Carol Kane used to be Hollywood's most memorable bit player. Her starring roles in Valentino and The World's Greatest Lover suggest that the cameo queen has come of age.

During a time when the scarcity of quality women's roles inked and discouraged many an aspiring actress, one young woman magnificently survived the famime. However brief her appearances, she created a stunning gallery of vivid, memorable cameos. And for one of her two starring roles (in Hester Street) she was nominated for an Oscar. Nor has recognition come the easy way- via TV, conventional glamor or sex appeal. What has made her unforgettable is her face. At times her face seemed lifted from the macabre pages of Edward Gorey. At other times the exquisitely frail features and luxuriant hair have conjured up visions of Lillian Gish, Botticelli maidens, pre-Raphaelite madonnas. In keeping with this actress' versatility, though, her entry into films came not through innocence but in roles as a whore (The Last Detail), a rape victim (Wedding in White) and a free love hippie (Carnal Knowledge). Today, at a mere 25 years of age, Carol Kane stands on the threshold of stardom.
We are sitting in a dark corner of New York's Cafe Carlyle. Wrapped in a fringed purple shawl, Carol is slipping white sine and chain-smoking Tareytons. Her deep-set eyes project a blend of intensity and mischief. One asks if she has minded playing so many non-featured roles, like the pregnant hostage in Dog Day Afternoon or a temptress in Annie Hall or, most recently, Valentino's first wife. Does she mind being dubbed the cameo queen? "Mind? More than don't mind. I hope I still get to. If somebody called me tomorrow and said I have two pages in a Fellini or Bertolucci script I'd say "Let me at it!" The size of the part's not important. More people have come up to me and said. "You're the best thing in Valentino. You're the shining light in Valentino.'"
Though she has been blessed with a dazzling roster of co-superstars- Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Donald Pleasance, Woody Allen, Elliot Gould and Michael Caine (Harry and Walter Go to New York)- in Valentino her role as a Dallas-waitress-turned-Hollywood-starlet required that she dance with (and urge into film) none other than Rudolph Nureyev. Understandably, Carol was somewhat awed at the prospect of tangoing with the world's foremost ballet dancer. Typically, she arrived in London a full three weeks ahead of schedule to practise. "I'd never danced before. I was terrified of letting him down. The choreographer kept saying, 'You've got it, you've got it.' But I'd say. 'No- I want it perfect for when Rudy comes'."
A similar intense dedication showed itself in her approach to Hester Street. In preparation for playing Gitel, the anguished, abandoned wife of an 1890's Jewish immigrant, she immersed herself in the life of the shtetl, read voluminously , wandered New York's Lower East Side, even borrowed the ugly horsehair sheitel to be used in the film and wore it around her small West Side apartment and on the streets of the city. Gitel, she found, was a woman not unlike herself. "Very shy and very quiet. And a diesel truck," smiles Carol. "If you were to ask me where she'd end up I'd say today she probably owns Macy's. She was strong like a bull. A major survivor."
But after reading armloads of books on Valentino, Carol found the immortal Lain lover of the 1920's to be a person quite different from herself. "It was all making money, killing time. he never understood film, or why he was being used in film," she says emphatically, and recites a speech in which Valentino declares his amazement that people should worship a person they'd never met. "All he wanted was to be a clean, free soul- which I don't. I like men. I like drinking. I like things I can touch. Valentino had no disinct sexuality. He was asexual."
Prompted by this cue, one inquires into Carol's personal life. "No boyfriend right now. Besides," she quickly adds, though not unpleasantly, "I don't really like talking about that stuff." She lights up another Tareyton with the butt of her last, and the serene smile returns to her face. "You know, I have the same feeling right now that I have at my analyst. I've often asked him, "Don't you ever get furious at the imbalance of this relationship?" Which is I sit there and talk all the time and he just listens. Even if I was a total dummy you'd still have to listen to what I said."
Carol's been in therapy almost as long as she's been on the stage. Eleven years with the same New York psychiatrist. It began under crisis conditions. When Carol was 12 her parents announced divorce, and her world fell apart. From a straight-A student she nearly flunked out of school. Nightmares plagued her. She had hallucinations- waking visions of close friends falling down stairs and crushed by cars. She read F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. "There was this person who had these shoes that curl up at the end. That's how I felt: you're sitting in a room and you look at those curled shoes and you don't know if it's them or you."
Now when Carol sees shoes that curl she knows it's the shoes. But she's still in therapy. "Most people think you have to be ill or crazy to be in analysis. Well, I'm not ill and I'm not crazy. If I stopped today, I wouldn't fall apart. It's just that we all have a huge capacity- but it gets cut off by the circumstances of our life. Or our inability to realize what we can do. I don't want to stand in my own way. If something's going to stop me I don't want it to be me. I want to reach the fullest limit I can reach. As an actress. As a creative person."
