For Hershey, the Years Have Revealed Depth and Grace

NEW YORK —  The first time you see Barbara Hershey in “The Portrait of a Lady,” she’s seated at a piano. Her dark, usually shoulder-splayed hair is up, braided and woven in a manner as complicated as her character, Madame Merle, the ally and manipulator of heroine Isabel Archer. She is playing a piece by Schubert, also quite tricky, and her arms connect to the music so organically that you begin to wonder why Hollywood has been hiding this musical talent from us all these years.

You don’t know the half of it.

Early on the shooting, Hershey approached her director, Jane Campion, and told her she’d like to take a crack at the Schubert for real. She understood that she’d be matching her finger movements to a soundtrack, but she didn’t want to be just another one of those tone-deaf actors banging out “Heart and Soul” while the camera recorded her passion from the neck up.

So what, she only had six months of lessons when she was a kid. So what, she had taught herself a smidgen of classical as an adult. So what, she had less than a month to turn herself into Vladimir Horowitz. Hershey was going to let that camera zoom in on the ivories if it was the last thing she ever did.

Three weeks before shooting the scene she was handed a piece each by Schubert and Beethoven, the composers specified in the two versions of the novel Henry James had written. They were in the two hardest keys on the piano and were intended to be played at breakneck speed. For five days, she toiled with Holly Hunter’s tutor on “The Piano,” who greeted her efforts with encouraging words and mournful looks. By night, she burned the midnight candle to master the Schubert Impromptu at her electric piano.

A week before the shoot, she got the fingerings down, but much too slowly to keep pace with the recorded version. She crammed harder, and harder, till her fingers couldn’t move. The night before the shoot, by George, she got it, notes, dynamics and all. The actress woke the next morning feeling calm, knowing that no matter what happened, she had done her best. As the camera rolled, she proceeded to ace the Schubert, take after take.

Months later, she saw the movie and, wouldn’t you know, the cameraman had filmed her performance entirely from the back and face. For all it mattered, she could have been wearing boxing gloves.

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Hershey laughs explosively when she reaches the kicker of this anecdote, but you can’t help but feel that the laughter is a gift afforded by passing time, and that its intensity is in direct proportion to the piercing letdown she initially must have felt.

The piano story could be metaphor for Hershey’s 30-year career, which has been peppered with virtuoso turns that very few people have gotten to see. In one of them, “Shy People” (1987), she conceals her serene comeliness under a layer of grime and an overbite as a tough-willed matriarch in the Louisiana bayou. In “A World Apart,” released the same year, she affects a South African accent and a grim determination as a Communist activist who risks her neck in the campaign against apartheid.

These performances earned her the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival two years in a row, an unprecedented honor. Chances are, however, you may remember her more for “Beaches” (1988) or “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986), thoroughly respectable pieces of acting in which her tight-jawed gravity often was eclipsed by the more flamboyant turns of Bette Midler, Dianne Wiest and Woody Allen.

At 48, Hershey is ascending into a dominion previously settled by such actresses as Candice Bergen, Catherine Deneuve and the late Romy Schneider: the cool beauties whose superficial babe-ness falls away with age like a chrysalis, revealing a depth and grace of character within.

For three decades and still surviving, she has managed to reinvent herself at an impressive rate. Every time you think you’ve got her pegged--the femme fatale, the bitchy socialite, the sultry older woman who seduces younger guys--she shifts gears into Mary Magdalene or an Eric Idle farce and makes you look again.

As Madame Serena Merle in “The Portrait of a Lady,” a role for which she already has been awarded the L.A. Film Critics award for best supporting actress, Hershey accelerates the evolution. Purists may be startled at the thought of the diminutive Hershey assuming the role of a woman James described as “round and replete,” whose larger-than-life suggestions of German nobility belie her Brooklyn origins. But Hershey captures the repose, the melancholy air of experience, the Machiavellian intelligence with such conviction that there is a detectable energy slump whenever she walks off screen.

