Catching Up With Betty Buckley
By Lawson Taitte, The Dallas Morning News
Jun. 13–Betty Buckley is one of the top-billed stars in The Happening, but you wait a long time to get a glimpse of her.In the film, a group led by Mark Wahlberg is seeking refuge from a mysterious plague. Finally they stumble into a remote Pennsylvania farmstead inhabited only by an ominous-looking Ms. Buckley, who steals the rest of the show.
“Every movie needs a slam-dunk ending,” director M. Night Shyamalan said at the New York premiere on Tuesday. “Betty Buckley is our Michael Jackson.”
Ms. Buckley, 60, has done a lot of screen work since her time on TV’s Eight Is Enough, from Tender Mercies to HBO’s Oz. But her most passionate fans know the Fort Worth native for her stage work. She won a Tony Award for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats on Broadway and earned an Olivier Award nomination for his Sunset Boulevard in London.
For the last few years, she has been living back home in Texas, raising cutting horses on her ranch an hour west of Fort Worth. From there she emerges for concerts and other engagements, such as a cabaret show at New York’s Feinstein’s this winter that had ticket buyers lining up around the block.
Ms. Buckley is not exactly a stranger to the horror genre. She had a featured role in the movie Carrie and played the mother in the ill-fated Broadway musical version. She says she has been up for a role in every one of Mr. Shyamalan’s recent pictures. The casting director for The Happening believed that this was finally the right one, but she needed to get an audition tape to the director immediately. Ms. Buckley’s assistant on her Texas ranch went to town and bought a video camera and taped the audition herself.
“I deliberately played against what he thought he wanted,” Ms. Buckley recalls during an interview Thursday. “My inspiration was Anthony Hopkins, how he underplays everything but is really scary.”
When neither the assistant nor the salesman who sold the camera could figure out how to get the scene onto a DVD, they just put the camera in bubble wrap and sent it to Mr. Shyamalan overnight. That amused the director as much as Ms. Buckley’s audition impressed him.
Now that the movie has opened, Ms. Buckley can get back to her musical career. She begins another of her song-interpretation workshop series at Fort Worth’s Casa Manana on June 25. July 9-11, she’ll do a brand-new one-woman show, Broadway by Request, at the Irving Arts Center to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Lyric Stage.
“That’s kind of a work in progress,” Ms. Buckley says. Lyric’s founding producer, Stephen Jones, “heard me answering some audience members’ questions and told me he wanted me to do a show where I get to tell my Broadway stories.”
The event will give audiences a chance to hear Ms. Buckley sing songs from all her famous shows in a very intimate space, the Dupree Theater.
If stage and screen weren’t enough for the star, Ms. Buckley has also been making public appearances on her cutting horse, although she’s about to suspend those temporarily while she works with a new trainer.
“I had a bit of beginner’s luck,” she says, “but I’m so determined to become good at it — and I’m sure not — that I’m going to try a different way.”
You can lay odds that Ms. Buckley will either be a top performer, even on horseback, or not perform at all.
PLAN YOUR LIFE For information on Betty Buckley’s class at Casa Manana, call 940- 300-4944 or go to www.casamanana.org. For tickets to Broadway by Request, call 972-252-2787 or go to www.lyricstage.org.
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