Her life as a creative person began formally at age 7 when she enrolled in a children's theatre in hometown Cleveland. At 15 she was touring with Tammy Grimes in her first Equity production- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She appeared as an extra (and hated it) in films like Little Murders and Portnoy's Complaint, and inevitably landed more challenging jobs with Joe Papp's Public Theatre in New York (as Miranda in the Tempest) and with the Charles Street Playhouse in Boston, where she played a waterfront floozie to Al Pacino's Arturo Ui in Brecht's play of the same name. It was her co-starring role with Donald Pleasence in Wedding in White that brought her prominence in Canada (and gave rise to the widespread misconception that she is a Canadian). and her tour de force as Gitel in Hester Street that catapulted her to fame in the United States. Recently, however, Carol has been edging away from the grim though heroic victims she has portrayed. "I saw Wedding in White recently," she says, "and never, never in a million years would I tell anyone to see that movie: it's too depressing. YOu come out of there and you want to kill yourself. I always thought acting meant dramatic suffering. Suffering always seemed the big stuff. I don't know what put that in my head. But now it seems everone's got enough problems on their mind. You get smacked with reality evrey time you walk on the street. Just going to the supermarket's a problem, right."
So Carol has cast aside Gitel's ugly horsehair sheitel. No longer does she wander about in ash-white makeup and sombre black clothes, or even the antique velvet dresses that were once her trademark. Today, she points out smiling, she's wearing a chic, respectable skirt from Bendel's. These days she is courting a new image. These days Carolis into comedy of all things. Whence springs such inspiration? Why from Gene Wilder, of course, director, writer and hero of Carol's new starring vehicle, the 1920's comedy, The World's Greatest Lover.
Slated for Christmas release, The World's Greatest Lover is the flip-side of Valentino. The film concerns a quite unremarkable couple from Milwaukee- Rudy and Annie Hickman. Unremarkable except that Annie (Carol) is a stricken soul who helplessly haunts the local cinema, dreamily eyeing the sheik and imagining the great Valentino conversing with her. Poor Rudy (Gene Wilder) actually wants to be Valentino. In Hollywood, meanwhile, a Rainbow Studio magnate (Dom Deluise) plots to usurp Paramount's number-one billing, which is attributable to Valentino, by staging the World's Greatest Lover Contest. And naturally, who should arrive in Tinsel City to compete?
"Gene opened up a whole new world for me," declares Carol passionately. "Humor is extremely important, one of the few things in the world that's important now. It's so important to make people laugh. And enjoy themselves. on a classy level. Like Burns and allen. These days I'd much rather be Gracie than Eleonora Duse."
Of course, Carol hasn't totally abandoned the big stuff. In her next major role she co-stars with Lee Grant in Clouds, a bizarre and disturbing psychological thriller about the deadly foli a deux between two sisters who live together. While one holds a respectable job at the San Francisco Observatory, the other (Carol) never leaves the house and dwells exclusively in the living-room-turned-jungle habitat, complete with her dead father's African plants, masks, hammock and a large orangutan whose days Carol eventually brings to a grisly conclusion. Carl winces when she describes it: "The character's so profoundly ill I felt I was going through primal therapy. It's a great role- but painful.
The director of Clouds is a woman, Karen arthur, the third woman director Carol has worked with (Joan Silver directed Hester Street and Marilyn Fried directed her in an off-Broadway theatre. Asked which directors she'd like to work with in the future, Carol quickly mentions Lina Wertmuller, but the rest of the list are men: Mike Nichols, Hal Ashby (I'm dying to work with him again", Ken Russell, Fred Zinneman, Alan Pakula, Jack Nicholson ("Ooh- and Jack. Top of my list. He's brilliant working with actors"_ and of course Fellini and Bertolucci. A bit self-consciously, tugging at an errant brown curl ("I'll probably get plenty of letters from women's liberation groups") Carol confesses she feels most comfortable working with male directors. It's the way I was brought up and conditioned," she shrugs. "To respect the father-figure. God as man. It's hard to work with a woman. The actor/director relationship's like a love affair, but without the sex. With a woman there isn't the same electricity. I guess I haven't abandoned the need for that central male figure."
Her personal artistic idols are women. An ineffable bond exists between petite Carol and that tiny bundle of TNT, Edith Piaf. She'd desperately like to play Piaf on film. She'd like to play women with "spunk," gutsy Carol Lombard types. After Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, Carol is most in awe of Kim Stanley and Geraldine Page. And Bette Davis, "because you can't pigeon-hole her, you can't find something she really is." Carol identifies strongly with that elusive quality. She recently confronted her agent on the paucity of decent available parts and the frequent, dismaying response Kane evokes: "she's very good, she's wonderful, an excellent actress, but not quite what we had in mind."
