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Home > People Index Page > Anne Archer
Leading Lady
Actress Anne Archer Has It All: Elegance, Sophistication, Wit,
A Wonderful Family, And A Taste For Fine Cigars
by Paul Chutkow
Anne Archer has no liking for Hollywood flash
or glitz. She and her husband, businessman/TV producer Terry Jastrow,
live in a quiet, rustic corner of Brentwood, on a country lane
surrounded by ranch houses, stables, horses and trails leading back
into the wilds of a large canyon. From the outside, their house has
the look and feel of a lovely country cottage, such as you might find
in the south of France or on a hillside in Tuscany. A high wooden
fence surrounds their yard; in front there is a simple wooden
gate. When it opens, there is Henry, Archer's devoted white Labrador,
greeting a guest with nothing more menacing than a warm slobber to the
wrist.
The day before, at lunch in Beverly Hills, Archer was dressed to kill,
in a smart designer suit, her hair freshly styled, her makeup just
so. She looked ready to audition for a role as a high-powered '90s
businesswoman. Not today. On her home turf, she's kicked back and
comfy, dressed in black slacks, a gray polo shirt and a hooded black
sweatshirt. Her hair's a bit mussed and she's wearing almost no
makeup. Which only accentuates her stunning natural beauty and the
intelligence in her eyes.
By Hollywood standards, Archer has performed what amounts to a
miracle. In Fatal Attraction, she played Michael Douglas'
betrayed yet understanding wife, earning an Academy Award nomination
in the process. In two Tom Clancy blockbuster hits, Patriot Games
and Clear and Present Danger, Archer won popular acclaim as
Harrison Ford's savvy, all-enduring wife, balancing her career as an
eye surgeon with the difficult demands of being married to a CIA agent
being hunted by Irish terrorists and Colombian drug lords. In Robert
Altman's Short Cuts, in which Archer's character worked as a
clown, the actress revealed a gift for quirky, offbeat comedy that
made you wish Ernst Lubitsch and Cary Grant were still around.
Through these performances, Archer has established herself as one
of the most respected--and classiest--actresses in the movie
business. Remarkably, she has done so without becoming known in the
business as an egomaniacal pain-in-the-arse prima donna. Even more
remarkably, Archer has managed to maintain a happy, enduring marriage
and a stable family life for her two sons, Tommy, now an adult, and
Jeffrey, 11. She's even a devoted hockey mom who hauls her younger son
off to games at 5 a.m. So when we settled into her den to talk about
her life, her work and her love of fine cigars, one question was
uppermost in my mind:
How in heaven's name has Anne Archer managed to have it all in the
crazy world of Hollywood without losing her balance, her dignity or
her sense of humor?
"It's in the genes," she says with a laugh. "My mother started out on
Broadway at the age of 17. My father was also in the theater in New
York and later made movies. So I learned some hard lessons about
Hollywood when I was still very young."
As Archer talks, it becomes evident that she had a delightful,
somewhat tumultuous childhood and an upbringing that admirably
prepared her for the capriciousness of Hollywood, the inevitable highs
and lows of an acting career and the cruel dilemmas that the movie
business reserves for beautiful women with minds of their own. These
days, Archer sometimes feels a bit trapped; she is tired of being
typecast as "the good wife." As the accompanying photos make clear,
she has a whole other side, a sexy, daring side that urges her to kick
aside that good wife image and sprawl out on tables in the most
fetching sort of way. This is the serious actress looking for
growth, this is Archer's artistic streak searching for fresh oxygen
and stimulus. It is a search that, like her grandmother and her mother
before her, she knows only too well.
"My grandmother always wanted to become an actress," Archer says. "She
was eccentric, volatile, mischievous and full of fun." She was also
very beautiful and a talented dancer; by the age of 18 she was giving
dancing lessons in San Francisco and performing in clubs under the
stage name of Billie Lyon. At one critical moment in her young life,
Archer's grandmother got on a train to Los Angeles, to see a Hollywood
agent. This was a radical, rebellious act for a young woman of her
generation, and on the way south, she was overcome with fear and
guilt. Reaching Los Angeles, she turned around and came straight home,
without ever seeing the agent. Her acting dreams ended right there.
