Patti LuPone

LuPone in Les Miserables.

DON'T CRY FOR ME
For Patti LuPone, Italian-American success story, life goes on.

By TOM SOTER

for IL CAFFE, 1991

Patti LuPone likes to take chances. Trained as a singer and dancer, she planned to pursue an operatic career. But when she failed her singing audition at New York's Julliard, she turned right around and applied for entry in the school's new drama department. She got in, and four years later, was one of only 14 (out of 36) students who graduated.

Twenty years on, she is still taking chances. In 1989, she jumped from the theater to television to co-star in an unlikely weekly ABC-TV series, Life Goes On . As Libby Thatcher, she is a former singer who gave up a successful career to care for her son, a child with Down Syndrome. The series, now in its third year, went on to introduce another recurring character, atypical for TV: the boyfriend of Libby's daughter, a young man carrying the AIDS virus.

Unusual? Yes, but so is LuPone, a third-generation Italian-American who has essayed everything from dictator's wife in Broadway's Evita to detective's suburban sister in the film Witness; from tubercular street singer in the London company of Les Miserablesto president's wife in the TV-movie,LBJ: The Early Years. "Being Italian has helped me because I have this immediate release of emotion," notes the actress, who lives in California. "That can get in your way because this country is pretty whitebread. I've always felt my career should be in Europe. I look very European. My style of performance is more European than it is American: it's raw and big and emotional."

"There's something about Patti's abandon," observed Howard McGillin, one of her co-stars in Broadway's Anything Goes, in 1988. "She's not exactly what I'd call a cerebral actress. I mean, she's very bright and she certainly has a lot of technique behind her. But she really is completely uninhibited and throws herself into the performance with abandon. Patti is a kind of brassy dame. There's this rebellious streak in her a mile wide."

That streak goes back nearly 40 years, to 1953, when LuPone took her first dance lesson. The youngest of three children growing up in New York's Northport, Long Island, Patti was the only daughter of Orlando Joseph LuPone, a school principal, and Angela Louise ("Patti") LuPone, a graduate library administrator. Her mother was an opera buff – LuPone is also the great-grandniece of the famous Italian soprano Adelina Patti – and her father apparently liked tap dancing. While principal of Ocean Avenue Elementary School, LuPone senior introduced an extracurricular dance program. The four-year-old Patti suddenly discovered her niche. "I was tap dancing," she recalls, "and I fell in love with the audience, and that was that."

LuPone loved performing. In high school, she sang in the concert choir and madrigal group, played tuba in the marching band and cello in the school orchestra, and even sang and danced in South Pacific. While taking private voice and piano lessons, she also developed a dance act with her twin brothers, Robert and William. Dubbed The LuPone Trio, it competed at benefits around town.

Through it all, she was reminded sporadically of her Italian heritage. "My grandmother LuPone used to bake fresh bread every day, and my grandma Patti, we would just say, 'Pizza,' and she'd make a pizza. It was wonderful," she says. "My father's side of the family was from the Ubruzzi region, and my mother's side of the family is from Palermo, but we didn't talk about it a lot. When my parents were growing up in America, it wasn't cool to be Italian. So everybody strove to be American. And so the language was not taught to us. I'm upset by it. I wish I had learned the dialect they were speaking. But it was a time in America where it wasn't cool to be Italian." Nonetheless, she adds, with one of her frequent laughs, "I became more Italian than my mom. I'm proud of my heritage, and I just think it's in the body. You can't really deny it."

She had her share of personal trouble: her parents separated when she was 12, and the three children stayed with their mother, who encouraged them in their career choices. Robert became an actor (he originated the role of Zach in Broadway's A Chorus Line) and William a high school librarian. "My mother's never been a stage mother, but she never discouraged us," remarks Patti. "And we wouldn't have had it [if she tried to discourage us]. That was a way of life for us."

LuPone studied at Julliard with the actor John Houseman,‘ whose teaching regimen included 13-hour, six-day weeks. Her Sicilian nature often got her into trouble outside of class. "She was rebellious," recalled her brother, Robert, in 1988. "[When we were growing up,] she would be climbing out the window at 3 A.M. to sing and dance down the middle of Main Street." Houseman, in fact, reportedly placed LuPone on probation with the remark, "You do more acting in the corridors than in the classroom!"

Yet she was soon part of the Julliard Acting Company (later simply dubbed The Acting Company), which spent three years (48 weeks a year) touring America with workshops, classes, and a repertoire of 18 plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, and others. "I knew I would be able to make it on the musical stage," she notes now, "but I wanted to be able to maintain, so I studied acting."

