehicle, and Demme’s cut (which circulates here and there, illegally) reportedly is a different, more interesting ensemble affair, with Lahti’s performance significantly enhanced.
The 1987 Bill Forsyth adaptation of Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” was another early highlight in Lahti’s career. She and Forsyth introduced a gorgeous print of the film 10 years ago at Ebertfest in Champaign. “That was a lovely event,” she says by phone from LA. “It’s one of the best films I’ve ever been a part of.”
In her memoir, she writes of an upbringing with five siblings, a familial priority of proper appearances and a lid on unpleasant emotions. As she writes in the essay “Hidden”: “In our family you were expected to be happy. Being quiet was acceptable, too, but if you were downhearted, you were expected to go to your room and wait it out.”
This wasn’t easy for a “born drama queen,” as Lahti describes herself. “Writing about the denial we experienced in my family growing up, that was cathartic,” she says. “We didn’t really encourage any emotion except joy. You could be quiet; you could shut up and be invisible. That was OK. But anything beyond that, any anger or pain, although certainly expressed, was not welcomed. And because of that, my husband and I made a conscious effort to raise our children in a very different way. If you have a feeling, it should be expressed. And it’s OK to be mad; it’s not OK to be mean, but your anger, your tears, help us get to know who you are.”
Lahti has been married to veteran TV director Thomas Schlamme since 1983. In the memoir she writes of career highs and lows, as well as the occasional temptation borne of being paid to make out with a co-star on camera.
Memories of her often difficult childhood and two of her siblings’ struggles with mental health issues required a more fearless attack than she initially wanted to explore.
“My challenge,” she says, “was to always go deeper, and be more honest, and to write it how I’d really say it. In some ways I’d been hiding behind other people’s words my entire career.” One sister’s suicide, and a physically abusive brother and subsequent lifelong struggles enter into the essays, movingly.
Lahti performed some of them while in progress as stage monologues, script in hand, in small-group settings either in LA or New York. “As an actress I’d been developing work with writers for so long, I knew how to gauge an audience, and I knew when I’d lost the audience, or when I was overwriting something. Cut, cut, cut. I learned how to be more sparse in my writing. Always show, don’t tell. Whenever I read a script as an actress, if I see characters explaining how they’re feeling, rather than just expressing something or being specific about what they want, it feels flabby. So cut it!”
In “True Stories from an Unreliable Witness,” Lahti recounts various and all-too-common experiences with sexual harassment of all sorts. Her memories of 1960s college life portray a young woman entering college years as a clone of her mother, and leaving them a child of the counterculture.
Her feelings about what’s afoot in the culture today, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein revelations and the entire #MeToo movement, are all over the memoir.
“I have been dreaming about this moment, this reckoning, my entire life,” she says. “When Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas, it was the first time I heard the phrase ‘sexual harassment,’ and she put a name to it. I was riveted watching those trials. I thought that would be the beginning of something. Things stagnated for a while.
“But now we have this. And I do feel it’s different. I feel women aren’t going to put up with it anymore, and that men are going to be more mindful. … I think there are a lot of men who are nervous right now. And rightfully so. And a lot of women are being heard, and believed, for the first time. I want to be cautiously optimistic, because I’ve seen these things come and go, but I feel a momentum right now.
“And I hope the next wave will be about the ageism that affects women in Hollywood basically after 40, although it gets tougher in your 50s and 60s. There are basically no parts. And things will change only when more women are making the decisions about what stories are going to be told, what movies are going to be made, what plays are going to be produced. …
So here’s hoping.”
Christine Lahti and Michael Phillips in conversation at 1 p.m. April 12 at the Book Stall in Winnetka, 811 Elm St.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
mjphillips@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
