CRAZY MAMA!

Twin Peaks´ Grace Zabriskie has played richly-detailed celluloid moms to some of Hollywood´s biggest names

By Robert Waldron

Watching Twin Peaks´ first episode, viewers learned a lesson television drama had been reluctant to teach them: grief isn´t pretty. Sarah Palmer, played by Grace Zabriskie, discovers her daughter Laura´s bed hasn´t been slept in. Throughout the episode, viewers actually become part of the drama. Spying on the private suffering of a woman whose features are distorted by raw, heart-searing grief as she copes with the realization that her daughter is dead, the audience is thrust into the core of her pain. Zabriskie remembers feeling uneasy about her performance when the episode was filmed. She approached TP creator/director David Lynch during rehearsals to voice her concern. "I told David I thought I was over the top," she confides. "He said, 'No, you´re not. Keep going. I want you to go farther and farther.'"

Watching the completed episode several weeks later, Zabriskie agreed Lynch´s instincts were on the mark. "The main thing that David does is he uses the take," she explains, "He doesn´t edit your performance the way most [TV] shows do. He stays on you. I mean, he´ll stay there until you´re seeing what you´re seeing and you know you´re seeing what you´re seeing. It´s just a different philosophy of filmmaking."

Zabriskie first encountered Lynch two years ago when he requested a meeting to discuss her work. He´d just seen The Big Easy and couldn´t forget Zabriskie´s performance as Dennis Quaid´s Cajun mother. "David was kind of tickled," she says, "because he was beginning to conceive the character of Juana in Wild at Heart," she says, referring to the feature film Lynch directed that featured her as a Cajun voodoo woman.

The meeting led to Lynch´s offering Zabriskie a lead role on TP. Unfortunately, she had to turn it down - she was already committed to another series that was then in development. When that series failed to materialize, Lynch quickly arranged for Zabriskie to play a different role than he originally intended, Laura Palmer´s grief-stricken mother.

"They did more with Sarah than they had assumed they would in the beginning," notes Zabriskie, adding with a smile, "I would like to think that´s partly because of what I did with the character:"
Longtime viewers of Santa Barbara will recall that Zabriskie appeared as Theda Duvall on the series several years ago. "I had two daughters: a slut and a nun." (The other daughter, Christy, was portrayed by Tricia Cast, now Nina on The Young and the Restless.) Zabriskie was originally offered one of the soap´s core roles when in premiered in 1984, but she wasn´t interested in committing to a long-term contract. A year later, the producers called to offer her the part of Theda, the matriarch of a new family they were introducing. This time she accepted.

"The producers said I would have to sign a year´s contract," she recalls. "But they assured me that my cycle would only last for 13 weeks. I was really sweating that for a while. Still, I wouldn´t give up the experience for anything now because I learned something invaluable. I understood that when it came to memorizing lines, approximation is better than verbatim. Approximation is not second best in soap opera acting. It is best, simply because you cannot learn the dialogue verbatim every day. You can´t - especially if your character´s a motor mouth, as mine was."

Zabriskie´s breakthrough film role was playing one of Sally Field´s coworkers in Norma Rae. Zabriskie was a highly-regarded stage actress working in Atlanta, not far from where the film was shot. Although she enjoyed her role in Norma Rae, Zabriskie had no intention of relocating to Los Angeles to see more film work. "I had been out here a few times doing post-production work on the film, and I thoroughly disliked it. I had said I would never, ever want to move here." As if to cement that resolve, when Zabriskie got back to Atlanta, she fell in love with a local writer. "It happened at once," she remembers. "I met this person, and on the same day, I got invited to come out and see the screening of Norma Rae (in Hollywood). I thought, of course I´m not going to spend the money to go out there and see a screening. I´ll wait until it comes to Atlanta. But then I decided, maybe I will. Let me get out of town. I need to think about things."

The trip turned out to be fortuitous. Within hours of the screening, Zabriskie was approached by several leading talent agents who wanted to represent her. She called her beau and explained the situation: She could either stay in Hollywood and try to make it as an actress, or she could return to Atlanta and pursue their relationship. Fortunately, she never had to make the choice. Her boyfriend gallantly volunteered to relocate to Hollywood to live with Zabriskie and her teen-age daughters, Marion and Helen. Unfortunately, Zabriskie´s romantic relationship turned out to be short-lived. Not so her acting career.

Within weeks, Zabriskie found herself playing celluloid mother to some of the biggest stars in town. Besides Quaid and Kozak, Zabriskie has played mom to Debra Winger (An Officer and a Gentleman) and Matt Dillon (Drugstore Cowboy). Referring to her frequent roles as a mother, Zabriskie says, "Sometimes I see a mother in a character a way to illuminate the star´s character. The first thing I look for is, 'What is the point of this mother? What does she offer? Is there something I´m going to be able to say? Are you going to be able to watch my performance and understand something about my child that you wouldn´t have understood otherwise?'"

She cites An Officer and a Gentleman as an example. In the movie, Winger plays a working-class woman who, along with her best friend, makes a sport of getting romantically involved with officer trainees at a nearby military base. Unlike her pal, however, Winger´s character isn´t preoccupied with trying to trap one of the men into marriage. "What I tried to do was to show why Debra could be so different from her friend," explains Zabriskie. "Both of them came from essentially the same background. What was it about [my character] that could have produced an honest, very independent daughter?"

Given Zabriskie´s background, it´s not surprising, Lynch chose her to play the mother of the most famous corpse in prime time - Laura Palmer. However, as originally envisioned, the role was limited to appearances in the first few episodes, so Zabriskie became concerned about her future on the series once Laura´s killer (her father, Leland) was revealed. To make sure her character would continue in the series, Zabriskie met with the show´s writers to share her idea for the character´s involvement in upcoming storylines.

The writers were intrigued by Zabriskie´s ideas and assured her they´d be useful. "I was very happy because I think it gives Sarah at least a little bit of a future."

As for Twin Peaks, however, its own future is shaky. A few weeks ago, ABC announced the show would be put on hiatus. If it does return it´s fate could only be more secure with a little more air time for Grace Zabriskie.