By Jane Meredith Adams
For Calista Flockhart, stardom has come the usual way--overnight, after years of struggle. As the micro-miniskirted lead in Ally McBeal, the hottest new television series of the season, newcomer Flockhart surprised Hollywood when her name boomed out at the Golden Globe awards as best in a Comedy Series, upstaging veterans Helen Hunt, Ellen DeGeneres, and Kirstie Alley. "She looks like she just got shot," a television reporter wisecracked as Flockhart made her way to the stage. "Smile, Calista, you won."
Flockhart can be forgiven for being in shock. As recently as last summer, she was a veritable unknown outside the New York theater scene. Five years ago, she was living off a case of ravioli sent by her brother and pulling down $400 for eight weeks of work Off-Off-Broadway. Now she's a burgeoning TV powerhouse, with a Golden Globe under her arm, fans gawking at her on the street, and enough acting oomph to take her share of the credit when Ally McBeal won its own Golden Globe for Best Comedy Series.
This is not what she'd planned. A serious Broadway who picked up a Tony nomination in 1997 for her role in Chekhov's Three Sisters, she had every intention of paying her stage-acting dues until something hit--which is how she almost missed the turning point of her career. "All along, we kept hearing about this Calista Flockhart, a theatrical in New York," said Ally McBeal executive co-producer Jeffrey Kramer who auditioned hundreds of es for the part. "But we were told that she just wouldn't do television."
Nudged by friends, Flockhart read for the part of Ally, fell in love with the writing (every word penned by producer David E. Kelley of Chicago Hope and The Practice fame), and decided to give TV a shot. "I haven't got anything to lose, in a way," she told a reporter earlier in her McBeal incarnation. "If it doesn't work out and I go back to New York, I'll have a lot more money than I did when I started."
Turns out she'll have more than a fatter wallet. The Fox show has already been renewed, fan mail arrives by the bucketful, and Flockhart now mingles with the big name stars, performing at a New York benefit last Valentine's Day with Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, and Glenn Close.
All this attention takes some getting used to. For the post-Golden Globe press tour, Flockhart arrived wearing a denim jacket, black jeans, and hiking boots and sat hunched, looking like a child in an oversized chair. "This is a first for me," she told a mob of reporters, as she clung to the arm of the publicist who came to rescue her. "I'm somewhat psychotically private."
Like Ally, Flockhart is single and ambitious, but thinks longingly of marriage and a family. "I'd like to change the world, but I'd also like to get married and have babies," she has said, repeating a line that Ally uttered in one episode. "Being loved is a basic human need. Who wants to be alone?" She says her closest relationship at the moment is with her seven-year-old terrier mutt, Webster.
Because she's so at ease playing Ally McBeal, many believe she is McBeal--the ditzy-but-savvy Boston lawyer whom TV watchers seem to either love or to . Those who adore her say Ally is the Mary Tyler More of the '90s, vulnerable and funny. Those on the other side say her microminis wouldn't be tolerated for a nanosecond in a real courtroom, and that her sometimes whiny ways make them want to hurl popcorn at their TV screens. Flockhart says she both is and isn't Ally--making sure to point out she isn't a whiner.
But like her alter ego, she lets her emotions show. "I've definitely been in situations where people say, "Calista, you're overreacting,'" Flockhart has said. "'Calista, people think you are crazy.' 'Calista, you're overemotional.' And I say, 'No, no, that is how I am--and you're just going to have to deal.'"
And like Ally, Flockhart has been known to verbalize her thoughts as soon as they arrive in her brain. Take the day she tried out for the show. After flying into Los Angeles from New York, she quickly read for Kelley, the other producers, and Fox executives. Afterward, discouraged that the auditions hadn't gone better, she wandered outside the pale-yellow Ren-Mar Studios on Cahuenga Boulevard. One of the producers came out and, escorting her across the street, told her to cheer up because she'd landed the part. Ally-style, she blurted out: "Oh, great. Now I've got to move."
