'American Film Magazine'

May 1990

“Acting Up A Storm”
Elizabeth Perkins

By: Robert Seidenberg

*Transcribed By This Website

It doesn’t take Einstein to notice that Elizabeth Perkins is out of place in her first few films. It’s a simple case of the good-actor/bad-movie syndrome, with Perkins adding a touch of class to the otherwise forgettable Sweet Heart’s Dance, From the Hip and About Last Night…

In the splendid Big, she finally landed a role to suit her abilities. But Tom Hanks is the one who gets to play around with his age, when Perkins’ looks and demeanor fairly beg for the chance to move back in time. There’s something about her that’s old-fashioned. You can picture her as the femme fatale in some classic, shadow-drenched film noir or as the wise-cracking dame in a screwball comedy. Perhaps that’s why she seems most at home in Alan Rudolph’s new Love At Large, a Raymond Chandler-esque tale of romance between two bungling detectives, which, like most Rudolph films, has the feel of another time.

With the thick eyebrows and expressive brown eyes, Perkins has a gutsy 1940’s style. She’s the down-to-earth girl next door who becomes more attractive the more you get to know her. Character, intelligence and a basic goodness enhance her looks. Imagine a 1990’s version of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday and you’ve got a bead on the kind of spell she casts – smart, classy, spunky, tough and independent, yet vulnerable.

In most of her early films, Perkins’ characters hide their emotions behind a cool veneer. You’d be hard-pressed to consider her wisecracking Joan Gunther in About Last Night… as anything other than bitter and possessive. But rather than haphazard, one-dimensional portrait of a bitch, Perkins convincingly show’s how Joan’s anger stems from the loneliness and frustration of a woman caught among the wolves of Chicago’s singles scene.

In Sweet Heart’s Dance, Perkins’ grade school teacher Adie Nims hides behind verbal smoke screens. When her goofy boyfriend, Sam Manners (Jeff Daniels), proposes, she quickly brushes him off: “I believe that life is an endless highway,” she says, laughing nervously. “And what I am is a bus, and I’m chuggin’ down the highway and boys – and men – climb on me, and they get off and I keep going. And I keep thinking, someday I’m gonna have to let someone sit up front with me and look through my window and share my ride.” Soon thereafter, however, she chucks her schoolbooks into the backseat to make room for her dufus, leaving us to wonder why the partners this grade-A woman ends up with always seem like booby prizes. Appropriately, Perkins’ extremes in Big are even greater, as her Susan Lawrence transforms from an uptight marketing executive into Josh Baskin’s (Tom Hanks) sexy, generous lover. At first, she falls for Josh so she can ride his coattails to the top, but then his youthful exuberance and innocence win her over. On their memorable first date, Susan bounces vigorously on Josh’s trampoline wearing a short black evening dress.

In Love At Large, Perkins’ Stella Wynkowski is a hard-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside private eye who resists the advances of frog-voiced detective Harry Dobbs (Tom Berenger). She keeps her emotions locked behind bonded-steel armor but occasionally lets rip a revealing nugget like, “The one in love always waits.” Fortunately, when stripped of her protective shell this time around, Perkins finds herself face-to-face with a good guy.

Perkins often engages in what Vanity Fair’s Stephen Schiff dubs “the Perkins Melt”- from toughie to softie. It’s her way of making characters real. “Nobody is just a hard-ass,” says Perkins, dressed in head-to-toe black and white, save a swath of red lipstick. “There is never a person who is just an asshole or just evil. No matter what Bette Davis was doing there was always a moment you saw her character unsure of herself. All of her women, whenever they were hard, there was always that moment when she wasn’t sure if hard was the best way to be. What gives that toughness so much more strength is the weakness. That’s what makes it so much more interesting.”

That’s also what makes Perkins alluring to men and women alike. Men like her combination of brains, beauty and brassiness. For those exact reasons, women consider her worthy of emulation. Plus, she’s not going to trade her female friends up the river just so she can land a guy. She invests a lot in her same-sex friendships. In Love At Large, for instance, she risks her job and her life to rush to the aid of a browbeaten wife. Her reason for consoling a bawling Kate Capshaw is simple: “I’m a woman,” she explains sympathetically.

Perkins, who turns 30 this November, hasn’t yet had a chance to truly strut her stuff. Thankfully, meatier roles lie ahead. Her first top billing, a black comedy called Enid Is Sleeping, is completed, but it’s stuck in Vestron hell, awaiting purchase by a distributor. And this fall will se the release of a Barry Levinson’s Avalon, in which Perkins plays the mother of a first-generation immigrant family in Baltimore. Born in Queens, New York, to a concert-pianist mother and writer-editor father, Perkins grew up in her grandmother’s farmhouse outside of Brattleboro, Vermont. After high school, she studied at Chicago’s Goodman School of Drama before moving to New York, where she worked off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons and the Ensemble Studio Theater. Her big break came when she landed a lead in the Broadway production of Brighton Beach Memoirs. Less than two years later, she was in the movies.

In person, Perkins can be intimidating. She has definite opinions and makes no bones about expressing them. Some interpret that as being “difficult.” “A few people have heard that I was very demanding in terms of what I want,” she says, “so I’ve become ‘hard to work with.’ But that’s really unfair. All you’re doing is trying to put in your creative input so you’re not just flouncing around like some bimbo. It’s very frustrating because I’m not a robot. You don’t turn me on and I do my little job, and you shut me off and put me in my trailer. That’s not the way I operate. If that’s the kind of actress you want, then you shouldn’t cast me.”

[ Back To The Main Page ]