Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 6, 1993 TAG: 9311090249
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
``I'd read a biography of her about 10 years ago,'' she said, ``but like most things, my recollection of actually what had happened to her had dimmed, to say the least. When I read the script, I thought, `This is beautiful love story, an extraordinary story of this very complicated woman.'
``So then I launched into very heavy research and preparation. I was traveling around with a suitcase of Fitzgerald's novels and writings.''
Among them were ``The Last Tycoon,'' ``Tender is the Night,'' ``This Side of Paradise,'' ``The Great Gatsby'' and ``The Beautiful and the Damned,'' all built on the world of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Richardson, who stars with Timothy Hutton, would have to play the flamboyant Zelda from her teen years in Alabama during the summer of 1918, when she meets the soldier who wants to become a writer, through their marriage, the birth of a daughter and finally her confinement in a mental institution by her mid-30s.
But ``Zelda'' is not a definitive biography, and it did not have the cooperation of the Fitzgeralds' daughter, Richardson said.
``You can't cover everything,'' she said. ``You have to decide which part of the story you are telling. This is story of this young woman and her deterioration and the love story and what effectively ended the love story.''
Filmed in Montreal, ``Zelda'' was not the easiest movie to make, she said. Richardson had to dance - Zelda Fitzgerald had dreams of becoming a professional ballet dancer - and she had to go mad and present a credible Alabama accent.
The Southern accent was not the most difficult task, however.
``It was a very tough movie to work because of the nature of the characters, and what happened to them and the added pressure of the dancing,'' Richardson said. ``The dancing raised the level of the intensity - being in almost every scene, one minute young and happy and carefree and dancing, and one moment on the verge of a breakdown.''
Zelda Sayre, precocious and headstrong daughter of well-to-do parents, was blessed with beauty that made her the belle of Montgomery. At a dance she met then-soldier Fitzgerald, and they saw themselves in each other: fun-loving, romantic, audacious people, self-important, self-indulgent, good-looking and perfectly matched.
They both glittered in a world that reflected them, pampered with almost non-stop attention from the friends who formed their coterie. They lived in chic New York hotels and houses in France, surrounded by other expatriates, and the alcohol never stopped flowing.
When their purse was nearly empty, as it often was, Fitzgerald simply looked into their lives to write another story, another book and as a last resort, another movie script.
But the pairing proved to be disastrous in the end. Zelda, who married at 19, had little self-discipline and few outlets for her energy, intelligence and talents. She tried painting and writing and then took up ballet, which in the film pushes her into another, darker world.
Richardson thinks the intensity that ballet required ``was detrimental. Nothing requires more hard work than the ballet. She put in a lot of work, but she took it up too late. She became totally obsessed by it to the exclusion of everything else, to the detriment of her health.''
Richardson, daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson, studied ballet when she was small and did some jazz dancing in a stage musical, ``but for the film, I had to train very hard and become however good I could be in two months.''
As the Jazz Age began to fade, Zelda Fitzgerald, now the mother of a small daughter called Scottie, found little in life for herself. Even her husband, when he was caught up in his writing, could not spend all his time with her. And so her fragile personality began to unravel.
``I think there was always a level of instability there,'' said Richardson. ``She was a very smart, creative and talented woman who was way ahead of her time, but she didn't have the discipline and avenues down which to channel her energy.
``When the bubble burst of her champagne life with Scott, it was like waking up with a very bad hangover. It wasn't enough for her to be his muse and glorious appendage. And I think it was that level of emptiness and feeling of low self-esteem that drove her over the edge.''
by CNB