Amanda Plummer: Odd Woman In

https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/03/12/amanda-plummer-odd-woman-in/

If you imagined that actress Amanda Plummer would be eccentric in real-life like the characters she often plays on-screen, you would be right. Prior to the release of The Fisher King, Plummer met with writer Luc Sante for this profile from the April 1991 issue of Movieline magazine. For context, the interview takes place at the start of the first Gulf War. You’ll see why that’s relevant roughly half-way through.

The day I was to meet Amanda Plummer she left a panicky message on my answering machine at 6:30 a.m. claiming she didn’t know if it was day or night, whether she’d overslept or the sky had darkened. It was a miniature expressionist performance, extreme and funny, real and confected all at once. On the other hand, war had broken out and we’d all had a bad night. I didn’t even hear the phone ring. Still, it gave me pause. What was I going to do with Amanda Plummer?

___________________

What are we going to do with Amanda Plummer? That question must have been asked dozens, hundreds of times by agents, casting directors, producers, studio executives. Who is this woman? She’s so…weird. And she’s not very pretty, is she? You couldn’t see her shilling for product during prime time. She fails to reassure. She’s not anybody who would live next door. You wouldn’t, say, cast her as a single mother of three who goes undercover for the DEA at her local supermarket and meets cute with a roguish government inspector (played by, say, Bruce Boxleitner) who rediscovers human warmth in the course of a sting operation.

Plummer’s had phenomenal success on the stage (a Tony for Agnes of God, and raves for The Glass Menagerie, Romeo and Juliet, The Cherry Orchard, A Lie of the Mind–a full range of great stuff to do on the boards). But she’s been stiffed by the movies. So much so that Terry Gilliam’s new film The Fisher King represents the first time that she’s had a significant part with substantial screen time in a major motion picture. She’s had significant parts (Cattle Annie and Little Britches, Daniel), she’s had screen time (in the same two pictures), and she’s been in major films (The World According to Garp), but never all at once. Mostly she’s done cameos in movies neither you nor anyone else saw, like Made in Heaven and Joe Versus the Volcano. (Her biggest audience exposure to date, in fact, came from a stint as the retarded Benny’s girlfriend on “L.A. Law,” an experience she simply will not discuss.)

Maybe it’s because she’s had the bad luck to be the daughter of two stars–Tammy Grimes and Christopher Plummer–who themselves are hardly mainstream. Or because she had the bad luck to be branded an eccentric at an early age. (Eccentrics are permitted to run loose in their declining years, but seldom in their youth and prime.) Maybe it’s because she had the bad luck to possess features that are so protean she looks different from moment to moment, not just from role to role. Or because she had the bad luck to be theatrical, in an era when actors are expected to be regular, if not ordinary, just Joes and Janes from your subdivision with a little bit extra. Flamboyance and idiosyncrasy are not desirable in role models and demographic representatives.

But Amanda Plummer is flamboyant and idiosyncratic. For all the fragile and even spooked qualities she emanates over the phone, in person she is animated and disarming, bounding out into the lobby (if you can call it that) of the modest Little Italy quasi-tenement in which she leads a quiet, solo, almost student-like existence involving much reading and writing. She is wearing a short fake-fur something and her hair is yanked back under one of those wide headband things that women are wearing these days. “It makes my hair feel longer,” she allows, explaining that she had to lop a lot of it off for The Fisher King and she’s impatient for it to grow back.

Amanda and I head off to a nearby coffee shop where the waiters wear bow ties and read tabloids at the counter. She orders scrambled eggs “hard, very hard,” and then allows them to congeal. I eventually point out that they must by now be feeling neglected. “I eat cold, “she says, leaving no doubt as to the superiority of this choice.

So far I’m finding Amanda to be fairly normal, cold eggs notwithstanding. True, she looks and sounds like no one else (Time once said her voice “sounds like she went to the Berlitz School on Mars,” and another critic said it “sounded like a rusty key turned in a boudoir lock”). But the giddy way her affect constantly shifts, from confidential to melodramatic to sultry to comical, is obviously unpremeditated, and she strikes me as extremely intelligent.

We’re still at the small-talk stage, and the recorder has hardly begun rolling, when she suddenly announces, “I’m not considered a movie person at all.”