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Crewson on a role
Saturday, October 17, 1998
During a radio interview here this week, the host asked actress Wendy Crewson to 'do' a little Sue Rodriguez.
It was an unusual choice, requesting someone portray a severely physically and verbally disabled person in such a setting.
Most shows would probably have felt more comfortable airing a clip from tomorrow night's CBC movie At The End Of The Day:
The Sue Rodriguez Story, in which Crewson gives a remarkable performance as the terminally ill Vancouver woman who became
famous for her legal battle for assisted suicide.
But she complied and it's unlikely she was offended. Generally, because after 20 years in the business, she has a thick skin,
a thriving self-deprecating sense of humour and utter pragmatism. Specifically, because she still feels so close to the role.
"I felt such loss when it was over," she told me earlier. "I missed her. I missed being her."
WORLD CLOSING IN
Tax incentives wooed production to New Brunswick, moving much of the story indoors because it was too snowy to depict a West
Coast winter. That change heightens the movie's feeling of watching Rodriguez's world close in on her.
Crewson's isolation was self-imposed. While cast and crew housed and caroused at a luxury hotel, she kept to herself in an
apartment. "No food, no company" were her watchwords.
"And then here's another problem: She goes from a healthy, pretty normal person to, by the end, a skeletal pile of bones.
You can't fake that. Four days before the movie starts, they tell you that you've got the part. So you better stop eating
right then. Because the shoot's only 17 days. So if you stop eating right at the moment that the phone call comes, maybe by
the time the 17th day comes, you've lost enough weight."
No family, either. Crewson's husband, actor Michael Murphy, and kids, Maggie, 9, and Jack, 6, stayed home in San Francisco
lest she be distracted.
"I used to scoff at this kind of stuff because I'm such a hack actress. 'Daniel Day-Lewis stays in the part between scenes.'
'Oh really, does he? Isn't that cute.' Because I can't imagine that. Then you get a part like this and you realize you have
no choice. You're sitting in the wheelchair like that and then, what? You're going to get up and have a coffee and chat with
some people and sit back down?"
Fifteen years after Crewson left Canada for the U.S., she frequently finds herself back working on home soil.
Two weeks ago, she won a Gemini Award for guesting on Due South. She spent Sunday necking with Nikita star Peta Wilson at
a Bloor St. boutique for the movie Mercy, which co-stars Julian Sands.
"I'm just having sex with everyone in the movie. And I have no children in it. I'm not a mother. That's the best part," she
says, of a break from what she calls her "worried wife" roles, such as playing U.S. First Lady opposite Harrison Ford in Air
Force One.
Crewson co-stars with her own husband in Sleeping Dogs Lie, the January CBC movie about disappeared businessman Ambrose Small.
Awaiting feature release are the Vancouver-filmed romantic comedy Better Than Chocolate and the Edmonton-made legal drama
A Question of Privilege. Summer's End, a movie for U.S. cable, took her to lake country north of Orillia.
Her first kick-ass action role, in the upcoming Escape Velocity, was filmed in the Czech Republic.
"I save a spaceship. Those big guns really empower a girl!"
Speaking of girls, it's Maggie who still mourns one role that got away.
NO TO TITANIC
Her mom said no to Titanic.
"The part of, you know, the woman James Cameron had the big affair with? She takes care of the grandmother? It had two lines
in it and it's in the bad part of the movie. It's not in the good part where you get to wear the great clothes and walk around
drinking champagne out of crystal. So I said no and my daughter has never forgiven me. 'Mom, didn't you know Leonardo was
going to be in it, and I could have met Leonardo and I could have met Kate?' Oh dear."
Dealing with death
The Sue Rodriguez story a challenging role for Hamilton-born actress
By STEWART BROWN -- Hamilton Spectator
The sad, serious saga of Sue Rodriguez airs this Sunday on CBC television and Wendy Crewson, the Hamilton-born
actress who plays Rodriguez, says she's never had a role as intense.
"Unless you're Meryl Streep, I think you get these kinds of things only once in a lifetime," Crewson, 42, says on the phone
from her home near San Francisco.
Rodriguez is the Victoria woman, stricken with amylotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS (known as Lou Gehrig's Disease), whose
legal battles for the right to die earlier in this decade drew international attention.
The emotional two-hour CBC film covers Rodriguez's struggle to change the law prohibiting doctor-assisted suicide in Canada.
Her case was turned down, both in the British Columbia and Canadian supreme courts, on the basis that the existing law protects
vulnerable people.
But Rodriguez's challenge renewed widespread debate on the issue of mercy-killing.
Ironically, Rodriguez's death on Feb. 12, 1993, was assisted by an anonymous physician, with MP Svend Robinson in attendance.
It was the emotion of Rodriguez's final years that touched Crewson most vividly, particularly the relationship between Rodriguez
and her son, Jesse.
The actress sensed this before she was even assigned the role.
"They were taking a long time to decide after auditions," she recalls.
"I know what happens in those situations. They cast it two days before shooting and it doesn't give you time to do any homework.
"So I threw caution to the wind and went to an ALS clinic in San Francisco, following doctors on their rounds and meeting
the patients. The ones who became the focus of my interest were the mothers, a lot of them my age.
"I watched the (CBC) tape The Journal did on Sue's life. I read books about her life and the books she was reading at the
end of her life -- The Seat Of The Soul -- and a number of books on death and dying."
When filming began last November in New Brunswick, Crewson purposely left her family -- actor/husband Michael Murphy and children
Maggie and Jack, now nine and six -- at home.
"I'd always believed you shouldn't take a role home. But on this one, I really had to keep in character lots of time.
"Jesse is about seven when Sue gets the disease and nine when she dies.
"How do you say goodbye to your children?
"That was very hard, facing that every day, and within all that, still keeping her sense of humour and sexuality and point
of view.
"She still wanted to live and yet she was making this horrendous preparation for this ultimate farewell.
"It was a very emotional time. It makes me emotional just thinking about it."
Story apart, the weatherman threw producers a curve.
"They assured us New Brunswick never has snow until well after Christmas. So we had about eight feet the day we arrived! It
didn't look anything like Victoria. We had heaters on the lawn."
Crewson's co-stars are all Canadian, except for young Miko Hughes, playing the son, Jesse Rodriguez, painfully trying to cope
with his mother's terminal illness.
Al Waxman impresses in a laid-back portrayal of John Hofsess, the former Hamiltonian who headed the Victoria-based Right To
Die Society of Canada.
Hofsess's diligence in the Rodriguez cause eventually leads her to sever ties with him.
Carl Marotte plays Rodriguez's second husband, while Patrick Galligan portrays Svend Robinson.
The real Robinson, incidentally, has a walk-on part in the movie, as a reporter who asks Rodriguez a question in a media
scrum.
Crewson remains diplomatic on the movie's subject of doctor-assisted suicides.
"I don't feel morally equipped to judge," she says. "If a person has decided to have an abortion or a physician-assisted
suicide, that's been tough enough for them. Those are enormous issues and all you can do is support whatever decision they
make, I think.
"I do think that Sue Rodriguez made the right choices for the right reasons.
"She's such a piece of me now that I feel very protective. I feel like we've had a whole shared life and I never met her.
All you can hope for in that situation is that she would look down and think that we were doing it the right way."
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