Archer's mother, actress Marjorie Lord, had a similar dream, and she
was not about to be deterred by fear, guilt or anything else. She
started dancing lessons at the age of three, threw herself into the
world of art and, at 16, left home bound for New York and Broadway and
determined to see her name in lights. She made a name for herself in
the New York theater and met and married John Archer, a dashing young
actor who had several lead roles on Broadway before going to Hollywood
to make movies. Anne was born a few years later, in 1947. But the
strains of maintaining a household with two working actors proved to
be crippling; Anne's parents divorced when she was only four.
"My mother was always in a show and on the road a lot. We communicated
by letter. But we remained deeply attached," Archer says. The demands
of her mother's acting career meant that Anne and her older brother,
Gregg, were often left in the care of their grandmother. "She really
raised us," Archer says. "Mom played the father role. Grandma was
Mom."
At a very early age, Archer made up her mind that she, too, would
become an actress. "I think I stated it pretty clearly at about age
six," Archer recalls. "I was in a totally artistic world. I was
putting shows together [for family and friends], performing, learning
songs, playing the piano. I lived for ballet. I took dance class
everyday. At one point, I thought I wanted to be a ballerina."
Through a hit play on Broadway, Archer's mother came to the attention
of comedian Danny Thomas, the creator and star of Make Room for
Daddy, one of the most popular shows in the then-emerging field of
television. Actress Jean Hagen originally played Thomas' wife on the
show, but when she stepped down, Lord took over--in what began as a
big break and wound up as something of a curse. She had a great
seven-year run in the role and became a beloved figure in millions of
households across America. But in a cruel Hollywood irony, her success
as Thomas' wife wound up stifling her career and her development as an
actress.
"It restricted my whole career," Lord says in a telephone
interview. "It very quickly happens that people start to typecast you
as a wife. And because I was so identified with Danny, after I left
the show many actors refused to have me as their wife on screen or on
TV. I was very disappointed with the way my career went after the
Danny Thomas show. But the theater was my salvation and I began to see
different values in life. Maybe there was a big hand watching over me,
seeing to it that I didn't have too much success."
For young Anne, watching her mother's career hit a wall was a harsh
lesson about an actor's life and about the fickle nature of the
Hollywood powers-that-be--a lesson that helped armor Archer for her
own career as an actress. "In acting, 99 percent of the time you're
rejected," Archer says. "And people in this town drop you flat when
you're no longer hot. I saw that happen to my mother. I saw how
superficial the town was. There were some hard years there for my
mother. And I swore I'd never think I had it made. You really have to
be prepared for the ups and downs of this business."
Still, despite the many problems she saw her mother and grandmother
encounter, Archer was irresistibly drawn to actors and their
unconventional lives. "When I grew up, holidays were the time to
invite all the lost souls to the house for Thanksgiving or Christmas
dinner. Every actor who was on the road and not going home came to our
house for dinner, and we sort of took care of everybody." It was
during such festive occasions that Archer came to a realization:
"The artists are the special people. You could see their faults and
you could see their egos. But they brought a fresh take to every
moment. They brought energy and humor and variety. They just weren't
your average people; they don't live life like everyone else. Theater
people are just more fun, more eccentric, in a really heartwarming
way."
So Archer threw herself into the pursuit of her dream. She worked on
singing, on playing the piano; in the privacy of her room she would
become Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady, complete with the English
accent. By the age of 12 she was doing her own renditions of nightclub
torch songs. Her pals at school in Los Angeles became swept up by rock
and roll, but Archer's heart was in a different time, to a different
beat.
"I loved the blues. I liked the minor chords. Everything I played was
always minor chords. I just loved that sound. It was my
sound. My friends talked constantly about The Beatles and The Rolling
Stones, but that just wasn't my world. I was listening to Billie
Holiday, old Sinatra, Ray Charles, Mahalia Jackson--and I loved Nat
King Cole."
When Archer was 11, her mother married a San Francisco theater
producer named Randolph Hale, who would later open Los Angeles' first
theater in the round. But the mainstay of Archer's existence remained
her mother. Lord encouraged Archer in her singing, acting and piano
playing, but also conveyed the importance of keeping her values
straight and balancing her acting ambitions with the more
important and lasting things in life, such as family.
