First lady of charm and grace

Tuesday, July 29, 1997
By BRUCE KIRKLAND -- Toronto Sun

She was the estranged wife to Tim Allen in the megahit The Santa Clause and now she's the First Lady to Harrison Ford's ass-kicking U.S. president in Air Force One.

But charmer Wendy Crewson does the modesty shuffle as we saunter across Bay St. to lunch at Bistro 990: "Jeez," she teases, "maybe we'll see some famous people there."

Trim and radiant in a tight white summer dress, flashing a megawatt smile, the 37-year-old Hamilton-born, Ontario-raised Crewson is all star power. Most people just don't know it yet.

"Let's be frank, I don't think I ever will reach that level," Crewson muses about the kind of Hollywood success attained by superstars such as Julia Roberts.

"And the fame I see down there (in the U.S.A.) is nothing I would wish on my worst enemy. I have seen such appalling behavior of people, especially when you are around famous figures like Harrison, Richard Gere (with whom she shot Primal Fear, although her role was excised in editing) or Tim Allen."

At the Air Force One premiere in Hollywood last week, Crewson was swept up in a crowd surging towards Ford, who had flown in from Hawaii for the occasion. People were nice enough to her until Ford was near. Then hysteria set in. "There's that horrible sense that you are going to be crushed and suffocated by this crowd."

That experience puts things in proper perspective for this career actress, who shares a home in San Francisco with her husband, actor Michael Murphy, and their two children, seven-year-old Maggie and four-year-old Jack. Their mutual reaction to surviving Hollywood: "You leave town!"

Crewson is serious. "Fame means you have to give up the ability to go to the grocery store in sweatpants with your hair a mess and the kids screaming -- I wouldn't give that up for the world!" That is real life.

Yet it leaves her in that limbo of quality performers who are valued as support players but never asked to headline major Hollywood films. "I would love to work a little more and work my way up a little bit," Crewson admits, "and I wish the parts were a little better and that I would get an offer now and again. But I do not want 'them' knowing who I am. I do not want 'them' knowing who my children are."

Crewson looks at Ford with admiration. "He does a good job of protecting his family. He does a good job of keeping that drawbridge up and the moat full. It's like the character in Air Force One. There he is protecting his family, to an extreme. And what is more attractive in a man than the ability to protect his family?"

In Air Force One, a Wolfgang Petersen thriller, Ford plays a president forced to save his wife and child on board his presidential plane, which has been taken over by hard-line terrorists from the former Soviet Union. Crewson is generating good notices, even from critics who don't buy into the film.

But she's giggling about spending much of the past few hours telling female interviewers about Ford's pucker power. Seems that it's the first question they ask. I don't but Crewson offers the answer anyway: "Good, real good!"

More important, and more interesting to this interrogator, is Ford's awesome power as a sex symbol at the age of 55.

"There something in him, an old-fashioned Hollywood quality like Cary Grant or Gary Cooper," ventures Crewson. "He's devastatingly sexy. He's very smart. He's pretty sensitive. He can be very funny. And yet he's not vain about it all.

"And he's vulnerable, in a way. You don't worry that he's going to be mean. He likes women and that's a really helpful thing."