She wasn't completely kidding about not wanting to leave New York. After a nomadic childhood--her family lived in Illinois, Minnesota, New York, and New Jersey while father Ronald climbed the corporate ladder at Kraft Foods Inc.--Flockhart is fond of staying put. After graduating from Rutgers University, she landed in New York, and the city has been the city of her greatest acting triumphs and disappointments. In 1994, she won praise in her Broadway debut as the crippled Laura in The Glass Menagerie. Other performances, in such Off-Broadway productions such as Sophistry, and All for One, also pleased the critics. In between New York shows, she traveled the regional-theater circuit, appearing in Death Takes a Holiday at the Williamstown Theater Festival, among other stops. But there were plenty of lean times when she scourged for parts on daytime soap operas and put her wide-eyed perkiness to the test by teaching aerobics.
If anything, paying her dues made her more committed to becoming an accomplished . Yet while she says she has always been "very deeply in love with theater," she wasn't adverse to sticking her toe into Hollywood, as long as the work involved films. In 1992, she mesmerized audiences with her performance in the HBO movie The Secret Life of Mary-Margaret: Portrait of a Bulimic. In another far-from-Ally role, she won kudos for playing a chain-smoking ic in the 1996 Showtime film, Drunks.
Feature film parts dribbled in her way, beginning with a brief appearance in Robert Redford's Quiz Show. Another small part that earned her big exposure: the bride-to-be daughter of Gene Hackman and Diane Weist in the 1996 comedy blockbuster, The Birdcage. Most recently she appeared as Brad Renfro's love obsession in Telling Lies in America, which opened last fall. After each film stint, she returned to her New York apartment, to Webster, and to the stage career that seemed on the verge of taking off. No matter how difficult it was to make it on the Great White Way, she vowed never to do television roles.
But in Ally McBeal, she discovered that the small screen was indeed spacious enough to hold her. "In real life people have big emotions," she has said. "People tend to believe that in film or TV you have to act smaller, but I don't believe that."
On the set she is intense, pacing the floor in a trance-like state, memorizing lines between takes, tucking her hair behind her ear as she works. Unlike Broadway rehearsals, the process is fast. When the director yells, "Print!" she fights the urge to say, "Let's rehearse that one more time."
"I've really had to learn how to let go and not be so hard on myself," she once explained. Being hard on herself seems to be as much a part of who she is as her pouty lips and pageboy haircut. (She's been called a Michele Pfeiffer lookalike; Pfeiffer happens to be producer Kelley's wife.) "I've been told since I was little that I have an old soul," Flockhart once recalled. "How old do I feel? Depends on the day. Sometimes I feel 90 and some days I feel like a little ."
Growing up on the move might be the root of that old soul. Born in Freeport, Illinois on November 11, (the year is in contention--one Web biography puts it at 1964, but Flockhart declines to say) she crisscrossed the country with her father, her schoolteacher mother, Kay, and her older brother, Gary. The family finally settled in Medford, New Jersey, where Flockhart was a cheerleader and school council member at Shawnee High School. The one constant locale was rural Boone, Iowa, where she visited to sets of grandparents during summer vacations. She inherited the name Calista from her great-grandmother; it means "most beautiful" in Greek.
When Ally McBeal wraps for the season, Flockhart says she plans to return to her New York apartment and would like to get back on stage. In her future, too, she's said, is a stint directing. But first, there's the business of adjusting to her new success. "I've been working so hard and trying to memorize my lines and doing the best I can," she has said. "The rest of it hasn't become a reality for me."
On vacation last Christmas with her family in Hawaii, she couldn't figure out why people were staring at her--she thought she must have committed some kind of faux pas. Her mother pointed out that they probably recognized her from the television show. As Ally McBeal says when she can't believe what's happening: "Excuse me please?"
She'll get used to it.
