Basic Spacek: Keeping Life Tidy

Uncanny--and that's just for openers. Sensual, wistful, fragile, spooky spring to mind, too. Just shy of 27, Sissy Spacek has already played such a variety of roles so smoothly that the only constant in her personality appears to be mutability.

In Badlands, she brought an unlikely but saving sympathy to the part of a Midwestern high school girl on an interstate crime spree with her boy friend. Currently, she is raising goose bumps, and even bringing a tear or two, as the put-upon heroine of Carrie, Brian De Palma's nightmare chiller about a young girl with telekinetic powers. For a little change of pace, she shows up as a topless housekeeper and part-time hooker in Welcome to L.A. (TIME, Nov. 22), winning the broadest laughs in a hard-edged social satire directed by Newcomer Alan Rudolph. Says Robert Altman, who produced Welcome to L.A. and proceeded to star Spacek in his own, just completed Three Women: "She's remarkable, one of the top actresses I've ever worked with. Her resources are like a deep well." Says De Palma: "Sissy's a phantom. She has this mysterious way of slipping into a part, letting it take over her. She's got a wider range than any young actress I know." Her range has never been better demonstrated than in Carrie's split-second transformation from radiant prom queen to blood-drenched avenger. It is a piece of acting virtuosity that elicits one of the deepest frissons contemporary movies have to offer.

Spacek has a good perspective on all these encomiums. When she was 18, her brother, a local track star, died of leukemia. "My parents told me, 'You don't know how long you'll be around. You have to use your life for the things that matter to you.' Still, I've been trying not to take myself too seriously."

Spacek lucked into her first movie part--in an overwrought thriller called Prime Cut--just five fast years ago. Before that, her professional experience had amounted to some high school theatricals back home in Quitman, Texas (she failed to qualify for the senior play, however); posing for a perfume ad; and landing a one-line part on a John Lennon-Yoko Ono record album. Prime Cut, which featured Spacek as a piece of hollow-eyed jailbait, did at least manage to get across a little of her country-fresh, city-smudged sensuality. Spacek (the name is Czechoslovakian, and is pronounced to rhyme with "basic") looks a little like a White Rock girl who slipped off the soda bottle to spend a summer in the old Haight. That quality of naivete and simultaneous sophistication is an excellent tool for an actress, one that Spacek is clearly adept at using; although she insists "I don't think of myself as an actress. I am an actress, among other things."

Hot Tub. Some of the other things include keeping an orderly house up in Los Angeles' Topanga Canyon with her husband, Art Director Jack Fisk. She and Fisk first met when they both worked on Badlands. "We were getting along so well," Spacek remembers, "I thought it couldn't last. He was the first guy I ever really relaxed around." The marriage has flourished, despite some rather odd exigencies. During Carrie, Art Director Fisk had to seal his wife in a coffin-shaped box and bury her under several layers of rock.

The Fisk home is "basically a little tract house," converted by Jack and Sissy into something funkier. Now the place is full of skylights, doors, windows and, outside, a gigantic hot tub made of redwood and heated by gas. Says Spacek: "It's a good way to loosen people up at parties." Guests in the tub are most likely to be artists and sculptors from the neighborhood--the Fisks do not run with the movie crowd--and the house will be spanking clean the morning after a social occasion.

"I can't really start to concentrate on anything else until I get things orderly," Spacek confesses, and this kind of dedicated fuss-budgetry gives her a strong center of gravity whenever celebrity threatens to throw her off balance. Says she: "The main thing is I don't want to lose myself. If I get hit by a car, I want to go out knowing I returned my neighbor's cake pan."

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