"It can be quite infuriating," admits Carol. "So I asked him why, because I have to live with it, I have to function. And he said it's because I'm so chameleon-like." Like the chameleon, Carol adapts to whatever enviorenment work takes her to. "I don't really care where I live. The past two years it's been, oh 60 percent Los Angeles, 20 percent London and 20 percent here in New York. When you're not working, what do I do? I worry, I go to the gym, see my doctors. What else? I drink and smoke a lot." She describes a "good night for me" as "out to a restaurant with people I love, a bit of white wine, on to the theatre or a film." At restaurants Carol eats neither meat, nor fish, nor fowl. As far back as Carnal Knowledge Jack Nicholdson nicknamed her "Whitey" because she ate only white foods- cottage cheese and eggs. For Carol, vegetarianism began at age 15, "when news of the Vietnam War was very graphic. You got to see people dying. It came out of that. I just decided I didn't want to participate in taking the life of anyone or anything else. I don't mean to sound like a preacher. If you want to eat roast beef, teriffic. I think roast beef's terrific. I'll always cook someone a steak. But for myself I draw the line at anything that had to die for me to eat it. I don't want that power of taking life."
The crowd in the Cafe Carlyle has grown noisier, larger. So far no one has approached for her autograph. Does this bother her? "Actually, people do recognize me a lot," she says, and tells how this morning she ran into close friend Diane Keaton at the New York Health Spa (where Carol works out on the Nautilus machine). Afterward the two went out for a soda and while no one recognized Keaton several people did come up and talk to Carol. She recounts the anecdote with a mixture of shyness and pride.
Most of Carol's friends are "in the business": actors, directors, theatrical folk. Today she's got a copy of Brooke Hayward's book Haywire tucked under her arm. Does she likeit? Oh, yes- Carol and Brooke are good friends. How so? Well, when Carol was shooting Carnal Knowledge in British Columbia. Brooke came up with Buck Henry to visit Mike Nichols. They've been friends ever since. She's tight with Art Garfunkel, Nicholson, Pacino and a host of female actresses includeing Keaton, Sissy spacek and Sylvia Miles. "I guess I'm not a very good interview," she laughs, "because there are very few people I've worked with I don't like. I never look for the negatives in people." Her experience with Nureyev, for instance, was totally positive. He is "one of those magical people." Not just a brilliant dancer but marvellous to work with. Very creative, "a very special acting talent." In Valentino he improvised an entire scene with her, popping chocolate cherries into his mouth. She hopes he works more in films and knows he would like to. And "Yeah, hopefully we're friends now."
Her only friends outside the business says Carol jokingly, are her doctors, "I have lots and lots of doctors." Because her time is divided between half a dozen cities, "I have to have one of everything out there. GP's, gynecologists, dentists, skin doctors. I've got 'em everywhere, in Toronto, Boston, New York, L.A." Especially crucial is the skin doctor. "Three weeks before the Academy Awards (for Hester Street) my entire body broke out in this incredible rash. The doctors said it was measles. But my best friends told me, "Don't be silly- it's be silly- it's nerves.' Still, it looked so formidable."
Despite her admittedly "rough" childhood, Carol has remained quite close with her divorced parents- Joy Kane, a singer and musician who lives in New York, and Carol's peripatetic father, an architect recently returned from a year in Africa. Carol herself just came back from a week-long visit with her sister who sells real estate and does calligraphy in Santa Cruz, California.
At the moment Carol's waiting, a bit suspensefully, for the release of The World's Greatest Lover- which promises another major breakthrough in her career. But she's not one to twiddle her thumbs. Theatre has always remained her first love, and currently she's proposing an all-female Waiting for Godot to Joe Papp. "When I'm not working," she once said, "I wake up in the morning and think frantically: "Well, what am I going to do today? Where am I going to go?" But that was a long time ago.


Photos accompanying the above article: 1. Fifth page black and white of Carol as Gitel- Kane received a 1976 Oscar nomination for her role in Joan Silver's film Hester Street; 2. Three fifths page color photo of Carol sitting with knees up in black pants and blouse on a large sofa- Born in Cleveland, Kane now spends her time in New York, London and Los Angeles; 3.Tenth page black and whiteof Carol's head- With Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge Kane puts him "at the top of my list."; 4. Tenth page black and white of Carol in bridal gown from Wedding in White- Canadians know Kane best for her part in Wedding in White with Donald Pleasence; 5. Tenth page black and white of Carol as Valentino's wife- Although Nureyev drew the attention, Kane in Valentino drew most of the praise..; 6. Tenth page black and white of Carol as Woody Allen's ex-wife in Annie Hall- In Annie Hall as Woody Allen's ex-wife. "The size of the role isn't important."; 7. Fourth page black and white of Carol as Gene Wilder's wife in The World's Greatest Lover- Kane's role as Gene Wilder's wife in The World's Greatest Lover adds a comic facet to an already versatile talent. In Clouds, however, she's back to straight drama.