"I preached that to her," Lord says. "I always felt that who you
are as a human being is more important than success in the theater or
whatever people see up there on the marquee. At one point I remember
saying to her, 'You know, my dear, you have to learn to live a full
life. Otherwise, you won't have anything to bring to the theater.'"
By the time she was a teenager, Archer had heard the message loud
and clear. "All I wanted was to grow up and have a relationship and be
loved by somebody. And be a big, successful actress and a great
actress at the same time. I was a kid daydreaming. Creating
fantasies. And it really started making me nuts at about age
12. That's puberty. Your hormones are talking, but you gotta sit it
out for about eight more years. As a result, I was a very unhappy girl
in high school. I was confused. I paid lots of attention to boys--and
yet there were no boys in my life."
But nothing derailed her ambitions, or her dreams. After she graduated
from Marlborough High School in Los Angeles, Archer remained in
Southern California and went to private colleges, taking
classes at Pitzer College and working in the Scripps theater
department. She threw herself into her acting classes and participated
in all the school plays and productions. Toward the end of her years
at Scripps, she fell in love. Hard.
"He was older, handsome, mysterious, from a very, very wealthy
blue-blood family in Los Angeles, and he was extremely eccentric,"
Archer says. "In fact, he was a bit of a lunatic. But he loved history
and culture and he opened up whole new worlds for me." After
graduation, they got married, and Archer had her first son,
Tommy. Right away she came to understand, in a more profound way, her
mother's message about the difficulties inherent in trying to balance
an acting career and a family:
"If I hadn't been married, I'd have gone to New York and tried to work
in the theater," she says. Instead, with a husband and baby, Archer
chose to stay in Los Angeles. Through her mother, she found an agent
who sent her scripts and sent her out on interviews. She got her first
big break almost immediately. In 1972, she read for Jon Voight and
director Charles Eastman and got a lead role in The All-American
Boy, a major picture. The movie bombed, but Archer was on her way.
Over the next several years, Archer did theater, some smaller movies
and a bit of television, and she continued to study acting. Along the
way, she worked with some of the most prominent leading men in
Hollywood: William Holden, James Coburn, Sylvester Stallone and Ryan
O'Neal and, in later movies, Gene Hackman, Donald Sutherland, Sam
Elliott and Joe Mantegna. Still, Archer was a woman divided.
"Most actresses went through a pretty wild fling of it for the first
10 years," she says. "And they were up and down with boyfriends and
live-in relationships and a different kind of living. But I had this
kid and from the moment he was born I just felt this huge change in
me. I felt a woman of the world, I felt that I understood life and I
felt permanently changed. I also felt very protective of my child. The
word 'tigress' would definitely apply."
Archer ran into a problem: It was the 1970s and directors weren't
looking for urbane, sophisticated women of the world. "The kind of
movies I would have been ideally castable for were really made more in
the 1940s--sophisticated comedies with sophisticated actresses and
snappy dialogue. I had this womanly quality, but it just wasn't
fashionable at that time," she says. "When I came on the scene, what
was fashionable was that you had to take all your clothes off and
expose your breasts, which I was extremely conservative about. In the
'70s, that's what everybody did. And the kind of star, the quality
that was looked for, was kookiness. You know, Goldie Hawn. Or you
played a hippie and were very eccentric, like Karen Black."
There was another aspect to the problem as well: the curse of
beauty in Hollywood, something Archer's mother and countless other
actresses before and since have faced.
"You're pretty, and you thought it was your plus, your ace in the
hole to get you in the door,'' Archer says. "But it was really the
thing that kept you limited as an actress." As she explains it, the
studios are always trying to wedge actresses into narrowly confined
niches. "If you're pretty, you've gotta be a sexpot and take your
clothes off. So they want to cast you as a hooker. Or you can play the
elegant, untouchable one and still take your clothes off. By way of
choices, that was about it. Or, of course, you could be like Farrah
Fawcett. You know: furniture."
During these early years of her career, Archer was having her
frustrations at home as well. After six years of marital ups and
downs, she decided to call it quits. Ever seeking balance and harmony,
Archer managed to make it an amicable split. Today, she says, she
remains good friends with her ex-husband (whom she prefers not to
name)and he remains an excellent father to their son.
