Jane Alexander

An American actress with a rarely equaled reputation for high-quality work, Jane Alexander (born 1939) has worked with equal success in the fields of film, theater, and television. She has not hesitated to take on roles with controversial content; her range as a performer is wide.

In the 1990s, Alexander spent four stormy years as the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the chief arts funding agency operated by the United States government. As federal arts funding became a political football during the politically polarized administration of President Bill Clinton, Alexander struggled to uphold the ideal of the arts as a broadly beneficial force in society. After leaving the agency, Alexander returned to acting, and although she suffered along with other middle-aged actresses from a general lack of substantial film parts for women, she still found a strong demand for her talents.

Granddaughter of Buffalo Bill's Physician

Born Jane Quigley in Boston, Massachusetts on October 28, 1939, Alexander grew up in a fairly affluent household. Her father, Thomas Quigley, was a noted sports physician and surgeon whose own father had been the personal physician to the famed prairie scout and Wild West show promoter William "Buffalo Bill" Cody. Alexander grew up going to symphony and dance concerts and traveling on her own by subway to Boston's splendid art museums. She loved the arts in general from a young age, but her acting career did not begin until her years at Sarah Lawrence College. There, she auditioned for and won a part in The Plough and the Stars, a play by Irish writer Sean O'Casey. Alexander immersed herself in the role, and for the rest of her career she would be noted for enthusiastic research into the lives, real or imagined, of the characters she played. Her investigations began with books and would sometimes extend to visiting places where a character may have spent time.

Upset by a friend's sudden death during her sophomore year, she left Sarah Lawrence and went to study theater at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 1959 and 1960. She married actor and director Robert Alexander in 1962, and their son Jason went on to become a director. Robert and Jane Alexander divorced in 1969. Her second husband, director Edwin Sherin, met Alexander when she auditioned for a play and impressed him with her total commitment to the role. They would marry in 1975, occasionally working together as director and lead actress.

Alexander's professional career began at the Charles Playhouse in Boston in 1964. The following year she moved on to the Arena Stage company in Washington, D.C. and had 15 parts in plays there between 1965 and 1968. Her career at Arena Stage culminated in her creation of the role of Eleanor in Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope, playing the mistress of troubled black heavyweight boxer Jack Jefferson—based on the real-life figure of Jack Johnson and played by actor James Earl Jones. The play was a major success and moved in 1969 to Broadway in New York, where Alexander's performance earned her a Tony award.

The portrayal of an interracial romance on stage, at a time when such subject matter was still rare, brought Alexander her first taste of controversy; she received hate mail that included occasional death threats. Ignoring the attacks, she continued to perform. The Great White Hope was filmed in 1971, once again with Alexander in the role of Eleanor, and she was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance.

Portrayed Eleanor Roosevelt

For the next several years, Alexander worked consistently in theater, films, and television. She appeared in the hit Broadway play Six Rms Riv Vu in 1972 and 1973, and took one of her few Shakespearean roles in Hamlet in 1975—despite her lifelong identification with high-quality material, Alexander was more oriented toward contemporary plays and films rather than toward theatrical classics. After small parts in The New Centurions (1972) and several other films, Alexander returned to the spotlight in 1976 with the starring role of Eleanor Roosevelt in the made-for-television film Eleanor and Franklin and its sequel, Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years, the following year. She also won another Academy Award nomination for her appearance in the political drama All the President's Men.

In 1979 Alexander landed the high-profile supporting role of Margaret in Kramer vs. Kramer, playing a friend to both parties in a bitter divorce struggle. The 1980 made-for-television film Playing for Time, in which Alexander played one of a group of female concentration-camp prisoners who stave off death by forming an orchestra and playing music for camp commanders, was another feather in Alexander's cap critically. Many of the films that made Alexander a familiar face appeared on television, and Testament (1983), a tale that manifested the nuclear-war jitters of the 1980s, started out in the television medium.

In Testament, Alexander played the mother in a California family trying to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Some critics condemned the film as melodramatic, but it brought the dangers of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union home to viewers in an immediate way, and Alexander gained praise for her performance as the film became a national topic of conversation and was rushed into theatrical release. Alexander showed her versatility with a complete about-face in her next role, playing the title role of Old West diarist Calamity Jane in a television film of 1984.

With new clout in the industry, Alexander could act on a desire to branch out from high-minded roles. "I get offered a lot of films that have a noble woman pursuing a noble cause, or something like that," she explained to David Sterritt of the Christian Science Monitor. Alexander served as both star and executive producer for Square Dance (1987), a family drama set in Texas that took Alexander to country-music dance clubs as she carried out her trademark research for the role. In 1989 Alexander went beyond her usual reserved image when she played flamboyant gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in the television film Malice in Wonderland, and she had an uncredited role in the acclaimed Civil War drama Glory, as the mother of Colonel Robert G. Shaw (played by Matthew Broderick), the commander of an all-black Union regiment.

