Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time.
I came out of repertory theater, where I worked 50 weeks a year, and I loved working with the people.
Well oddly enough, I liken the years at MGM, and I was there for about eight years, to doing stock, what we used to call repertory or stock, playing a whole bunch of different roles.
I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time.
I was a repertory actor, which meant that I did a play every week. I was a different character every week; for a year, I was doing 40 or 50 characters.
My first summer at a repertory theater, I was making $20 a week. I was making a living, as far as I was concerned, and I was doing theater. And next season, I made $40 a week. But I don't think anyone in my family would have considered that making a living.
This is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism.
I was trained in the repertory theater. You would do Moliere one night and Sam Shepard the next.
I used to do a lot of repertory theater. You're playing different roles all the time, and I love that.
With repertory, you had to play all these different characters. The range of roles is really what I fell in love with, every night getting to become somebody different. That was my idea of acting, getting to be part of the company and a family.
Corporate Hollywood thinks I'm a geek to go back and do theater. They don't understand why I don't want to be a movie star, why I'm not pursuing Mel Gibson's roles.
Having that college-town atmosphere with a live repertory company available was a real gift. I found myself gravitating toward the theater from about the age of nine. I guess it was the environment that got me started.
I like variety, which is frustrating. But I've always been picky. I was afraid Pirates would be too much like Twentieth Century, broad comedy. But my agent talked me into it. I was spoiled by the range of a repertory theater.
