Jessica Lange leaves home because of 'Normal'

LOS ANGELES -- Jessica Lange doesn't leave home readily.

"I kept thinking once the kids get a bit older it will get easier, but, au contraire, it gets more difficult."

Home is her native Minnesota, where she lives with playwright Sam Shepard and their two teenage children. As the "kids get more entrenched" in school and friendships, the actress doesn't want to uproot them to join her on location, or be separated from them for any length of time.

But she made an exception for the role of Irma Applewood in "Normal," an HBO movie filmed on location in Illinois last spring.

The movie co-stars Tom Wilkinson as Roy, Irma's husband, who reveals after 25 years of marriage that he's always felt he was a woman trapped in a man's body, and that he plans to undergo a sex change.

Jane Anderson directs the adaptation of her play "Looking for Normal." It debuts Sunday (9 p.m. Central), and airs on the cable channel several times throughout the month.

Lange liked the script's poignancy and humor but found it "odd" on first reading. "I thought it was quite tricky, and in the wrong hands it could have been a disaster."

After talking to Anderson and recognizing the talent of Wilkinson (Oscar-nominated last year for "In the Bedroom"), she signed on.

Lange tried to find "an intimate way" of reaching the heart of the story, about the relationship of a middle-class, Midwestern couple going through extraordinary changes.

Her character Irma, she says, must learn about "the essence of acceptance, or tolerating something which, I think, even at the end, remains absolutely unknowable, foreign and not understandable at all."

Anderson says she needed actors true to their gender. "Tom is a very masculine man and Jessica is an extremely feminine woman. This character is clearly a woman who needs a man for completion. Jessica can play that quality brilliantly."

Lange says working with British actor Wilkinson was "extremely easy. I felt like we got on the same train."

While Roy slowly and bravely becomes female, Irma must rethink the nature of her love for him.

To make Irma's "journey" as interesting as her husband's, Lange wanted her, too, to undergo some subtle physical transformation. It's reflected in a gradual softening of a brittle, "held in" attractiveness into something warmer and more natural.

"Even though she's in love with this man, wants nothing more than to continue the life she has known ... there is an unknown part of her, unknown even to herself ... as she learns life's lessons of acceptance and tolerance and the practice of compassion. There is something in her that opens up and begins to bloom also," says Lange.

The 53-year-old actress had flown to Los Angeles to attend the movie's premiere. Although her plane arrived late, she made time for an interview in a hotel lobby. She was dressed simply in jeans and black sweater.

Lange's acting career took off inauspiciously with the Fay Wray role in the 1976 remake of "King Kong."

In the beginning, she "was so worried, foolishly so, about being considered ..." She pauses for a long moment. Blonde? She laughs. "Blonde, very blonde" is "a nice way of putting it."

That worry was short-lived, killed off by her lauded star turn in another famous blonde role: the Lana Turner part of Cora in the 1981 remake of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," opposite Jack Nicholson.

Subsequently Lange won two Oscars: supporting actress for the 1982 comedy "Tootsie" and lead actress for the 1994 drama "Blue Sky." She also found success on stage, in the classic roles of Blanche DuBois in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and Mary Tyrone in "Long Day's Journey into Night."

Now she prefers to observe. She loves photography -- shooting "whatever is there ... people and places." But she's unsure if she'll try to publish any of her work.

"It allows me a private form of expression, which, as we all know, doesn't exist in film and theater."

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