Named to Head NEA

The early 1990s saw Alexander appearing on Broadway in the Wendy Wasserstein play The Sisters Rosenzweig, never giving a thought to entering the world of government service or politics. But a staffer for Rhode Island U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell called Alexander out of the blue and asked whether she would be interested in being considered for the chairmanship of the NEA. The agency had endured several years of controversy over what some saw as obscene art it had funded, and many conservatives in the U.S. Congress were angling for the NEA's elimination, or, at the very least, a reduction in funding. The widely respected Alexander, seen as a consensus choice who could heal wounds within the agency, soon made the short list and then was nominated by President Clinton.

Alexander, for her part, warmed to her new opportunity. As reported by The Boston Globe she told a Senate committee during her confirmation hearings that "the life I have led in theater, in the world of art, has given me so much personally—particularly from Endowment-supported work—that I wish at this time to give something back." Confirmed overwhelmingly in late 1992, Alexander pledged to maintain the agency's independence from political interference. "We have to," she told Interview. "We're upholding a democratic principle here. This is the federal government, and federal agencies do not discriminate. What we do is look for high standards of excellence in the arts."

Alexander took steps to broaden the NEA's base, traveling widely to visit community-based arts groups that benefited from the agency's increased emphasis on disbursing funds beyond the traditional culture centers of the northeastern U.S. Over her first two years as chairman she visited all 50 states, emphasizing the important role the arts could play in local communities and economies. Live, nonprofit arts events were especially critical in an increasingly technology-dominated society, Alexander argued, telling an Economic Club of Detroit audience (according to Vital Speeches of the Day) that such events "will begin to seem like some of the few authentic experiences we have, and they will be places where we appreciate the artist's skill—be it music or painting or theater—and the excitement of discovering new talent."

But Congressional Republicans, who ascended to majority status in the House of Representatives after the 1994 elections, continued to threaten the NEA's existence, leaving Alexander in a defensive posture most of the time. Washington's political environment was unfamiliar for Alexander, who had spent her whole life in arts-oriented settings. The people she worked with in Washington, she complained to Marilyn Stasio of American Theatre, were "a whole new breed. They are not well educated. They are hostile and suspicious of the arts, and it was tough for me to persuade them otherwise." President Clinton, preoccupied with other issues, met with Alexander only after she tried for two years to get an appointment. Few controversies over the funding of specific projects flared while Alexander was chairman, but a combination of new proposals to curb the agency's independence and a desire to return to acting—she had been inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1995—led her to resign as NEA chairman in 1997. By that time NEA funding had been cut by almost half.

Chronicled Experiences in Book

Alexander wrote about her NEA tenure in the book Command Performance: an Actress in the Theater of Politics, recounting her clashes with congressional conservatives. Steven C. Munson of Policy Review in his negative review of the book blamed many of the problems on what it saw as Alexander's own high-handedness, observing that "the point … that Alexander seems incapable of grasping … is that who's running an agency in Washington, and how he or she approaches that task, can actually make a difference, for good or ill. While the NEA … was spared extinction, it is by no means clear that its survival was because of, rather than despite, Jane Alexander." Art in America's Robert Atkins viewed the book through a different lens, calling it "essentially a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story in which an idealistic agency head loses her innocence in the snakepit of corruption and ambition that is Washington."

"After being away from theatre for all that time, I was pretty overwhelmed by how deeply moved I was to be back on stage," Alexander told Stasio. She threw herself back into her work, returning to the cinema screen for the first time in ten years with a small role in 1999's The Cider House Rules and taking on various theater projects in New York and Washington. A 2003 production of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts at Washington's Shakespeare Theatre seemed to refer back to her NEA experiences; it was staged with sexually explicit paintings on the set, standing in for the controversial books her character liked to read in the play as originally written. In 2005 she performed in the one-woman play What of the Night and made a triumphant return to television, starring in Warm Springs and returning to her long fascination with the family of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Her portrayal of Sara Delano Roosevelt, the president's mother, brought her an Emmy award and another flower in a long garland of honors that recognized her craft.

Books

Alexander, Jane, Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics, Public Affairs, 2000.

Newsmakers 1994 issue 4, Gale, 1994.

Periodicals

American Theatre, September 1998; July 2000; July-August 2003.

Art in America, July 2001.

Boston Globe, September 25, 1992.

Christian Science Monitor, March 13, 1987.

Dance Magazine, December 1997.

Interview, July 1994.

New York Times, March 6, 1984.

Policy Review, December 2000.

Variety, April 11, 2005.

Vital Speeches of the Day, January 15, 1996.

Washington Post, November 25, 1978.

Online

"Jane Alexander," Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com (December 4, 2005).