The lady's not for turning

Stockard Channing, a star of 'The West Wing', had a conventional upbringing so taking up acting was like running off to join the circus for her mother but she's stuck with it and prospered, writes FIONA McCANN

REMEMBER RIZZO? The ballsy teenager with the soft heart who stole the show from Sandy in the musical Grease? Or Abigail Bartlet, the chief-of-staff-defying president's wife who secretly medicated her husband as he ran for office in The West Wing? What could a teenage rebel or a US First Lady have in common with Lady Bracknell, the stern, gold-digging dowager from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Stockard Channing, that's what, the New York-born actor who, though still best-known to Irish audiences for such on-screen appearances, is currently in the country rehearsing Rough Magic's forthcoming production of Wilde's famous comedy.

In person, Channing is strikingly petite and even a little shy, not exactly characteristics you might immediately associate with Lady Bracknell, but the steel she brought to Rizzo and Bartlet, and the glint of which makes occasional appearances in conversation, will certainly come in handy. Not to mention Channing’s connections with Wilde’s native country: her maternal grandfather set sail from Cork some time around the turn of the 20th century and her mother grew up an Irish Catholic, with all the rules and repression that went with it.

“It wasn’t just the Irish Catholic thing,” says Channing. “She was someone who’d been through the Depression . . . Having gone through all that, there was a real sense of the cold touch of panic, of holding on. So she was a bit of a control freak herself.” She smiles. “So maybe there’s a touch of my mother in Lady Bracknell.” Neither Lady Bracknell nor Channing’s mother would have particularly approved of the choice of profession by the young Susan Antonia Williams Stockard.

"When I was a kid, to be an actor meant you wanted to be some kind of an artist, which was completely threatening to someone of my mother's personality or background. She and my father had paid these hefty bills of schooling, so for me to run off and join the circus was panicking to her." Channing, who took her stage name from her first husband's surname, though they divorced soon after she began to pursue her passion for acting, was not to be swayed. Her doggedness was abetted by her coming of age in the 1960s, a time when the old values were being turned upside down. "What I discovered was you could be anything you wanted to be. You didn't have to be what your parents had set you up to be. It was something I had to actively discover for myself and it seemed very willful and rebellious at the time," she recalls. "Some people couldn't take the ride and collapsed and fell off the tracks, and some of us ate it up." Her independent choices didn't necessarily make for an easy life: in her early years she struggled to make a living, but refused to give up. "I really couldn't do anything else." In fact, Channing was close to 30 before she got her big break, thanks to director Mike Nichols who cast the then relatively unknown actor alongside established stars Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty in his comedy, The Fortune.

“I went from zero to 60,” is how Channing describes the instant attention that ensued. “It was extraordinary. I still had clothes that I’d worn in college because I’d no money to buy new clothes, and there I was suddenly plonked into this Hollywood world.” Her famously womanising co-stars were disappointingly respectful, however. “They never flirted with me which was really too bad. I really was like this kid sister person, which kind of galled my sense of self a little bit.”

Yet Channing had enough on her hands, first coping with the sudden limelight, then cast out soon after when the film, and the ones that immediately followed, failed to make money. "That was a real great life lesson, because I had this whole new world, and then it was all taken away from me." She went from feted newcomer to persona non grata. "Nobody really wanted to see me about anything, because I was a firecracker that had spurted in the sky and died out, and I was asking 'Where did everybody go? I just got here!'"

One role that did come her way was that of teenager Betty Rizzo in the high school musical Grease, a role which Channing landed when she was already 33. Yet despite the fact that it went on to become the highest grossing musical film of all time, "it really didn't make much difference to my career". So Channing went back to the stage, what she calls "the foundation" of her work, and apart from a couple of failed sitcoms that she says she never felt comfortable doing in the first place, worked solidly in theatre for the years that followed. It was through her role as the well-heeled art collector's wife Ouisa Kittredge in the John Guare play, Six Degrees of Separation, that she found herself back on screen, through the film of the same name which followed.

Yet one of her most beloved screen characters is still Abigail Bartlet, wife to Martin Sheen's Jed Bartlet in the long-running hit television series, The West Wing. This despite the fact that Mrs Bartlet was only written into the series when Sheen's character became so popular it was suddenly decided "he should have a wife". Channing was initially rushed in to film a one-off episode, where Mrs Bartlet attends a state dinner with her husband. "I had to get into this evening gown which was spilling out at the top, a nightmare, and I like to prepare all this stuff and I was very cranky," she recalls of the last minute nature of her introduction to the show as she was rushed through make-up without any character preparation.

“I was thrown onto the set, and I’d never met Martin before, and I’m waddling along in this evening dress and he’s sitting in white tie and tails sneaking a cigarette. And I said to him: ‘Hi. We’ve never met but I think we’ve been married for about 35 years’.”

And so it remained for the series’ seven-year run, Channing and Sheen making a compelling team with a credible on-screen chemistry that often stole the show. From Ouisa Kittredge to Abigail Bartlet and now to Lady Bracknell: so much for good roles being hard to come by for women of a certain age in Hollywood. But Channing maintains that she’s been lucky in that regard. “Unfortunately, there are a lot more roles for men, and there always have been,” she says stoically. “I try not to think about it because you can’t do anything about it. It’s a truth of life.”

At 66, however, it doesn’t seem to have stopped Channing, whose career defies certain clichés about aging as a woman in the acting profession. Which doesn’t mean she’s immune to the pressures to stay young – she admits to having work done to keep herself looking youthful. “I do all these little bits and bobs that people do, I’m as vain as everybody else,” she says, but adds the work she has done to keep herself slim is more about health than vanity.

She also acknowledges the benefits that come with age, which removes her from the kind of scrutiny younger stars now come under, particularly when it comes to the now ubiquitous red carpet parades. “It’s tougher for younger people, young women, because they have to do all of this. That’s the rite of passage. At my age, I can just go in the back door: you’ll never see me on a red carpet again if I can help it, but boy if you’re in your twenties or thirties, that’s what you’ve gotta go through.”

There’s a winning vulnerability Channing reveals at times like this, when she admits how she struggled with the glamour aspects of the actor’s life. “The whole red carpet business, I never quite succeeded at it, you know.” And despite her protestations of vanity, there is little hubris as she puts down her successful four decades in acting to luck.

“There are a lot of talented people out there who didn’t have the opportunities I had, and I was aware of that. I’m not putting myself down, but that’s what life is like, you play it as it lays.”

For now, it lays with Wilde’s enduring Lady Bracknell, a woman she describes as “crafty and brainy and powerful and a bit mad”, though not, she suspects, particularly happy. And Channing? She smiles, and there is finally a hint of pride as she describes much of the source of her own hard-earned contentment. “For better or worse, I did it on my own terms,” she says, and her smile broadens. “I’m not going to say I did it my way, because I can see a banner headline . . .”

The Importance of Being Earnestruns at the Gaiety Theatre from June 2th to 19th