Patti LuPone talks about upcoming memoir in USA Today
Patti LuPone talks about upcoming memoir in USA Today
Patti LuPone talks about upcoming memoir in USA Today#1
Posted: 9/9/10 at 12:51pm
There's a little article and video interview on USA Today's website about Patti's upcoming memoir. She also talks briefly about Women on the Verge (and she's VERY excited about it).
Don't cry for Broadway baby and author Patti LuPone
NEW YORK — Patti LuPone is not known for playing soft and cuddly characters. But over a Caesar salad and oysters at a posh riverside restaurant, the Broadway star is all smiles and giggles as she dishes about her first book, Patti LuPone: A Memoir (Crown Archetype, $25.99).
Mind you, the woman who created the title role in Evita and re-created the equally intimidating Momma Rose in a 2008 revival of Gypsy— winning Tony Awards for both performances — is no delicate flower.
Don't get LuPone, 61, started on the 7 p.m. curtain time instituted at some shows on select days. "There's a structure that comes with knowing you have to be on stage at 8 and (on matinee days) 2," she says. "Seven o'clock— I can't stand that."
On the subject of her spouse of 22 years, Matt Johnston — they met when he was a camera assistant for the 1987 TV movie LBJ: The Early Years, in which LuPone played Lady Bird Johnson— and their 19-year-old son, Joshua, LuPone is sunnier but similarly blunt. "I have a great husband and this great kid. I lucked out. I'm not a lonely, bitter old (rhymes with witch)."
Out Tuesday, Patti LuPone— written with Digby Diehl, also co-author of autobiographies by Esther Williams and Natalie Cole— offers the same mix of frankness and warmth. Though personal and professional battles are charted, the tone is, like LuPone's conversational style, more chatty than catty, littered with earthy, often self-effacing humor.
Beginning with her childhood on New York's Long Island as the only daughter of a colorful Italian-American family, the book traces LuPone's journey to the prestigious Juilliard School, her pre-Evita career and the triumphs and trials that followed. Included is her seven-year relationship with fellow stage and screen veteran Kevin Kline, her "first great love" and enduring friend, of whom she writes: "We couldn't keep our hands off each other." When his name is mentioned, though, LuPone grins and pantomimes zipping her lips.
"Theater has given me a unique life," she says. "By investigating other people, I try to understand myself and humanity better. It's a noble profession, and I'm lucky to be part of it. That's what I wanted to write about."
Probably the most ignoble experience documented in the memoir, and clearly the most traumatic, is the original London run of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical adaptation of Sunset Boulevard, in which LuPone starred as faded screen siren Norma Desmond. The production was plagued with offstage drama, which peaked in 1994 when LuPone learned from her agent, via a tabloid report, that Glenn Close would replace her on Broadway.
"The Sunset chapters wrote themselves, but at the end, I was creeped out," LuPone concedes. "The injustice still feels present. I had some wonderful times doing that show, but I must have had karmic issues to work out."
LuPone has been more forgiving of her sharp-edged characters, dating back to Eva Peron, whose political speeches she devoured. ("She had that little ping in her voice, like Sarah Palin; you can't help but listen, even though it's like a mosquito in your ear.")
However off-putting the role in question, she reasons, "if you don't imbue her with compassion, the audience won't care. You want them to be horrified by you, to laugh with you, to be frightened, to be sympathetic. You take them on a journey."
LuPone's journey will continue with another Broadway musical based on a classic film, Pedro Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which starts previews in October. She also shot Kathryn Bigelow's star-studded HBO pilot The Miraculous Year, due next year. And she wants to start taking notes for another book.
"There could be a Part 2," she says. "I'm not dead yet. There's the title: I'm Not Dead Yet."
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Patti LuPone talks about upcoming memoir in USA Today#2
Posted: 9/9/10 at 3:37pmMs. LuPone is looking Good !
Patti LuPone talks about upcoming memoir in USA Today#2
Posted: 9/9/10 at 3:54pmHer description of the book as "more chatty than catty" is spot on!
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