Twitch Upon a Star (48 page)
Read Twitch Upon a Star Online
Authors: Herbie J. Pilato
“Well, then do one! I think that would be great!”
At which point, Lizzie explained how London's historic Globe Theatre had invited her and Foxworth to perform in Edward Albee's classic play,
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
In 1966, writer Ernest Lehman had adapted this monumentally depressing play, about a bitter, middle-aged couple who use alcohol as a pawn in and to fuel their already angry relationship, into a feature film directed by Mike Nichols, and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. But Lizzie thought that tackling such a play with Fox-worth would have been “totally crazy”:
I'm not sure that two people who really care about each other should do that play. I think it would be better to rehearse it, do it, go home, and then get really kind of attracted to the person that you're working with, so that you're on an entirely different level than to having to live and rehearse with the person doing that play. And when the Burtons did the movie ⦠that's different because they didn't have to all be on the same set at the same time.
Needless to say, they turned down Globe's invitation to do
Woolf
, but years before they were on the same set at the same time in
Mrs. Sundance
, the 1974 TV-movie in which she played
Etta Place
opposite his
Jack Maddox
. They met and fell in love while working on this film which ultimately served as a sequel to the 1969 big screen flick,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(in which Katharine Ross portrayed
Etta
).
A review of the film appears in the book,
The Great Western Pictures
(Scarecrow Press, 1976) by James Robert Parrish and Michael R. Pitts:
It was a catchy gimmick to produce a semi-sequel to
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(1969), with Elizabeth Montgomery, the queen of the telefeatures, as the title figure. The intriguing premise had
Etta Place
(aka
Mrs. Sundance
) in a ticklish situation when she learns that the
Sundance Kid
did not die with
Butch Cassidy
but is waiting for her at their old hideout. What makes the set-up so dangerous is that bounty hunters are aware of the planned reunion of the famed outlaw and the schoolteacher of a small Colorado town. Elizabeth Montgomery, very much Robert's daughter, offered a strong performance in this flashy role, giving an enriched characterization in a genre far removed from her days as the star of the teleseries
Bewitched
.
Once more, Lizzie's on-screen performance mirrored her off-stage life, and this time, Foxworth successfully played into the scenario. Although his
Maddox
character was a cagey, weak-spined character who first viewed
Etta
as a way to get out of jail free, he was big-hearted and fell prey to her charms, just as had Foxworth with Lizzie.
Etta's
love may have made
Jack
heroic and strong, but they were always a team, partners for humanity, again, much like Lizzie and Foxworth would be for various charitable causes.
After
Mrs. Sundance
, Lizzie and Foxworth would co-star in two other TV films:
Face to Face
for CBS in 1990 and
With Murder in Mind
for in 1992.
Face to Face
was their shining moment, debuting January 24, 1990 under the prestigious
Hallmark Hall of Fame
banner:
Diana Firestone
(Lizzie), a brilliant paleontologist, traveled to Africa with a team of assistants in search of the remains of a three-million-year-old man, a potential discovery that would rewrite the anthropological textbooks.
Tobias Williams
(Foxworth) was a rough and ready miner who explored the same territory for meerschaum (a special clay used for making smoking pipes). Sparks flew as they both claimed digging rights in Kenya's high country. She considered him the epitome of a Philistine, narrow-minded, devoid of culture, and indifferent to art. He patronized her “naı¨ve” outlook on life and regarded her as better suited to an ivory-towered academic institution than the African bush. Compromise was out. Occasional attempts to be cordial took mutual turns for the worse. But despite their stubbornness and fiercely independent manner, their hostility gradually changed to reluctant respect and finally to unexpected romantic love.
Lizzie and Foxworth may have played themselves on
Password
, but
Face to Face
marked the first time since 1974's
Mrs. Sundance
that they performed together on screen in character. “It's not the usual kind of romance you see on television,” he said of
Face
in a press release for the film in 1990. “It's a mature love story, with two very interesting and very independent characters whose relationship changes from mutual animosity to mutual respect.”
The movie was filmed on location in remote Kenya, on the banks of the Engare Odare River. When additional laborers were needed on the set, ten Maasai warriors were hired. Interviewed around a campfire near her tent (her home for the three weeks of filming), Lizzie talked with CBS publicity about the African location shoot. “The innocence, the beauty, the harshness,” she said. “It's all here. This is life of another dimension.”
Certainly, it was a life that was foreign in terms of her teen years growing up in Patterson, New York, her young adult life in New York, and her later days in Beverly Hills. But she felt compelled by
Face
when, upon first reading the script, she said: “It was so good you couldn't bear to turn the page because you were afraid the next page would disappoint you ⦠I kept thinking, âI hope it stays this good.'”
Face
may have also jogged memories of her youth on the family farmâand even
Bewitched
.