From there, she played Off-Broadway and Broadway. She garnered good notices ("unusually sweet and vulnerable," wrote Clive Barnes; "a comic actress with enormous personal flair," observed Mel Gussow) and even a Tony nomination in 1976 for The Robber Bridegroom, in which she co-starred with Kevin Kline, reportedly her lover for seven years.

She finally hit the big time with Evita. She was an unlikely choice for the part of Evita Peron, the part-Italian wife of Argentinean dictator Juan Peron. "Because of that role, everybody thinks I'm six feet tall, blonde – and a fascist!" notes the five-foot-two brunette with another laugh. "It took a long time to break that image, although it's a great image to have." She got the part on the basis of two songs ("Don't Cry for Me‘ Argentina" and "Rainbow High"), which she sang so powerfully that some listeners reportedly cried. "Being Italian-American and having that kind of raw power helped me. Absolutely."

LuPone as the unlikely heroine in Evita.

She won the Tony for the part in 1980, but has had her share of ups and downs since: a series of less-than-memorable movie parts, a cabaret act, some notable Broadway successes (Anything Goes ) and flops (a revival of Oliver! as the prostitute Nancy), and the prestigious Olivier Award for her role in the London production of Les Miserables. "I don't think she's ruled by her head," said the producer Hal Prince once. "I don't think after the great success of Evita she said, 'Now this is my next step, and I must have this publicity agent, and this is whom I must meet.' I think she went off helter-skelter and didn't work it all out. And you know what? That's kind of winning."

Curiously, it was during a trip to Italy that things started to make sense once more to Patti LuPone. On location for the RAI-TV film Sicilian in Sicily, the actress found herself driving her car on a Sicilian road and thinking, "'It makes sense being here. Mentally. Emotionally.' It was all so beautiful. Everything about it struck me. And I suddenly connected to it all. The struggle – growing up part-Sicilian in America – the feelings I've had. I really can't describe it. Being there in Sicily, it just made sense."

Soon after, she was a hit in Anything Goes, and then began her long run as Libby on Life Goes On. The character started as "Middle American whitebread," but soon turned into pure Patti – an Italian-American with hidden fire who raises a family in the face of life's adversities. "My character is Italian," she says, adding with a chuckle: "It didn't start out that way, but it was kind of hard to deny it after a while." Her Italian "parents" have also appeared, as has her "cousin" Gabriella from Sicily, also played by LuPone.

"Playing Gabriella was much lighter and a lot of fun," she recalls. "It was the first time I really got to use my acting muscles again. I mean television is shorthand acting. It doesn't really challenge you that much. And I got to play two parts."

In the story, Gabriella, an Italian actress, comes to audition for an American TV show and disrupts the Thatcher family. "Libby sees that the two of them were basically the same when they were growing up, when they knew each other in Italy, but now they've changed," explains LuPone. "She had decided that she wanted to be a mother of a family and Gabriella became a performer in Italy. And she had a lot of life, a lot of spunk, and Libby envies her cousin. But then she realizes that her cousin really doesn't have anything in her life, that she doesn't have a family, that Gabby's selfish, that she keeps running away."

No one would say that about LuPone, who married cameraman Matt Johnston in 1988 and had her first child, Joshua Luke, in 1990. "Being Italian is very important to me," admits the actress, who says she has relatives in Italy but has never met them. "My favorite film for years has been Cinema Paradiso. What a film! You know, the Italian temperament is so appealing – and that kid's love for movies!"

LuPone's own love of things Italian extends to novels: she has just finished reading Cry to Heaven, a story set in Eighteenth Century Italy. "It's wonderful book, and makes the country so appealing. I would love to go all over Italy! When I was making A Sicilian in Sicily for RAI, we spent two weeks in Sicily, which was a mind-blower. It was so beautiful. So beautiful. When I go back, I'd like to go up the Almazzi coast. I'd like to go back there and make films."

LuPone pays little attention to the changing role of Italians in the media, feeling that in Hollywood, Italians can play Greeks (Sophia Loren in Boy on a Dolphin), Hispanics can play Italians (Andy Garcia in The Untouchables), and Anthony Quinn can play anyone. "God bless Quinn! I just saw him the other night in Viva Zapata. He was great – and you know, I don't think it matters what the nationality is when it comes to the role. If you're an actor, it's your job – and your joy – to be able to play all sorts of different parts. I'm Italian but I can play anything. And I have."