Arts & Entertainment

A Career-Spanning Conversation With Jessica Lange

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Jessica Lange has made an enviable career out of playing tortured women on stage and screen — Blanche DuBois, Frances Farmer, Edith Bouvier Beale, to name a few not written by Ryan Murphy. She’s just a Grammy shy of an EGOT. And yet, spend a couple hours reflecting on her work with her, as Vulture critic Matt Zoller Seitz recently did, and you’ll find her still somewhat haunted by reviews of her 1976 debut in King Kong. “Nobody took me seriously. They still don’t,” she tells Matt. “Well, maybe a little bit more.” Coming off a masterful cameo as Truman Capote’s mother in the latest Feud, Lange will next star on Broadway in Paula Vogel’s Mother Play as, yes, the titular matriarch, whose story the audience follows from 30 to 80 years old (played by Lange all the way through). It’s a role she’s shaping in real-time and, at 74, she says that marks a career first. “Nobody had ever presented me with that possibility before — to actually create the character.”

—Dee Lockett, culture features editor, New York    

Made for Her Jessica Lange’s haunting role in Mother Play, like so much of her work, is one only she could perform.

Photo: Mark Seliger
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