Robert Halmi, Sr. served as the film's executive producer. Jim Chory was the co-producer and actor Lou Antonio directed and also cast himself in a small role. Antonio had first worked with Lizzie on
Bewitched
for an episode called “Going Ape,” which debuted on February 27, 1969, in which he played, of all things, a monkey who was turned into a man (the show's slight acknowledgement of the first and most popular
Planet of the Apes
film that had premiered approximately one year before).
Around this same time, Antonio directed episodes of ABC's
The Flying Nun
and
The Partridge Family
(later, NBC's
McMillan & Wife
and
McCloud
, while more recently,
Dawson's Creek, Numbers,
and
Boston Legal
). In 1983, he even directed Lizzie's friends, Carol Burnett and Elizabeth Taylor, in their hit TV-movie,
Between Friends
.
In
With Murder in Mind
, which premiered on May 12, 1992, Lizzie and Bob Foxworth worked together for their third and final time on screen within a scripted format.
Mind
was a fact-based story in which Lizzie played a real-life realtor:
Gayle Wolfer (Lizzie) was shot and nearly killed by a client (Howard Rollins, best known from the TV version of
In the Heat of the Night
, 1988-1994; NBC/CBS). Physically and emotionally scarred from the incident, Gayle remains determined to find her attacker, which she finally does at a county fair. But he's a part-time auxiliary policeman who's established his own security company. The case eventually goes to trial, but at first no one believes her because of his position in the community.
Through it all, Foxworth played
Bob Sprague
, Gayle's longtime live-in boyfriend, which is exactly what he was in Lizzie's real life. He was strong, calm, resilient, logical and practical; loving and family focused; supportive, independent with a strong sense of self even though he was living with his boss. He didn't put up with too much. But he was honest, a straight shooter, and not afraid to speak his own mind. Once again, all qualities which Fox-worth also possessed.
In 1989, Lizzie expressed her theories on acting, addressing the more specific challenges of performing comedy as opposed to drama.
Laughing on screen is more difficult than crying for a lot of actors. It's quite a challenge to laugh on cue in front of the camera. Both laughing and crying are hard for me. There must be something that's easy in the middle of that. Comedy is more difficult on many levels. If you have ten people come into a room and say “I just saw a dog hit by a car in the street.” Those ten people are going to go, “Oh, my God.” You're going to get the same reaction, presumably, from those ten people. But if someone comes into the room and tells those same ten people a joke, you may get ten different reactions. Some may think it's funny; some may not think it's funny. Some may think it's moderately funny. So you're not hitting the same emotional chord with everyone (compared) with something that might be a very sad kind of event.
Lizzie's friend and fellow-actor Ronny Cox co-starred with her in
With Murder in Mind
, and nearly twenty years before in
A Case of Rape
. He has an upbeat theory on acting that he believes they shared:
The fun is in the work. The fun of acting is reacting ⦠playing off of someone else. I'm not a proponent of rehearsing lines with certain voice inflections or physical gestures. That's distracting. The line can be, “I love you” and I can make it mean “I hate you,” depending on how I say it. Therefore, it's presumptuous to decide ahead of time how you're going to say a line ⦠until you know how (the other actor) is going to say their line. That becomes the be-all and end-all of acting. I have little patience for actors who over-strategize how they're going to say a line and how they're going to move while saying it. That's not acting. That's robotics. I hate to
see
“acting” and that's what always happens when you see that kind of work. It's technically very proficient, but lacking in the conveyance of truth. I'm one of the few actors who will vociferously defend American actors over British actors in that respect. Brilliant actors are brilliant actors no matter whether they're British or American. But run-of-the-mill British actors are more technically proficient. They work out how they're going to say the lines. Technically they're way ahead of [American actors] but they don't “invest” in a scene as much as less technically proficient American actors. For my money, if you take the very best of the American actors and the very best of the British actors, the British actors will have far superior technique and American actors will have a far superior grasp of the character! I also don't have much patience with actors who improvise their lines. Acting is like a great piece of jazz. The key to it is listening. You listen to what's being said and allow that to manifest how you're going to reply to what's being said. And I think that's the thing that Lizzie and I were able to do quite well.
It's Cox's brand of passion and love for his craft that contributed to his solid bond with Lizzie while they filmed
A Case of Rape
. In fact, they became so close Cox says “some people on the crew thought we might be lovers.” But such was not the case. His wife Mary died in 2006, and they met as children:
Just so everyone knows. I'm a widower now; but I was the most married man you've ever seen in your life. I never had another date. She was, is, and will always be the love of my life! But having said that, Lizzie and I were very close; I was hanging out in her dressing room all the time ⦠and I mean all the time. It paid off for us, I think, in the acting (department), because there was this familiarity where we could be at ease. And that ease translated into playing scenes with each other.
In 1979, five years after Lizzie starred with Ronny Cox in
A Case of Rape
, her friend Carol Burnett appeared in the ABC-TV movie,
Friendly Fire
. This acclaimed film was based on the real-life story of Peg Mullenâfrom rural Iowa who worked against government obstacles to uncover the truth about the death of her son Michael, a soldier killed by American “friendly fire” in 1970 during the Vietnam War.