Staying Fit
Finally! At 71, Mary Kay Place is the lead of a movie: writer-director Kent Jones’ Tribeca Film Festival award winner Diane. Over the decades, Place has been nominated for a writing Emmy for M*A*S*H, earned an acting Emmy as well as a Grammy nomination for playing country singer Loretta Haggers on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, plus received another Emmy nomination for Big Love. In Diane, she channels a rural Massachusetts mother of an opioid-addicted son. Diane’s life is a relentless series of errands that involve laundry and casseroles and visiting her terminally ill cousin. This small-life character study has big resonance, like a Gena Rowlands-John Cassavetes drama from the 1970s.
Place doesn’t just remind you of such screen legends; she’s been an important figure ever since she drove her VW from her hometown of Tulsa to Hollywood and got discovered by Norman Lear, who first cast her in a 1973 episode of All in the Family. Her breakout movie role was Meg the lawyer in The Big Chill, who was trying to have a baby with William Hurt's character, and she’s done great work in numerous films and shows: Bound for Glory, Being John Malkovich, Citizen Ruth, The West Wing, Grey’s Anatomy, Grace and Frankie, Black-ish. The diminutive singer with the throaty laugh hopped on the phone with AARP, her familiar Oklahoma twang sounding like the plain-spoken gal she's been playing on-screen in various incarnations for nearly 50 years.
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Diane is a character at an emotional crossroads. How would you describe her?
She's a woman who lives to serve others because she's been raised in that tradition. That's what women in her community do when they don't have a job or a career. They serve others with casseroles. She busies herself with a list of to-do's. As her family dies off, and the movie progresses, she becomes more reflective and starts to develop an inner life. She considers what she wants because she's discovered that life is shorter than you think.
The universality of this movie, and how it resonated from Czechoslovakia to South America to my hometown of Tulsa, really stunned me.
It's ironic that you were the woman most concerned with her biological clock in 1983’s The Big Chill, the first big hit for boomers about aging. How does it feel looking back on that moment?
What I learned through doing that part is that I didn't have that biological clock. It was OK if I didn't have a child. I don't know if I knew that prior to playing Meg. If this doesn't happen in a natural way — my parents were together 60 years and true companions. All these other ways don't feel right to me. Not that I judge other friends if they use a sperm donor or in vitro but, by playing this part, I knew in my bones and my heart that it was OK if I didn't have a child. Later, I thought, I think I've had six children and a needy husband in a past life. I wanted to stand up on my own two feet this time around for me.
Before The Big Chill, you rejected an offer to write on the first season of Saturday Night Live. Why?