Hershey’s sure-footedness was absent when she first campaigned for the role. She recalls that period of uncertainty. “I begged for the audition, then locked myself up for five days and didn’t go out. Usually I come into an audition with a take on the character, but this time I just didn’t know. It was four hours long, and I left without a sense of completion. I had no idea how I did.”

It would be another six months before Hershey heard she had the role. Her quest to unlock Madame Merle continued with a dissection of the novel so intensive and intimate that she now refers to the author as Hank. “I pulled out every description James had of the character, and when I looked at it all together, it was so contradictory! She’s not just a victimizer, she’s a victim. . . .”

Hershey’s compassion for Serena filters through every frame. “I once tried to ask defense lawyers how can you defend someone you know is guilty. The question upset them, but I finally got a public defender who said: ‘I go back into their history as far as is necessary to find the moment--there is always a moment--when things changed for them.’ And that moment is the moment of empathy. And when I have to play someone who did something awful or who is not the nicest person, that’s what I do. I sometimes feel like the defense lawyer for that character.”

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Hershey’s boundless willingness to defend often questionable behavior stops with herself. Some 25 years after the actress went hippie to the delight of the media hounds, changing her surname to Seagull and producing a love-child named Free by David Carradine, she is still dogged by journalists’ queries about that emblematic phase of her early life. Amid the current just-say-no-to-everything political climate, it is as though she were being asked to offer penance for some sin she never committed.

Try and question that persistent interest--even on the most philosophical level--and her body tightens, her easy smile fades, and she begs off in no uncertain terms. You get the impression that personal territory is a minefield for Hershey, who lost her older sister to cancer five years back and whose only marriage, to her art teacher in 1992, didn’t work out.

These days, with her son (now Tom) off finding himself at 23, Hershey divides her time between California, a cottage in Connecticut, and, since filming “Portrait of a Lady,” a home in Italy, which she bought with the intention of studying Italian painting when she is not working. The multiple residences contrast poignantly with her Hollywood upbringing, the daughter of a Russian-Jewish horse-racing columnist and his wife of Irish descent.

“I grew up in one house for 17 years of my life. I knew a three-block radius. The guy at the gas station. The guy at the grocery store. It was really that kind of life.

“I didn’t really go to that many movies. We didn’t have a whole lot of money. I was one of those television kids, so I got them that way. The one advantage, perhaps, was that I didn’t have to leave home to get into show business. The ache to act that was born in me, however, could have happened anywhere.”

In the 30 years since Hershey landed a part on the short-lived ABC western “The Monroes” at 17, she has worked with the gamut of directors, from Woody Allen to Martin Scorsese, a study in contrasts if there ever was one.

She credits Scorsese with “his enthusiasm, his encouraging you to join his vision and contribute, and then say yes to your ideas.” Hershey teamed with Scorsese twice, in two of his most uncharacteristic features: “Boxcar Bertha” (his 1972 debut potboiler) and “The Last Temptation of Christ” in 1988, which materialized years after Hershey first gave him Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel to read.

The raging controversy surrounding the latter film was a source of profound dismay for both the actress and her director. The fundamentalist protest became so incendiary that a bodyguard was hired to protect Hershey, and the producers held back from her the stream of hate-mail.

“It’s always been misunderstood. I think one of the things Marty wanted was to revitalize the Christ story, make it something that people yell at each other about over coffee after the film, whether or not they liked it. The irony is that Christ’s teachings are judge not that you be judged, and, of course, the fact that most of the people throwing stones hadn’t seen the film.”

Hershey reserves her warmest accolades for her current director, Jane Campion. “Usually I’m begging to have a minute with a director, and she came to me and said, ‘Do you mind if I spend two days with you?’ So she came to my house and for two days we created a history for the character and shared personal things from our lives and improvised and acted together from the script. It was amazing.”