Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 29, 1995 TAG: 9505020020
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL CARTER N.Y. TIMES NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
``I heard he was doing a book about Calamity Jane,'' Huston said. ``I was instantly interested.''
How could she not be? Huston added. After all, McMurtry had written ``Lonesome Dove,'' the book that became the most successful television miniseries in recent years, and she considered it a ``a real coup in my career'' to have been included in its cast.
But this opportunity seemed, if anything, even better. ``I mean, Calamity Jane!'' Huston said. ``I thought, this is right up my alley. I love to ride; I love the outdoors; I love westerns.''
The result, to be seen on Sunday and Monday nights (at 9 on WDBJ-Channel 7), is an epic of the last days of the American West, in which Huston plays Calamity Jane, the legendary Army scout, bullwhacker, mule-skinner and Wild West show performer.
Over four hours and locations ranging from Santa Fe, N.M., to Bath, England, Huston takes Calam, as she calls her, through a near miss with the doomed command of Gen. George Armstrong Custer, through an equally doomed romance with Wild Bill Hickok, to a painful parting with a baby daughter she felt she could not care for, to adventures with mythic Western figures like Buffalo Bill Cody, Sitting Bull and Annie Oakley, and finally to a trip to England with Cody's famous Wild West Show to perform for Queen Victoria.
The cast includes Melanie Griffith as Jane's best friend, Dora DuFran, a madam with a strong romantic bent; Jack Palance as Calamity's seedy trail partner, Bartle Bone; Sam Elliott as Hickok; and Peter Coyote as Buffalo Bill.
Calamity Jane is precisely the kind of huge, dense, demanding, interesting starring role that Huston said she and other experienced actresses of her generation almost never encounter in theatrical films.
``Where are those parts?'' she asked. She was referring specifically to characters like Maerose Prizzi, the Mafia princess of the 1985 film ``Prizzi's Honor,'' and Lilly Dillon, the scheming and ultimately tragic gambler and gangster of ``The Grifters.''
Lilly remains, quite literally, close to Huston's heart on a cloudy April afternoon in the Beverly Hills office of her publicist. Huston, tall and striking in a way that attests to her earlier career as a model, is wearing faded jeans perfectly matched with a jeans jacket that bears the name Lilly in red script right over her heart. On the back of the jacket in much larger letters is ``The Grifters.''
She's also wearing what look like snakeskin cowboy boots, much fancier than anything Calamity Jane would have come by, even if she could have plugged a rattler on the prairie - which would have been unlikely.
``She wasn't much of a shot,'' Huston said. ``She swore and drank like a fish and pretty much lived like a man.''
McMurtry is an unabashed admirer of Huston. ``I think she's just wonderful in the role,'' he said in a telephone interview. ``She basically carries the picture.''
Huston researched the real Calamity Jane but was able to discover far less than McMurtry was able to imagine.
``It's not a sure thing that she knew Buffalo Bill,'' Huston said. ``She definitely knew Hickok and asked to be buried next to him.''
Because she is identified with what she called ``sophisticated parts,'' the physical challenge of ``Buffalo Girls'' was additionally appealing. ``I've heard people say that this was an unusual role for me, that it must be a very big jump,'' Huston said. ``But in a way it was more natural for me than a lot of other roles I've played.''
One reason, she said, is her background. Not her famous show-business background as the daughter of film director John Huston and granddaughter of actor Walter Huston. (In truth, she said, ``My father did not direct many westerns. They were not his signature stuff.'')
Rather, she was referring to her upbringing in the west of Ireland, a place, she said, that ``has a soft spot for the American West.'' Indeed, she added, ``Every boy who grew up there wanted to be a cowboy.''
Huston wanted to be an actress. ``I always wanted that, from the time I was really small. I wasn't particularly encouraged.'' Still, when she was just 15, her father took the risky step (for both of them, as it turned out) of casting her in the lead role in a 1968 film called ``A Walk With Love and Death.''
The movie was not successful, and both of them were excoriated by critics charging nepotism.
Huston was put off movies for more than a decade. Instead, she modeled. ``I don't know why it was necessary to be in the public eye physically, but it was,'' she said. ``Maybe I needed to prove something.''
When she finally returned to acting, she did only one small film before she was once again paired with John Huston on ``Prizzi's Honor.''
``It was very intimidating to come back and work with my father,'' she said. ``I was not only working with him; I was working with Jack Nicholson, who I was living with at the time. I was very daunted and very afraid.''
But the role made her a movie star. She won the Academy Award for best supporting actress.
After numerous other films, including Woody Allen's ``Crimes and Misdemeanors'' and two trips with the ``Addams Family,'' Huston said the well of intriguing scripts has grown appallingly dry.
``There were maybe four female parts all last year,'' Huston said. One was ``Death and the Maiden,'' which she said she considered. But other choices simply weren't there.
``Meg Ryan is adorable, but she's not the only actress working in America,'' Huston said. ``I mean, this is the year when Meryl Streep had to do `The River Wild.' They're trying to make Meryl Streep an action hero? She's a great actress.''
The source of the problem is not hard to identify, Huston said: ``There's not a lot of the human factor in movies anymore. It's all explosions -and mostly male explosions. Most of what I read now is repeats of past successes. Things out of the Italian-American genre of `Prizzi.' Maybe it's happening because we don't have enough female writers, or men aren't writing for women, or no one's interested in writing anymore.''
She qualified those points: no one in movies. ``Television is much better to women than movies,'' Huston said. And that is the reason she had no hesitation about returning to television for a second journey with Larry McMurtry.
Will she be back on television? Most likely, she said, ``and I think you'll see other actresses turning to television as well.''
by CNB