Acting for America: Movie Stars of the 1980s

Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek: Country Girls

57 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 3 Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek Country Girls WILLIAM BROWN Scholarship on 1980s cinema regularly considers Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek in the same breath (Prince, Pot of Gold 177; Palmer 273). Molly Haskell consistently puts the two side by side, characterizing them (with Sally Field) as “country women who wear spunk the way Sylvester Stallone sports muscles . . . [and as female] candidates for canonization , superior to everyone else on the screen and remote from the rest of us” (From Reverence 372–73). Haskell notes that if Jane Fonda, Barbra Coal Miner’s Daughter. Copyright Universal Pictures, 1980. Frances. Copyright Brooksfilms/EMI Films, 1982. Streisand, and Goldie Hawn were the decade’s most bankable female stars, “at a slightly lower rung of bankability, Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek have been able to initiate and develop smaller projects” (376), before noting that they provided an alternative to the “kiddie movies and special effects superspectacles ” typical of the 1980s, superspectacles that may even have enabled their stardom by making enough profit to help fund smaller projects (398). Reasons for the pairing of these two actresses are several. First, both had significant roles as popular female country singers in two of the decade’s most noted music biopics, Spacek as Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) and Lange as Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams (1985). Second, both figured prominently in a cycle of films sometimes referred to as the “Dust Bowl Trilogy ” (Emerson and Pfaff 136), three films released in 1984 that dealt with the plight of small farm owners: two set in contemporary times, Country (Lange) and The River (Spacek), and a third set during the Depression, Places in the Heart (which starred Sally Field). A fourth film, The Dollmaker, starring Jane Fonda, which was made for television that same year, is sometimes included in this cycle (Palmer 252–53), not least because Fonda spoke before Congress in 1985, along with Lange and Spacek, in order to raise awareness of the 1980s “farm crisis,” which saw the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) foreclose on numerous small farms around the country, an event that in turn spurred the formation of Farm Aid, musical concerts staged as bene- fits for family farms (Bonnen 193–94; Dyer, “Rural” 54–57; Palmer 246–54; Prince, Pot of Gold 314; Whillock 27–31). Lange and Spacek’s joint appearance before Congress was followed by their first joint appearance in a film, Crimes of the Heart (1986), in which they play two of three sisters reunited in their hometown after one of them, Babe (Spacek), is arrested for shooting her husband (the third sister is played by Diane Keaton). In addition to their roles as country singers, farmwomen, and screen sisters , Spacek and Lange also have further similarities. Besides earning high wages, both have a stated antipathy toward Hollywood in that neither has lived there except temporarily and for professional reasons, each preferring to forgo glitz and glamour for a quiet life in the country.1 Both Lange and Spacek also have romantic relationships with men in the movie industry: the former has for a long time lived with playwright, actor, and director Sam Shepard, while the latter has long been married to art-director-turneddirector Jack Fisk. An understanding of them and their roles is enhanced by the non-cinematic texts such as interviews and profiles that accompany their films. Even if they both maintain a distance between themselves and Hollywood, that they are in relatively high-profile relationships has made them the stuff of celebrity fanfare. 58 WILLIAM BROWN However, their (clichéd?) decision not to be a part of the Hollywood glitterati also means that both are associated with a form of stardom based more upon their commitment to developing acting abilities than upon a desire for celebrity. According to Christine Geraghty, this would make of Lange and Spacek “professionals” as opposed to “celebrities” (187). Barry King, meanwhile , might describe this form of stardom as “impersonation,” in that Spacek and Lange can be said to “inhabit” their roles, rather than simply to play thinly veiled versions of themselves, this latter being a form of stardom that King terms “personification” (King 167–82). As we shall see, however, in the work of both actresses there are consistent trends that bear similarities to their offscreen personae, such that both tread an ambiguous path between impersonation and personification as...