Sissy Spacek: The Girl You Love To Hate!
“I go for characters that have a bit of oomph to them,” says the wispy blonde in a sort of crackly, husky voice. “They have to have something special; they have to have something different.”
Well, you might say that Carrie fits all the specifications for 27-year-old actress Sissy Spacek, since the character fit right in with the promotional ad endorsed by the film’s director Brian De Palma. The new master of the chiller-spine-tingler flick, De Palma’s advertising campaign promised: “If you’ve got a taste for terror, take Carrie to the prom!”
Unfortunately for Carrie’s high school class, the prophecy, held true and Time magazine recently described the little lady as “a naive nymphet who wreaks apocalyptic revenge at the senior prom on the high school classmates who have persecuted her.”
Actually Sissy, who studied with Lee Strassberg in New York for almost a year, claims that Carrie is not so distant from anyone of us, that there is always a scapegoat in every class who is made the butt of jokes, who everyone loves to hate. Though Sissy calls herself “an All-American girl”—and her real-life cheerleading-prom queen background testifies to it—she does have memories that helped her create Carrie in such a spell-binding way.
Her model was a high school classmate and Sissy remembers: “She was from a poor family and wore weird clothes, but she was really beautiful. People made fun of her, but not as much as they did of Carrie. Dorothy filled the space in my class that Carrie did in hers, and I based a lot of the character on her. I tried to get friendly with her in school. She called me Elizabeth [Sissy’s given name] and we sat together in a class. I did it out of curiosity to know what a person like that was like, and she was really neat. We just sort of had this little friendship that was apart from my other friends. At the end of the year, she wrote in my yearbook, ‘Elizabeth, you’re always so nice to me.’ The words were misspelled, but I was really devastated, because our friendship had meant something to her.”
Perhaps to try to make amends for the hurts and pains her friend Dorothy endured throughout her high school years, perhaps in part to prove that she was more than just a flash in the pan. Sissy actively sought out the role of Carrie—even though she was up against stiff competition. “Brian De Palma had told me I wasn’t his choice for the part, that I would probably be playing Chris, the bad girl in the film,” Sissy says. “But I decided to show up at the screen test, anyway. I rubbed Vaseline in my hair, and got as funky as I could. All the other girls and guys were so neat looking, and there I was in a little blue sailor dress I had worn in the seventh grade. The make-up people grabbed me as I walked in and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to work on you,’ but I convinced them not to. I was told later that day that I’d gotten the part.”
Not only had Sissy gotten the part, but she went on to win the National Society of the Film Critics Best Actress award and scoop up an Oscar nomination at the same time. All this was pretty heady stuff for a little girl from Quitman, Texas—though if you ask her now, she says that even as a child she wanted something special out of life, to do something more than the run-of-the-mill. The daughter of Virginia and Eddie Spacek—he was the county agent for the Department of Agriculture in Quitman—Sissy claims that even at a tender age she was “always into personal tests. I thought if somebody else could do it, I should be able to do it. I became a rodeo rider, and I remember being at the gate before the barrel race and just being terrified. But then once the race started, you were gone and all you had to do was hang on.”
As for her hopes and dreams, Sissy claims: “I was never shy, I had friends, but I think I was always my own best friend. I always felt a certain duality in myself; I think most people do. There was my outside self, the self that knew what I was supposed to do—to go to school, to be real precious, how to work people. And then there was my inside self that knew how I really felt about things, that knew the real dreams I didn’t tell anyone about, I always had a metal fishing-tackle box that I kept under my bed with my secret things in it. I’m looking for it right now.”
Part of Sissy’s secret dream was to become a singer and after her family found out that her older brother had leukemia, they allowed her to visit cousin/actor Rip Torn and his wife Geraldine Page in New York. The reason for the summer trip was to help Sissy “get out from underneath” her brother’s illness, but after she returned home to finish her last year in high school, her brother died and New York seemed a good enough place to forget the pain and sorrow that lingered at home. So once more. Sissy arrived on Rip Torn’s doorstep and this time she recalls: “It gave me strength being Rip’s cousin. I thought he, was a wonderful actor, and that maybe it ran in the family. When I first came here in 1967, he set up a meeting at the William Morris Agency. I had my guitar, and a lot of men filed into a room, and I started to sing my heart out. Then they filed out, and they filed in again, and they told me to keep on plugging and come back in a few years.”
She did keep on plugging and though she eventually turned to acting instead of singing. Sissy was making her mark early on among the New York acting crowd. Of course, exposure to a whole new group of people at the Torn-Page residence didn’t hurt. But Sissy laughingly claims it didn’t really help in the beginning: “I was exposed to all these incredible people! But I had no idea who they were. I remember once singing a song at their house, one I’d written about my brother, and one of the lines was: ‘I feel a soft touch while I’m sleeping.’ Afterwards, somebody named Terry Southern came up and asked me if I was a virgin. I was so shocked that anyone would ask such a thing! So I said, ‘Of course, I am. What do you mean?’ Only years later did I Find out that he was working at the time on the movie of Candy.”
What Terry Southern saw in Sissy became more and more obvious as she matured, while still retaining that little-girl innocence. First she was cast in Prime Cut, a thriller starring Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman, but she really called attention to herself in her next film with Martin Sheen, Badlands. Within a very short time she had won over Badlands’ director Terrence Malick with her warmth and-innocence. He says: “Though she was very charming, she didn’t seem aware of her charm, how it affected other people or how to use it. Her intelligence comes out in her affectionateness. It’s an intelligence about knowing what people want and need. You felt a core in her that you trusted. It wasn’t all performance. You felt safe hands with her. And you could imagine that her life goes on off-screen.”
Pretty incredible praise from one of today’s hottest directors, but though Badlands won critical acclaim. Sissy sat on the sidelines for two years waiting for the next right role. Of course, she made good use of the time off—she married Jack Fisk, a talented young art director she met while making Badlands. They set about making a life for themselves and Sissy ended up working for Jack as a set decorator on Phantom Of The Paradise. That’s when Brian De Palma first found his lead for Carrie. While working on Paradise, he became enthralled with the young actress and decided she was going to be in his next film. Sissy claims: “I became fascinated with the way De Palma worked. Brian helped me enormously. He helped show me how a girl can be made to feel beautiful or plain and shy by the attitude of others.”
As for the future, well, everything seems to be opening up for Sissy. Two films—both Robert Altman movies, Three Women and Welcome, To L.A.—are being released right now and Sissy claims she’s being offered more and more good scripts every day. As for accepting any more horror-type films. Sissy says: “Not all of my parts have been creepy. But they have been pretty strange. You have to admit to yourself how you look, and maybe those are the parts I look right for. We all have our own boundaries and limitations. I know one thing, though—I don’t want to do any more Carrie-type parts. I’ve done that. There are many things I want to do in life, and I just don’t have time to spend doing things I’ve already done.”
THE END
—BY MICHELLE ANNE WALTERS
See Sissy in Lion’s Gate Film’s Welcome To L.A.
It is a quote. SCREEN STARS MAGAZINE JULY 1977
