Taking Chances

"/ wanted to give meaning to my own time, to be the unattainable luring love that drives men on, the angel of light, the best of the universe made womankind, the living sacrifice, the end! Shit." -Carla (in Kennedy's Children)

"I never aspired to be a sex symbol, let alone Marilyn Monroe. In the end, trying to be a sex goddess can only bring pain and despair. If the career has not been based on a creative ideal, then where is that solid bit of your life?" -Shirley Knight

Nowhere is that solid bit more apparent than in Shirley Knight's performance as Carla in Children, the Robert Patrick drama now on Broadway about five members of the generation that got lost during the '60s. Carla's dream is to become the next Marilyn. Instead, she ends up an embittered go-go dancer. Knight plays Carla with the depth of understanding of one who might have had that dream herself. She goes beyond Carla's sometimes banal lines to give a poignant picture of a woman whose one distinction has led to defeat. Her performance poses a good question not much heard either now or in the '60s: What is wrong with being beautiful?

Knight, 39, may not have aspired to be a sex symbol, but she is possibly protesting a little too much. After all, 20 years ago she set out for Hollywood from Kansas with little more than cornsilk blonde hair and with legs, so the expression goes, that went all the way down to the floor. Shortly thereafter she was a Sunday supplement cover girl possessed of "a dewy freshness that is a blessing to behold." But Shirley was also a natural actress before cameras. Before long she had earned two Academy Award nominations (for Sweet Bird of Youth and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs).

Shirley was far from tinsel town's idea of a blessing. Calling the industry moguls "blockheads," she stormed East to New York in 1962. "I guess I just didn't want to be Natalie Wood," she told the press on arrival. She studied with Lee Strasberg, won a Venice Film Festival award for her role as a subway seductress in LeRoi Jones' Dutchman, and earned a reputation as a terror on Broadway. Once, to protest what she felt was a director's incompetence, she singlehanded trashed the set of a play. "I'm a practical person, but a bit of me is arrogant, even hostile," says Shirley now.

"My family is right out of The Grapes of Wrath," Knight says. She was raised in the tiny town of Mitchell, Kans. Shirley Enola got her early education in a one-room schoolhouse. Her Oklahoma-born father was the only one in his family to finish grade school, but unlike Pa Joad of Steinbeck's novel, he finally made it big -in oil. Shirley is proud: "He supports everybody in sight now. He has two Lincoln Continentals and a mobile home parked in his driveway."

Gusty Emotions. As a child, she spent Saturday afternoons listening to Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. She decided to become a singer. "When I was ten, Horace Heidt held an amateur talent show in Lyons," Knight recalls. "My mother bought me a new dress from Sears for the show." Shirley sang In My Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown, but her younger sister Gloria won the contest with a rendition of On a Slow Boat to China. Says Shirley: "I cried."

She is still a lady of gusty emotions and fervently held opinions. The dearth of roles for actresses is something of a crusade with her: "Sure women can get leads, like being a silly TV cop, if there is a man there to support them." She even tried quitting. For most of the past five years she has been living in England with Second Husband John Hopkins, an English playwright, playing housemum to her two daughters and doing needlepoint. She has returned, she says, because "I discovered that acting is what I do best." The Hopkins family now lives in suburban Chappaqua, N.Y. Her next role, as a woman who becomes sexually involved with another woman, has been written for her by her husband. The practical side of Shirley might find it a bit discomfiting. The professional Knight can't wait. Says she: "I want to do work that takes chances."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.