PUBLIC LIVES

A FLING WITH HOLLYWOOD, BUT TRUE LOVE FOR THE BIG EASY

By ROBIN FINN
The New York Times, 8/8/08

Patricia Clarkson already knows how her mother, Jackie Clarkson, the peppy president of the City Council of resurgent New Orleans, will react to her latest nude scene in a feature film, this time opposite Ben Kingsley in “Elegy,” adapted from Philip Roth’s tortured novelette, “The Dying Animal”: two thumbs up.

The reaction of her father, a retired public health administrator at the Louisiana State University School of Medicine, mildly concerns her. Since the film opens this weekend after having had its New York premiere on Tuesday night — she wore a slinky, black one-shoulder gown on loan from Donatella Versace: “It’s Cinderella time!” — Ms. Clarkson may hear a paternal review quite soon.

“My parents are old-fashioned, but not in a standard conservative sense,” says Ms. Clarkson, 48, balancing her sylph-thin, barefoot self on one of the deliberately unmatched chairs flanking the banquet-size dining table in her West Village loft. Purchased 11 months ago, it is the first and only home she has owned. She fantasizes about a pied-à-terre on the outskirts of the French Quarter, but putting down roots in New York City was a priority. Even if her family is ensconced in the city where she grew up.

“I mean, please, they’re Southerners, they’re high school sweethearts who’ve been married 55 years and are still speaking to each other, plus they’ve raised five daughters,” adds Ms. Clarkson of her comfortable suburban upbringing in the Algiers section, where her parents still live. “I grew up in a boisterous, loud house; the lights were always on.”

She is their fifth and final child, a two-time Emmy winner (“Six Feet Under”) and an Oscar nominee (“Pieces of April”) who bolted to Fordham University for a theater arts degree and graduated summa cum laude. She received a master of fine arts degree from the Yale School of Drama in 1985, and made her film debut as the wife of Eliot Ness in “The Untouchables” in 1987. Kevin Costner was her leading man. Mr. Kingsley is just the latest in a long list of men whose characters have inspired hers to shed their clothes onscreen.

“My mother will tell me how great I look, but that I’m too skinny,” predicts Ms. Clarkson, who despite the shining matrimonial example set by her parents is single. (Note to potential suitors: “I am not opposed to marriage; I just have never married,” she says.) A multiyear relationship with the actor Campbell Scott is over; she is dating again, and content. Her most prolific relationship with a male creature is her 13-year love affair with Beaux, a lanky black pit bull/hound mutt she rescued in Los Angeles. She dotes on him despite his abundance of “doggie odor only a mother could love.”

“See, good things can come out of L.A. — wait, don’t write that, I can’t afford to offend anybody there,” she continues. Too late. No more blockbusters for Ms. Clarkson. Actually, her next would be her first: She tends to gravitate toward independent films or, even when the director is a Hollywood heavyweight like George Clooney (“Good Night, and Good Luck”), films that do not gain renown as box office cash machines.

“Though I’d lay down in moving traffic to do a comedy with Will Ferrell.” No kidding.

“Anyhow, I’m a little worried about my father seeing me in the sack with Ben Kingsley,” she resumes. “Ben and I play a couple of hedonists; I’m a lover with a capital L. It’s pretty steamy stuff,” she says, and that’s not counting the striptease her character performs for Mr. Kingsley’s before realizing she has been replaced in his affections — and boudoir — by a younger woman (Penelope Cruz).

“Hey, what time is it?” blurts Ms. Clarkson. “If we’re going to talk about me being naked, is it too early for bourbon?”

It is, so she settles, grudgingly, for a healthy dose of probiotic kefir, which she deems less boring than water. She muses that it, along with mega-doses of goat yogurt, may be the reason she was the only cast member of “Cairo Time,” which just finished a six-week shoot in Egypt, not to contract a crippling case of food poisoning. With that film comes a career first: Finally, at this relatively advanced stage of her acting life, she is the female lead. “I’m in every frame,” she says.

Ms. Clarkson may possess the metabolism of a hummingbird, but she is a Clydesdale when it comes to work. She jokes that it took 140 indie films, many forgettable, to earn enough money to buy this apartment. Of late, her calendar is jammed: Besides “Elegy” and “Cairo Time,” not only did she land her first Woody Allen film, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” but Mr. Allen invited her to join a cast that includes Larry David in what she carefully refers to as “Woody’s untitled spring project.”

In it, she plays a crazed Southern woman. A stretch? “She does contain elements of me and my mother,” she says. She also finished a small, unglamorous role — “I look like something that’s been dragged behind a truck for a few weeks” — in the coming Martin Scorsese film “Shutter Island,” with Leonardo DiCaprio.

“I fell in love with him in a pure and chaste way,” she says of Mr. Scorsese.

Ms. Clarkson’s less flirtatious side surfaces when she speaks about the now-ravaged city she grew up in. “They sent a disaster to help fix a disaster; it makes me insane,” is her assessment of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She visits the city periodically for Hurricane Katrina fund-raisers and benefits. She also writes personal checks to survivors. “It’s the simplest thing to do, and it’s incredibly honorable because it helps,” she says. She also exhorts Louisiana tourism in a series of commercials. “Why go to Europe when you have New Orleans? New Orleans is Europe!” she says. “Maybe I have no objectivity, but I don’t care.”

Asked whether she considers herself a Southern belle, which is how she is portrayed throughout her publicity package, she laughs and says: “Ding dong! I don’t even know how to type; how un-Southern belle of me. But I am a girly girl, for better or for worse. When I’m on my deathbed I’ll probably say: ‘Go get me my curlers! Please.’ ”