Interview with Theresa Russell | Interviews

She has it about right. We were sitting in a restaurant in Toronto on the day after "Track 29" had premiered at the Festival of Festivals, and I was trying to remember how Kazan told the story in A Life, his recently-published autobiography. After lunch I walked over to a book store and looked up Russell, Teresa in the index, and found:

"Sam suggested her. I had strong reservations, saw some values but more drawbacks. It was obvious to me, and later conversations with Theresa verified this, that Sam had, for a long time, tried to gentle her into his bed. I saw this without prejudice, because the truth is that most men of imagination and passion in the arts tend to use their power over young women--and young men--to this end. It's life-loving and it's inevitable. Sam, according to Miss Russell, had pursued her for many months unsuccessfully, and apparently he'd not given up. When I worked with her, as he requested, I liked her too, and came to believe she was certainly the best of a poor field and would bring something unanticipated to the role."

Reading here between the lines (something that is not often necessary in Kazan's frank memoir), I gather that Kazan wanted to sleep with her, too. Or maybe not. Liked her, anyway, and perhaps felt he had an opening since Spiegel was simultaneously trying to convince Kazan to hire another of his proteges.

Russell, in any event, did not find it life-loving to be squired by Spiegel, nor inevitable that she surrender to him. "I never had to do anything to be ashamed of, except that he did put his tongue down my throat," she said. "But he never got inside my knickers."

And so, at 17, Theresa Russell's acting career was launched. If Kazan found her only the "best of a poor field," reflect that she was straight from the Valley and had never done a day's acting in her life. Completely inexperienced but with instinctive poise and screen presence, she held her own in the picture and has since developed into one of the most interesting actresses of her generation.

"I was not a bimbo," she said, drawing the moral of the Spiegel episode. "Sam wanted me to sign this contract putting me under his control until 1985. This was 1976. I called a lawyer. Sam was furious. He said he would see to it that I got no billing in the movie. And to this day, if you ever see any advertising for 'The Last Tycoon,' my name is in teentsy-weentsy type. I was completely left out of the publicity for the movie. He was unrelenting. I asked him, 'If I sign your contract, what if I want to do some role in some other picture?' He said, 'You'll have to come to my boat in the South of France.' Yeah, and what happens then?"