Jessica Lange interviewed by Michael Coveney for the Belfast Telegraph:
"George Bush really has whipped up the most poisonous scenario of neighbour against neighbour over the war in Iraq. It's disgusting. I can't tell you. There were times when it was really lovely to be out there and against the war. But then I had anti-war stickers on my car and some big fucking pick-up with an American flag tried to drive me off the road. It was scary and I was scared."
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After Coveney suggests that things could be worse if "President Bush wasn't defending her 'way of life' and 'civilised' (read privileged) values against the Islamic threat," Lange responds, "What? What are you saying here? I thought you were a nice person. My anti-war work started four years ago when the drums were beating. The few of us who really spoke out at the time took such a beating in the press — even the liberal press — and on CNN; I was on a CNN news programme with an arms inspector who had been in Iraq, and we were treated like shit. Everything he said — and it was all factual — has come to pass."
Lange goes on to talk about threats of blacklisting, summing it all up with a downbeat — though unquestionably reasonable — "You begin to wonder why we bring children into this world. We're on the precipice. No question."
Jessica Lange, one of the best film actresses of the last 25 years, is currently appearing at the Apollo Theatre on the West End in A Glass Menagerie. Besides winning two Academy Awards (best supporting actress for Tootsie in 1982; best actress for Blue Sky in 1994), Lange acted as an ambassador for Unicef for five years and has worked with HIV-infected children.
The Lange-Coveney interview is a must read even though Coveney says that Bob Fosse's 1979 musical All That Jazz was Lange's first film. Perhaps she'd like others to think so, or perhaps Coveney simply made a gigantic — as in the 1976 King Kong — mistake.
Either way, that's why in the above paragraph I say that Lange is one of the best film actresses of the past 25 — not 30 — years, as she first blossomed as an actress only in Bob Rafelson's 1981 version of The Postman Always Rings Twice.