Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 14, 1993 TAG: 9305140033
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LISA ANDERSON KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
For 15 years, nobody in New York -- not casting agents, producers, writers nor directors -- seemed able to divine the professional promise in Mercedes Ruehl. Even the actress herself began to wonder as she wandered between waitress jobs and auditions. Most people might have given up. She almost did.
"Well, if you can say the first real impulse to become a performer started when I was 4 and the first real breakthrough started in my early 30s, well, that was a long time to live with a dream," says the 40-something Ruehl, with a wry shrug.
But that was eight years, 10 films, a Tony Award and one golden Oscar statuette ago -- and nobody in Hollywood or New York, not even the pitilessly self-scrutinizing Mercedes Ruehl, wonders about her potential now.
A tall, willowy woman with a tousle of short dark hair, large brown eyes and a low, husky voice, Ruehl sits sipping mineral water in a lounge at the Rihga Royal Hotel here.
She has just endured a relentlessly scheduled, daylong meeting with a parade of reporters, arranged by Columbia Pictures to promote the film version of Neil Simon's Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Lost In Yonkers." Co-starring with Irene Worth and Richard Dreyfuss, Ruehl re-creates her Tony Award-winning role as Aunt Bella in the movie, which opens today at the Salem Valley 8.
It's cocktail time and she should be exhausted and cranky. But, cool, composed and elegantly turned-out in a pale sage Calvin Klein pantsuit, she actually seems happy, at least for the moment, to pay the price of success.
From the cyclonic fury of Connie Russo in 1988's "Married to the Mob" to her poignant, Oscar-winning performance as the tough, tender Anne Napolitano in 1991's "The Fisher King," Ruehl has played a spectacular game of catch-up.
In June, she will appear in Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Last Action Hero," before beginning a stint on the stage here as the female lead in Jon Robin Baitz's two-character play "Three Hotels."
So, what took so long?
"I don't know. Readiness is all. I think it's safe to say I wasn't ready," she says, slowly. Clearly, it is something she's thought about a great deal.
Born into an Irish-Spanish family in New York City, Ruehl is the daughter of a retired FBI agent father and schoolteacher mother. The family, which traveled with her father's job from Pennsylvania to Indiana to New Jersey, finally settled in Silver Spring, Md., when Ruehl was 8 years old.
She spent her elementary and high-school years in Catholic girls' schools before entering the College of New Rochelle, a Catholic women's college in suburban New York, where she graduated with a degree in English literature and a passion for acting.
From there, it was on to Manhattan, where she hoped to find an acting job and wound up getting a big dose of culture shock. "I think I was very afraid in my early years in New York," says Ruehl, who believes her rather sheltered, all-girls education might have had something to do with this. Nothing had prepared her for the assaults the city and her chosen career would make on her sense of self and identity.
"To really be a focused performer, you really have to know who you are, you have to have something to say, you have to be prepared to say it, you have to know who you are as a woman, you have to know what you are sexually -- you have to have some kind of sense of critical masshood about yourself," she says firmly.
She began to develop that sense through years in regional repertory theater and honed it further in therapy.
"And it took me until I was about 32 to say, `OK, I'm ready now to face the world with this identity, this modus operandi.' That was just my timing on it," she says, ending with a wide smile and a wave of her hands that seems to dismiss this as a neat explanation of those 15 struggling years.
So, she doesn't blame anyone else's shortsightedness, muddle-mindedness or otherwise dim-wittedness for blocking her career?
The short answer is "No." The longer answer launches her on a brief socio-cultural discourse. "Obviously, there are influences. The fact that we're going through a period in film in America where the great roles of the '30s and '40s are not being written for women. Does that victimize me to a certain degree? Yes.
"Is it a male-oriented society? Yes. Are women considered secondary citizens? Yes. Did I have a hard time getting in the door because I was not perhaps an outrageous, timeless beauty who could get in any door by just standing there? Yes," she says crisply.
"So, fine. After you've toted up all the little reasons you're a victim, I think you finally have to say, this is all unfortunate but everybody's got some obstacles in life and how do I begin to take responsibility for what I can do and get out there and start doing it.
"I was really ready. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. When you're ready, things do happen."
But the most magical role, perhaps, came with her casting in 1991 as Aunt Bella, the sweet, funny, frustrated and sadly addled girl-woman in "Lost in Yonkers."
Set in the New York suburb of Yonkers in 1942, it is the story of two young, motherless boys who go to live with their tough, unsentimental, Jewish grandmother and their eccentric, somewhat backward, spinster aunt, Bella.
Ruehl won a Tony for her portrayal of Bella and, she says, couldn't resist the opportunity to translate her to film.
After all, it was Ruehl's role. "Yes," she says, "after I figured out who she was -- after I figured out she was me -- I didn't want anybody else to play her."
Asked to explain Bella, Ruehl smiles. "Friends who know me very well have told me that there's more of me in this character than in anything else I've done.
"There is an eagerness wedded to something fearful and cautious wedded to a vulnerability that is both a handicap and a strength at the same time.
"And I don't know Neil [Simon] very well, but from what I've perceived, these are all ways you could describe Neil, too," she adds. "So, I think that somehow this character is very close to his heart. It's certainly very close to something that lives in my heart."
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by CNB