
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 30, 1991                   TAG: 9103300096
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By MICHAEL MILLS COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SPACEK COULDN'T RESIST LATEST ROLE

Seeing Sissy Spacek in "The Long Walk Home," a civil-rights drama playing at Tanglewood Mall Cinemas in Roanoke, is like spying a long-lost friend across the room at a party. You want to run up to her and exclaim, "Where have you been!"

That's because she hasn't made a movie since 1986, the year "Crimes of the Heart" earned her a fifth Oscar nomination. (She won for her 1980 portrayal of Loretta Lynn in "Coal Miner's Daughter.")

For part of that five-year period, she and husband Jack Fisk, who directed her in "Raggedy Man" and "Violets Are Blue," were expanding their family. She also devoted time to political causes, such as lobbying for restrictions on uranium mining in the Charlottesville area, where she, Fisk and their daughters (ages 8 and 2) live on a farm.

But for a number of those years, says Spacek, "I was looking for a project I wanted to do." Like other actresses of her generation - Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Diane Keaton - the 40-year-old Texan knows there's a scarcity of good parts for women of a certain age.

"It's hard for us girls!" she says and laughs. "There are so many of us - and we love that there are - but most roles are written for the ingenue, and we've all played that to the hilt. Even if we could, I don't think we have any interest in doing that anymore."

"The Long Walk Home" offered a role she couldn't resist. As Miriam Thompson, Spacek plays an upper-middle-class wife and mother in Montgomery, Ala., who gets involved with the black community's famous 1955 boycott of the city's segregated bus system.

Miriam's transformation from complacent socialite into political activist takes place gradually, spurred by the changes in her perception of her maid, Odessa Cotter (Whoopi Goldberg). At first, Miriam offers to drive Odessa, who supports the boycott, across town simply because she wants her maid at work on time. Eventually, she volunteers for the car pool that helps blacks get around without depending on buses.

"I love that Miriam was relatively unsympathetic, and I also like that she changes. She'd always thought of Odessa as just an employee. She hadn't thought of her as a woman, as a mother, as a wife - not until she starts to spend more time with her and to think of her in different terms.

"I think that it wasn't until she went out on a limb that she really started to think on her own, period. I don't think it was easy to be a woman in the '50s in the South."

The project was also a natural for Spacek because, like many of her other movies, it deals with political and social issues. In the 1982 drama "Missing," she played a woman trying to cut through bureaucratic red tape to find her husband in an unstable Latin American country. "The River," in 1984, was one of that year's save-the-farm films. And in 1985's "Marie," she starred as a Tennessee woman out to expose corruption in the state's prison system.

"I've just been real fortunate to have found wonderful characters in projects that happen to be political and happen to be about things that I believe in. I always have been drawn to dramas, things that are controversial."

by CNB