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| w magazine: raising julianna |
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From an unconventional childhood to TV diva-dom, Julianna Margulies graduates to the
big screen.
“I don’t have dark secrets. You’re not going to find out one day that I was
a stripper and a heroin addict on Avenue B,” Julianna Margulies says. “And if I
was,” she adds,“I probably would have told you.” Being without dark
secrets, though, doesn’t mean that Margulies lacks a colorful past. She remembers a
tough childhood spent traveling throughout Europe with hertwo older sisters and a
divorced, free-spirited mother living in a van or sleeping in boardinghouses on horsehair
cots.
Now, at 30, Margulies views her mother as chic and ahead of her time. But in France and
England, where Julianna was dropped haphazardly into school, her mother’s swathed
scarves and purple-dyed Birkenstocks were something of an embarrassment.
“I would beg her not to get out of the car when she came to pick me up,” the
actress recalls. “There were times when we’d get off a plane, I’m entering
the fifth grade, I’ve got no idea what country I’m living in, school’s
already started, there’s a dress code, I don’t have the proper clothes...”
This is not a sob story, Margulies insists. “I look back and realize how lucky I was.
It instilled a sense of willpower. And I had a wonderful education.”
It also instilled an outsider’s watchfulness and the ability to read other
people’s secrets- skills she has brought to her Emmy-winning portrayal of
“ER”’s tough and enigmatic Nurse Carole Hathaway. Now, in “The Newton
Boys”, she costars with Matthew McConaughey as a woman filled with dark secrets. Set
in the 1920s and based on fact, the story involves a single woman who abandons her son to
follow Willis Newton (McConaughey) who with his brothers robbed more than 80 banks and
pulled off a $3 million train heist. The Newtons (Ethan Hawke plays Jess, Vincent
D’Onofrio plays Doc and Skeet Ulrich is Joe) consider themselves not so much thieves
as businessmen.
The $27 million film was shot in Texas: 81 locations in 57 days, with the crew battling
the weather while Margulies, who has sorrowful dark eyes and wild, curly hair, also
battled humidity and frizz.
“Luckily the tornadoes hit while we were inside,” says writer-director-producer
Richard Linklater (“Dazed and Confused”), who optioned a book about the Newtons
written by co-screenwriter Claude Stanush. He picked Margulies for the film after seeing
one episode of “ER”.
“She has a great period face,” he says. “She has the kind of glamorous
angles a silent-movie star might have had. And she’s like an athlete. I’d say
‘fearless’ is the word. She doesn’t need a lot of coddling.”
“He was so willing to learn, so respectful of my technique and my training,” she
says. “I really admired that, because he was in a position where he could have told
everyone just to fuck off, and he didn’t.”
Margulies started at Sarah Lawrence, the put in a stint in New York as a bartender and
waitress before hitting off-Broadway. She hasn’t forgotten the hard times, she says-
even if they lasted only a year, coming to an end four years ago with the debut of
“ER”. And even the she owed her success to a TV-style miracle. When Nurse Carole
Hathaway first appeared, in the pilot episode, she was declared brain-dead following a
suicide attempt. But the character was brought back to the series by popular demand, and
without explanation.
During the show’s first two years, Margulies got caught up in a whirlwind of acclaim.
Now she kicks herself. “I forgot to be grateful,” she says. As she speaks, she
has plenty to be grateful for. Early this year, NBC agreed to pay Warner Bros. Television
close to $13 million an episode for “ER” over the next three years. Then a few
weeks later, WB handed over $1 million bonus checks to the show’s five original
stars- including Margulies, who says she finds the situation surreal.
In spite of the adrenaline rush she still gets from doing a good scene, though, Margulies
admits to having trouble relating to lines like “Scalpel!” and
“Intubate!” She’ll do two more years on “ER”, the head back to
New York. Hollywood, she thinks, places “too much emphasis on money”, and she
fears that success has created a cocoon.
“When you’re in New York, no matter what you do you have to pass the homeless
person on the street, and you have to smell the urine coming up from the sidewalk.
There’s a reality to it. I don’t ever want to get to a place where I don’t
know what the subway costs.”
-Louise Farr
© W magazine, April 1998
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