The Curious Career of Jill Clayburgh
https://lebeauleblog.com/2018/05/10/the-curious-career-of-jill-clayburgh/
Jill Clayburgh rose to prominence in the late seventies. She became closely associated with feminist roles in movies like An Unmarried Woman. But in the eighties, Clayburgh’s career quickly cooled off. As the hits dried up, Clayburgh found herself taking whatever parts she could find. In the nineties, she entered the “supporting actress” phase of her career. It was around this time that Movieline magazine interviewed Clayburgh for the April 1993 Women in Hollywood issue.share
Back in the late ’70s, Jill Clayburgh seemed to ascend “overnight” and became–out of nowhere–America’s premier feminist sweetheart, an icon of The Liberated Woman’s Life. In two of her biggest success, An Unmarried Woman and Starting Over, she played dramatic and comedic variations, respectively, on the character she became identified with: an intelligent, sophisticated, anxiety-ridden woman unsure about commitment. With her pleasing and accessible, rather than drop-dead, good looks, Clayburgh was an almost-revered ideal and her career was red-hot. But while typecasting certainly made her a star, it carried the usual price. It turned out that movies about librated women were just another passing Hollywood fad, and when audiences had enough, Clayburgh’s star began to fade.
Unlike Jane Fonda and Diane Keaton, who also rode the “new American women” trend to the top, Clayburgh had no real previous screen presence and no evident powers of instantaneous self-reinvention. As Clayburgh later acknowledged in an interview, “It’s a tricky thing for an actor to be too closely associated with the material she plays.”
When Clayburgh agreed to be interviewed at the Westchester County, New York, country home she shares with her kids and her husband, playwright David Rabe, I wanted to talk with her about her career moves, good, bad and accidental. For Clayburgh didn’t just disappear from view–she’s consistently made films for TV, and in the last couple of years she’s begun to take on small roles again in feature films, one in last year’s regrettable Whispers in the Dark and another in the current Rich in Love. But then, Hollywood careers never continue in a straight upward trajectory toward heaven. I wanted her comments as, together, we plotted the course of an actress who’s been pretty much all over the map.
Clayburgh’s house is a big, rambling affair with plenty of children (her two, plus neighborhood friends) and dogs running loose. It is so picture-perfect it reminds me of a ’50s sitcom–that is, until I see photographs of Madonna and Sean Penn decorating the kitchen. The Clayburgh/Rabe home may be rustic and homey, but two mainstream show-biz careers are run out of this place. When I compliment Clayburgh on how non-Hollywood her house seems, she laughs, “I always wanted a perfect life, and now I have one.”
When we sit down in the study to chat with the tape recorder running, Clayburgh clears up at once any notion that when she hit the big time in the ’70s it was an “overnight” success. “I wanted to act,” she says, “and I worked on it.” And she started early.