In the months after the breakup, the last thing Archer was seeking was
another relationship. But in her acting class she met an aspiring
actor named Terry Jastrow. "We did scenes together and he looked upon
me as sort of a--I don't want to say 'mentor,' that's not the
word--but I was fully in the business and working all the time. And so
I educated him about the business part of acting. I treated him as a
friend."
One day, Jastrow told Archer that he was going up to Stanford
University for a football game. He was going to do a little work there
and he was inviting two others from the acting class, David and Cheryl
Ladd, to come along. Would Archer like to come? Archer was not
sure. Then the Ladds backed out and Archer made up her mind: "Terry
was heartbroken, so I said, 'OK, I'll come.'"
Jastrow had mentioned he was doing some work for ABC Sports at the
game and Archer assumed he was working as a gofer, just to make a
little money to help pay for his acting classes. Once she arrived in
San Francisco, however, she got quite a shock. "Terry has this guy
pick me up at the airport and drive me to the stadium. I don't know
what's going on. Then this guy takes me into this television truck and
there's Terry directing the entire show. For the first time I
saw he wasn't a gofer; he was the boss of the whole thing! It was
hysterical."
What Archer soon learned was that Terry Jastrow was one of Roone
Arledge's wunderkinder and one of the youngest directors in the
history of ABC Sports. The young man she saw in that TV truck bore
little resemblance to the tentative, fumbling young man she had seen
struggling in acting class. "Terry was different now. He was so...in
control. In acting, he was sort of looking to me for what was going
on. And now I was on his turf." They started dating, later moved in
together, got married and several years later had a son, Jeffrey. They
have been together 18 years, and with Jastrow, Archer says she has
found the necessary balance for which she had long been searching.
"There used to be a joke at ABC: There were no red lights in Terry
Jastrow's life. And it's true today. He can't fail. He just makes it
so right. I'm probably sane today because of him. He's very
enthusiastic, very dynamic." Jastrow is now president of Jack Nicklaus
Productions, which handles the legendary golfer's many business
ventures and also produces broadcasts of golf tournaments.
At one point, Jastrow was the producer for Howard Cosell's sports
magazine show, "Sports Beat," on ABC, and Cosell introduced him to the
joys of smoking fine cigars. Archer quickly took to sharing a cigar
with Jastrow, usually after dinner and preferably in some lovely
tropical place. "Cigarettes bother me," she says. "But cigars are
different. You don't inhale, the tobacco is good, there are no
chemicals and it's only an occasional thing. So I like it. It's a
social, relaxing event for me, not something I turn into a habit."
As with a great wine, or a great Port, Archer believes "you have to
pay a certain kind of homage to smoking a fine cigar." She and Jastrow
are part of an informal group of aficionados who meet from time to
time at cigar friendly restaurants around Los Angeles. In Jastrow's
home office, they have installed a special ventilation system so he
can smoke in comfort. Archer says she has only two rules about cigar
smoking: "Not in the car or in the bedroom."
At holidays and birthdays, Archer often gives Jastrow cigar
accessories, such as cutters and ashtrays. Once she gave him a picture
of himself smoking a cigar. On another occasion she gave him an
engraved silver cigar case. His favorite smoke: Montecristo
No. 1. Archer prefers a smaller Montecristo. "There are other cigars
I like better; I just can't get them here," she says with a laugh.
Archer says she never smokes alone; for her, enjoying a fine cigar is
something social and convivial, and usually festive. "We're pretty
much a cigar smoking group, at least the men are," she says. "I'm
usually the only woman smoking. I'm just very comfortable with cigars;
I always have been. It's relaxing, it tastes good, it's just very
enjoyable. And I love to blow smoke rings!"
For Archer and Jastrow, cigars are often an important part of a
night out in Los Angeles. They like to go to George Hamilton's wine
and smoke shop, for instance, or have dinner at Drai's, one of their
favorite local restaurants. The food is good, and after dinner, Drai's
has a pleasant place to sit and enjoy a cigar, Archer says. Above all,
though, smoking a cigar is something she likes to share with her
husband. "Ninety-nine percent of the time I smoke a cigar, I smoke it
with Terry," she says. "And we love to smoke outdoors in the evening;
I especially enjoy it in a tropical setting like Hawaii or the
Caribbean." The sea breezes, the wine, the cigar after dinner; now
there's a formula for keeping a marriage young.
