2003 marked the first time Frances Fisher had acted in a New York-based film in 20 years -- since her movie debut in "Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?" for director Henry Jaglom. Fisher came back to the city to play the stay-young-or-bust mother of Julianne Moore's character in the romantic comedy "Laws of Attraction," a New Line Cinema release, which also stars Pierce Brosnan. (The film opens April 30.)
Certainly, though, Fisher is no stranger to Manhattan. She first arrived here in 1974 from her hometown of Orange, Tex. (Orange is not Fisher's birthplace -- she was actually born in Britain. Her father's job took the family all over the globe.)
The actress spent 14 years in the city, studying her craft and pursuing a stage career. Between classes and projects, she worked as a nanny, living in the maid's quarters of a Fifth Avenue apartment. After a time, she "graduated" to bartending, then, finally, to paid acting gigs.
"Richie Allen was an actor who was making a lot of commercials back then," Fisher recalls. "He felt sorry for me because I didn't know what I was doing. He took me around, showed me how to crash auditions for commercials. I finally got a couple of commercials, and I was able to quit working as a bartender."
She eventually landed a regular role on the daytime drama "The Edge of Night" and stayed with the series for five years. The rigors of this job helped her to prepare for her later film work. Discipline was imperative, as there were early morning calls and pages of dialogue to learn each week.
Fisher notes that in those days, each episode of "Edge" was filmed in chronological order (unlike the case with soaps today, where scenes occurring on a single set are shot together). "The only way we would stop tape was if the boom shadow went across our faces," she remembers. "If you messed up a line a little bit, you just kept on going."
Daytime drama also helped Fisher develop a talent for keeping dialogue and actions crisp. "Soap-opera stories move very slowly," she explains, "so you had about two weeks of saying the same thing to about seven or eight different characters -- for people who don't tune in every day. So you learned how to make it fresh and new."
Fisher was also learning lessons in the classroom, of course. She began her New York studies at HB Studio, and eventually worked with both Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg (she was in the last group of actors personally selected by Strasberg for the Actors Studio). Fisher knew that the approaches of the two great teachers were "diametrically opposed," but she found she could pick up valuable lessons from both of them.
In 1984, she played Off-Broadway in Sam Shepard's "Fool for Love." Then, in 1987, she learned that Norman Mailer was directing a film in Provincetown, Mass.
"He was looking for an ex-stripper who was in real estate in Santa Barbara. I said, 'Oh, that's me!' So I went up to Provincetown and did 'Tough Guys Don't Dance.' And I realized that I made more money on that movie in six weeks than I had in the entire year doing theatre."
So, at age 36, Fisher's career course changed. She moved to Los Angeles, and began focusing primarily on movies.
In the succeeding years, she has acted in a wide range of roles in high-profile film projects, from the plain-speaking, revenge-bent madam in Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" to the ever-so-proper mother of Kate Winslet in James Cameron's "Titanic."
But the transition to movie acting wasn't easy: "It took me years to get used to working in the film medium. Just the whole technical part of it. I feel I didn't get really comfortable in film until I did 'Titanic,' and that was a good 10 years after I started working in film."
One lesson that she learned is that one can't always experiment creatively -- can't "be all over the place" -- from take to take, because it can wreak havoc with the continuity of a performance. If a director happens to select an aberrant take of a particular scene and insert it into the final cut, it can make the characterization seem inconsistent.
"I've seen some of my work be butchered because I was not specific enough with the director to say, 'This is where I want to go with it.' Now, I do that. But when you're young, it's very difficult to have the courage to say that."
Even when an actor has the kind of versatility that Fisher has, it's still possible to run the risk of being pigeonholed. That's especially true if one happens to pop up in an Oscar-winning blockbuster. Fisher says she turned down many an "uptight mother" role after the success of "Titanic."
With "Laws of Attraction," Fisher thinks moviemakers are finally acknowledging her comedic skills (something they'd have known about had they seen her hilarious turn in 1999's "The Big Tease").
"They finally know I'm funny," she says. "I've been funny for years, but now I think they're gonna trust that I am."