The Grail Came Parcel Post

By Gerald Clark

There is plenty to cheer in Kate Nelligan 's acting in Plenty

The way most actors tell it, success is the Holy Grail, achieved only after pain, struggle and years spent waiting on tables between auditions. Kate Nelligan, on the other hand, has to think of other conversational gambits. To her the Grail came parcel post, wrapped in bright holiday paper and crowned with a bow the size of a best-acting award. She has, in short, never had to pant after a part and rarely received so much as an unkind word from a reviewer. What she has experienced is the acclaim of the London critics, and after her new play, David Hare's Plenty, opened off-Broadway in October, almost embarrassingly ecstatic reviews in New York as well.

This week, when Plenty opens at Broadway's Plymouth Theater, there will doubtless be more gushing. Though the play has flaws, Nelligan seemingly has none. Her performance is so unique, mesmerizing and shattering at the same time, that it is hard to imagine anyone else in the role. She plays Susan Traherne, who as a girl of 17 was dropped behind German lines in France to work as a British courier. The character is never able to recapture the purity of her wartime zeal. As the play follows her through the next 20 years, shifting backward and forward through time, her personality hardens into madness, and she brings ruin not only to herself but her husband, who is movingly played by Edward Herrmann.

"It's a great role," says Nelligan.

"Susan has great power and is one of the most truly glamorous characters in the world, very sexy but saying to the world, 'If you touch me, I'll kill you.' Four years ago, when I was 27 and doing the part in London, I overplayed the power. I now allow more light in the power and permit myself early scenes. You tend to carry things lighter as you get older."

One of the keys to Nelligan as an actress, says Joseph Papp, whose Public Theater brought Plenty to the U.S., is her "tremendous self-confidence," and that, apparently, is something she has always had. Brought up in London, Ont., where her father worked for the city parks system, she seems to have been bottle-fed selfesteem. "There were six children," she says. "But my mother always made me feel that I would do something important, which stood me in good stead." She cannot remember a time when she did not work hard, and when she was only 16, she entered the University of Toronto. That is where she discovered the theater.

As Nelligan describes it, there was no flash of light when she first stood on a stage, no epiphany or dreams of glory. Just the opposite: she was comfortable. "I didn't feel elated or ecstatic, just at home." She wanted to stay in such a pleasant place--the theater, that is. In her second year, she auditioned for London's Central School of Speech and Drama, which was seeing applicants at Yale. She was accepted, but then ran into a problem: insufficient funds.

At this point, Nelligan did what probably no actor had ever done before. She sent letters to 150 patrons of the arts in her home town and elsewhere, describing her qualifications and asking for a subsidy. Surprisingly, a local family came through with her tuition and she was off to England. Her next major hurdle was her accent, and she decided not only to sound English, but to be English. "I wanted to work in Britain, and I did what was necessary. Once I made the decision to adopt that speech, it became mine." Three weeks after she graduated from the Central School in 1972, she landed a job with the Bristol Old Vic Company.

Her link with Hare, who was then a fledgling playwright in his mid-20s, dates from 1973. Although they were apparently never involved romantically, they established a professional bond, and she has held the lead in four of his stage and TV plays.

Acting in Hare's plays has given her a showcase allowed few other actresses. She has been unlucky in her films, which include the execrable Dracula (1979) and Eye of the Needle (1981). She received more attention in the BBC production of Emile Zola's Therese Raquin, but it is her work for Hare that has brought her to the first rank. Plenty indeed might have been written for her. "Kate's best when she is playing single-mind-edness and strength of moral feeling," says Hare. She has, in addition, an acting range few of her contemporaries can match: she is cerebral and sensual, and her smile, which is always quite dazzling, can both chill and warm. Whatever character she plays she invests with a strength of mind and passion, and probably the only role she would have difficulty playing would be that of a totally weak woman.

If you tend, as she says, to carry things lighter as you get older, you also tend to look back, as well as forward, and that is what Nelligan is doing now. A few years ago, she was saying that London is the only place in the world for an actress to be. At 31, however, she is disenchanted with England and longs to work in America. "In retrospect I'm not sure I should have gone to the lengths I did in becoming English," she confesses. "I gave up too much. I sacrificed relaxation, humor, kindness, classlessness, democracy."

In 1981 Nelligan returned to North America, reclaimed her native accent and became involved with an American film technician.

She also made the first feature film in which she played an American.

Scheduled for release in March, Without a Trace is loosely based on the tragic story of Etan Patz, a six-year-old boy who disappeared on his way to a Manhattan school three years ago. When Plenty ends its run March 27, she wants to make one more film to establish a career as a movie actress. She then wants to take time out to start a family. "I intend to have a family," she says, firmly, indisputably. "I must. I will."

And, on the record so far, she will do it, and anything else she wants to do. Her friends can start knitting booties. Gerald Clarke. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.