Living with Jastrow and her two sons, Archer has become accustomed
to being the only woman in a world of males. "What happened to the
ballet and cutting out paper dolls? I miss all that femininity a
little bit," she says, "but I do enjoy being the only woman,
too. Because you do get adored when you're the only woman in the
family. You get a lot of attention and you don't have to share it with
anybody!"
Being so feminine and yet so comfortable around men may well have had
an important impact on Archer's career. When she read for the part of
Michael Douglas' wife in Fatal Attraction, the producers and
Douglas immediately saw the fit. Here was a woman who was smart,
compassionate and very attractive, just the kind of wife Douglas'
character would hate to lose. Working with Douglas, actress Glenn
Close and director Adrian Lynne was the high-profile acting challenge
Archer had spent so many years preparing for; being nominated for an
Oscar as best supporting actress was just icing on the cake.
"The time I was making Fatal Attraction were the happiest years
of my life, without question," she says. "I'm my happiest in the
actual moments of acting when it's going well. That's the happiest I
ever feel. It's an aesthetic high that's better than sex. When the
film was so recognized, and I got those accolades, that was a really
fun time. And I don't think I realized how rare it is; I took it in
stride. I see now that those are rare moments in life."
Then came the Clancy movies. Archer took what might have been a minor
character and brought depth and intelligence to her role as the wife
of CIA agent Jack Ryan, played by Harrison Ford. "I knew Harrison and
I would be dynamite together," Archer says. "I knew that on the screen
we would really look like a couple." But playing the role twice, she
also knew the danger: The role could stamp her indelibly--and
destructively--as the good wife, just as her mother had been stamped
as the wife of Danny Thomas.
"I knew it could be death and it was exactly as I predicted," she
says. "I got a lot of attention from those Clancy movies, but they
really stamped me deeper into that mold." Some of the attention she
got, though, was especially welcome. Gregg Archer, a pilot with Delta
Airlines, had always taken his sister's acting career rather
lightly. But he and his pilot buddies are fervent Clancy fans and she
says those two films made her a hero to them.
Robert Altman's Short Cuts gave Archer a welcomed break from
playing the sympathetic wife, and so did Mojave Moon, a film
she recently finished with Danny Aiello. It's a romantic picture in
which Archer plays a naive dreamer living in a trailer camp in the
California desert. "I call her my ice cream girl," Archer says. "She's
sensual, tasty. And she has a Monroe quality about her, lovable yet a
bit off-center. She'd just love to have somebody love her. And that
happens in the movie."
Still, Archer yearns for more. "Women characters don't have to be
only victims, prostitutes or wives. What about great stories about
interesting people who just happen to be women? And now there's a new
twist: putting women into roles where they have to behave like a
man. We're missing the point. Let's just create a rich character who's
had a rich experience."
At the close of the interview, as Archer and Henry get up to
stretch, one wonders if Archer has been tempted to try her hand at
writing the kind of sophisticated roles she would most like to
play. She has shied away from the idea. In the early 1980s, she and
Jastrow wrote, produced and starred in their own movie,
Waltz Across Texas, and while she feels it was a worthwhile
experience, she's not eager to try it again.
Still, one can hope. As articulate as she is and with such a wealth
of insight into Hollywood, actors and the perils of beauty, one can
picture Archer writing a wonderful screenplay. Perhaps about a
thoroughly '90s woman out on the edge and trying to have it all, as
actress, wife and mom.
Or how about this: a warm-hearted mother-daughter saga about three
bright, beautiful American women from the same family. Each would be
from a different generation and yet each would pursue the same dream
of finding creative and personal fulfillment through the craft of
acting. An intimate look at Broadway, Hollywood and the crazy, often
tumultuous lives and loves of a merry band of actors and artists, "the
special people." Sounds like a winner.
Paul Chutkow, a freelance writer based in northern California, is
the author of Depardieu, a biography of French actor Gerard
Depardieu.
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