Lee
Remick:
IN CONVERSATION WITH
ROY PICKARD
by Roy Pickard
Photoplay
April 1976
I don’t really know what I would do if I couldn’t act. Still I’m basically a survivor.
APART from Barbra Streisand few women stars these days can draw the crowds to the cinemas. Which is a pity when there are lovely ladies like Lee Remick around.
Ever since 1957 when she twirled a baton suggestively in A Face in the Crowd and made a play for Andy Griffith she has graced the screen with her stunning looks and acting. Her movies have included Anatomy of a Murder, The Days of Wine and Roses, The Detective, and No Way to Treat a Lady. Her leading men, James Stewart, Jack Lemmon, Paul Newman, Rod Steiger and Frank Sinatra.
"You
know, it's very peculiar," she said, tugging at her brown boots and relaxing
in a smiling heap in her caravan on The
Omen set. "It's a bit like
a women's lib backlash really. Before this women's lib thing took place they
used to write stories about exactly that - women's liberation. Only there
weren't any labels attached.
"I mean, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, all those used
to play women executives - women in a man's world, over and over again. Women
of power of one sort or another, whether it was in business or in families.
The woman was either as strong or as weak as the man might be. It's nothing
new but," she smiled, "that doesn't make it any less frustrating
for the rest of us."
Lee Remick, however, is doing better than many actresses suffering from under- exposure on the screen. A triumph in TV's Jennie - herself a lady not without strong liberal tendencies - she was, on the day I visited The Omen set, being cuddled by Gregory Peck, who plays her husband in the film.
Six years ago Lee married British assistant director Kip Gowans and decided to settle down with him in England. With her two children - Kate 16 and Matthew 14 by her former marriage - they live together in a big house in St. John's Wood.
Whenever she can Lee goes on location with her husband. Sometimes the locations take her back to America as, for instance, Albuquerque where Kip worked recently, as Nick Roeg's assistant on the David Bowie movie The Man Who Fell To Earth.
Lee is very much the contemporary woman. She loves her family and spends as much free time as she can with them, but she is very determined, has strong views about many of today's issues, and she has been involved in political campaigning for the Democratic Party. She is very much the woman of today. Even that tyrannical director Otto Preminger didn't shout at her when she made Anatomy Of A Murder for him.
"I have a theory about that," says Lee firmly. "When he rang and asked me if I'd take over from Lana Turner who had walked off the movie at the last moment I had just had my first baby. Kate was just four or five weeks old. When I made the film he behaved beautifully toward me, always gentlemanly and sweet, partly I think because of the child.
"Otto does explode on the set. I've seen people reduced to tears. It didn't happen on our picture, but I would definitely have been the target, being a young, newish actress, if it hadn't been for Kate's presence in my life."
MGM was the studio that first found that Lee Remick couldn't be treated like a puppet. When they dropped her in favor of Petula Clark for Goodbye Mr. Chips she sued and won, She got f416, 000 pounds for breach of contract. "I'm not the sort of person who usually sues, but I thought, 'Why the hell let them get away with it?' Big studios still treat actors like puppets. There's less of it than there was, but now and then you have to take a stand."
Twentieth Century-Fox also had to make out a large check - f36, 000 - to Lee, not because of any row she had with them but because the film she was going to make, Something's Got to Give as Marilyn Monroe's replacement, was never made.
"They fired her because she was always late," said Lee. "I was under contract to Fox and just in order to save their skins and their insurance they said: 'OK we'll make it with someone else'.
"They looked through their little books as to who would be plausible enough - it was obvious the picture was never going to be made - came up with me and said 'Alright darling, report for work Monday.' I said that I didn't want to and although Fox had never forced me to do anything before, on this occasion they did because they had to get their insurance money back.
Then Dean Martin said 'I don't want to do it without Marilyn Monroe' which is quite understandable because the only reason he'd wanted to do it in the first place was because of Marilyn. And as I didn't want to do it anyhow it never got made. They paid me an awful lot of money for doing nothing and I went off to Spain to do The Running Man."
Most of Lee's recent films have been British (A Severed Head, Loot, Hennessy), but occasionally she travels back to the States for an American movie or to see her friends and parents in her hometown of Boston. As a child she was in the enviable position of having a father who owned a department store - Remicks of Quincy, Massachusetts - something which made her early life seem like Christmas all the year round. "It still does," she adds smiling.
As for London. Well, she loves it. "There are superficial things that everybody bitches about - even the English do - like the fact that the telephones never seem to work. That really drives me bananas. It's bad enough that they cost a lot, but the fact that they don't work at the same time really makes me angry.
Those long distance calls to Hollywood, I ventured.
"Are you kidding? From Chelsea to Kensington. It sounds as if you're talking from ship to shore. The men are very nice about it when they come to fix things but it's still not very funny. In a very large country like America you can dial absolutely anywhere at any time and you don't get any flack from anybody.
"But that's only superficial. A couple of years back I said that I could put my young daughter into a London taxi, send her off to a party and be reasonably sure that nobody would chop her up into little pieces before she got there. Despite all the violence in London now I still think that."
Could she do anything else, other than acting, I asked?
"You mean if someone threw acid in my face and I could no longer get up there and do it. What would I do then? I don't really know. I've never thought about it too much.
"The funny thing is I can't bear watching myself on the screen. No more than you would. It's the same thing as when you have a family snapshot of mum, dad and the three kids and the dog. The first person you look at is yourself and you say, ‘Oh, don't I look awful.’ Everybody always does that and when you see yourself 60ft high on screen its 60 times more horrific.
"But I really don't know what I would do if I couldn't act. Still," she added smiling. "I'm basically a survivor, and I'm sure I'd find something. After all, I'm a practical Yankee realist."
