| Accent is just part of actress' challenges for film Author: Arthur Salm Alice Krige, a native of South Africa, had some heavy-duty pretending to do in her role as Jeff Bridges' wife in Alan J. Pakula's new film "See You in the Morning," which opens in San Diego on Friday. First there was the accent. Although she now speaks what she calls "RP," or Received Pronunciation (also known as "BBC English"), she grew up in Port Elizabeth, where residents speak in a unique accent difficult even for South Africans to understand. "It's an Eastern Cape sound," she explained recently during a stopover in San Diego to promote the film, "and it has an odd inflection pattern; it rises at the end of each sentence. It's curious -- it makes everything sound like a question. So as you can imagine, it was quite a problem when I first went to England and did Shakespeare, with its iambic pentameter -- rising at the end! Everyone got very confused." "See You in the Morning" is set in New York City, but Krige (pronounced KREE-guh) says that, because her character is the widow of a concert pianist, she didn't try for any particular New York accent. "She's not really a New Yorker -- it's just sort of an Eastern sound, more Westchester than anything else, I guess. We figured that she had spent a lot of time traveling with her first husband on the Continent, and that it'd be all right if it was a generally cosmopolitan sound." But more than a convincing accent, she says, is involved in finding the character's voice. "In the costume fitting I was given a pair of Banana Republic boots, and the fit made me walk in a different way, centered my weight in a different way -- and it made me feel American! And at the same time, Rick (Ericson, her dialogue consultant) was saying to me that Americans talk from a much lower place than the English, who talk from the chest area. "It's interesting to work in an accent. The acting school where I trained did a lot of work with masks, and it's incredibly freeing -- it's as if your personality is wiped out. And in an odd way, acting in an accent is similar. In fact, I've never acted in my native accent." Although Krige and her husband (director Paul Schoolman) do not yet have children of their own, she has two in the film, played by Drew Barrymore and Lukas Haas. She plays a good mother, very close to her kids. How much pretending was involved in that? "I liked Lukaas and Drew," she says, "I really liked them; they're two bright, lovely, talented people. We had a lot of fun and did a lot of things together; Lukas and I went to the Empire State Building together, and we ran around photographing together, and had meals together, so it was very easy to feel loving and protective toward them. "And also, in a weird kind of way, responsible for them, because it's a terribly hard job to be a child actor. I remember one day we were shooting a very important sequence, and they had to take a math test. They were doing the test for 10 minutes, then rushing to the set and doing a scene, and then going back while the setup was being changed to answer another two or three questions. I felt such admiration and sympathy for them, because it's hard." "See You in the Morning" is very much a contemporary love story, about two people trying to forge a loving family as much as maintain love for each other. Krige, who has degrees in both drama and psychology (and whose mother is a clinical psychologist) had more than a little to say on the subject. "I find family for myself a very important anchor. I came from a very close, very stable, very loving family. These days there seems to be so much stuff thrown at us, and the world changes so fast, there's such mobility, that the family structure, in urban society, anyway, has been fading away. The nuclear family is no longer a very stable institution. "There's so much pressure on so many people ... And because you no longer have the extended family, all you have is the nuclear family. That's a very small circle of people to absorb those shocks. When we had grandmothers and grandfathers and cousins nearby, we all supported each other. It was a much more broad-based group, and an individual could take on the pressures more easily -- not to mention the fact that there were fewer of them. So the nuclear family today has become so fragile because it alone is subjected to those pressures." When a family breaks up, Krige says (as happens to Jeff Bridges' first family in the film), everyone is hurt, everyone wonders how he or she failed -- and without the support of an extended family it's an especially grueling experience. "Human relationships are the measuring staffs by which we acquire our own sense of worth. And maybe this whole rising wave of divorce, and all the attendant suffering and confusion -- well, maybe people are looking around and thinking, 'Maybe we should try and make this work.' The picture doesn't give answers; it has lots of loose ends. But it examines the problem in a compassionate and often humorous way." The San Diego-Union Tribune April 18, 1989 Copyright 1989, 2008 Union-Tribune Publishing Co. |