When Celia Weston's sister-in-law recently told her, "You know, Celia, you've never lacked for courage," Weston was taken aback. "I'd never made that appraisal of myself," said the respected actor. "It was very touching to hear, and I've really reflected on it a lot."
As Weston now realizes, her choice of profession was a particularly bold one. Born and raised in South Carolina, Weston came from what she described as a "pretty privileged background." She wryly noted, "It was frowned on to even have a summer job in a public situation where other people might notice that you were doing it." Weston's genteel mother, a homemaker, thought her daughter's interest in acting, beginning in college, was scandalous. "I kid my mother for thinking that acting was the first oldest profession instead of the second," Weston told me. "She just thought it was the most déclassé idea to entertain."
Defying her mother's wish for her daughter to, as Weston put it, "marry well and complete my silver service," she auditioned and got her first acting gig in a summer stock company, landing lead roles in productions of Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke and Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Regional, Off-Broadway, and Broadway work followed. Her most recent Broadway credits include The Last Night of Ballyhoo, for which she received a Tony nomination, and Sam Shepard's True West, in which she co-starred with Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly.
I had the immense pleasure of seeing Weston in True West a couple of years ago and was struck by how authentically she came across, playing a middle-class suburbanite who returns from a vacation to find her normally orderly home turned upside down by her two sons. That quality of utter realness is also what attracted noted film directors Ang Lee, David O. Russell, Tim Robbins, Scott Hicks, Anthony Minghella, and In the Bedroom's Todd Field. Though Weston prefers to not be labeled strictly as a character actor, she is undeniably one of the great supporting players.
Thanks largely to casting directors' openness to Weston (as well as Weston's ability to take on different accents besides her own Southern cadence), she has managed to avoid being typed as any particular character or in any one genre. As an American aristocrat in The Talented Mr. Ripley, a middle-class Southerner coping with grief over the murder of her daughter in Dead Man Walking, the racist wife of a farmer during the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans in Snow Falling on Cedars, and the mistaken mother of Ben Stiller in the hilarious Flirting With Disaster, Weston is consistently effective and memorable.
Not surprisingly Weston's strong roots in theatre inform her approach to her craft. Said the New York-based actor, "The great lesson in theatre is that you live the story every night, and that is a wonderful vehicle for getting to the richest places in a performance or investing a character with the richest life. It gets only more and more profound as you mature in a part, when you're able to do it night after night and have the immediate response of the audience—what works and what doesn't."
Film, as has been said many times by actors, is a much different process, one that requires Weston to rely strongly on herself and to come to the set with her performance in hand. "You have to have it all wrapped up with a bow on it, for the most part," she said. "If you've had a theatre background, you learn how to have it on tap for yourself."
The life of a character actor can be a lonely one on a film set. Weston often has only a few days' work at a time and doesn't have the opportunity to bond with the other actors and the crew. "You're the new kid on the block," as she put it. That's where Weston's courage comes into play. She focuses on the work at hand and has to maintain the confidence she needs to give a strong performance every time. For this reason Weston is the best kind of jobbing actor—one who embraces the challenge, no matter the size of the part, and always sets a high standard for herself.
"My goal has always been to make a living and to have the respect of my peers," she concluded. "It's never been about stardom. It's about a good and challenging part."