Anne Meara, who died on Saturday at 85, was best known as a comedian, half of Stiller and Meara, her husband being Jerry Stiller.
She was also a trained actress, skillful in both comedy and drama. My favorite of her screen appearances was as Wilma, a woman hitting middle age, in the wonderful “Lovers and Other Strangers” from 1970.
In her 60s, she turned her attention to playwriting, producing one of the sharpest (if underrated) comedies of the 1990s — “After-Play.”
Set in a chic restaurant of the era (probably Orso), “After-Play” centers on two aging showbiz couples who, after attending the play everybody in New York is talking about, spend the evening drinking martinis and opening old wounds.
“My body parts are disintegrating and my children are candidates for the Hitler Youth,” the most acid-tongued character says of her lot in life.
I liked the play a lot and got to know Brooklyn-born Meara at the time. When I interviewed her, Meara told me the play was the result of a bout of stage fright she experienced in a 1993 Broadway production of “Anna Christie.”
“I just couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “I would arrive at the theater two hours before curtain and sit in my dressing room terrified that I was going to screw up. So I decided to focus on playwriting, and after about a year I completed ‘After-Play.’ ”
Rue McClanahan and Barbara Barrie were in the original cast, but when McClanahan had to leave to work on a movie, Meara, with the help of her therapist, mustered the courage to take over the role.
Stiller joined the show, too, though he had to duck out after a few weeks for hip-replacement surgery.
“He’s mending nicely,” Meara said, when I called to check on him.
Stiller yelled from the kitchen: “I’m dancing on one crutch!”
I asked Meara what she thought triggered the stage fright.
“Personal issues I never dealt with in my childhood,” she said. Then she added: “The death of my mother by her own hand when I was 11 — I think that had a lot to do with it.”
Her mother always said Meara looked like Deanna Durbin, which got her daughter dreaming of being a movie star one day.
Things seemed fine in the Meara household until her mother had a hysterectomy. Then she spiraled into a depression — “which today could be taken care of with therapy or Prozac,” Meara said — and killed herself.
Meara never spoke to her father about her mother’s suicide, something she came to regret later in life.
“If you have any questions of your parents, you’d better ask them now,” she told me. “Because sooner or later they are going to end up in the boneyard, and you’ll spend the rest of your life in the dark.”
Our conversation wasn’t a complete downer, however.
She told me Stiller liked her on their first date because she picked up the check.
“He also says I stole the spoon, which I probably did because it matched the set I had at home from other cafeteria visits,” she said.