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Allison Janney: Life on 'The West Wing'

Allison Janney: a Towering Figure

People Magazine Online

Actor Allison Janney sees her star rising

TV's Five Freshest Faces

Allison Janney: Life on 'The West Wing'

By Bonnie Churchill

February 7, 2000
Web posted at: 2:25 p.m. EST (1925 GMT)

"I also went on a tour of the White House, visited the tourist's spots, including all the monuments, then went to New York to have lunch with former press secretary, Dede Myers."

Is she always this thorough in investigating a role? "I'm afraid so," she said. "It's my training."

Janney was referring to her mother, who was a budding actress in New York, attended the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and roomed with Eileen Brennan and Rue McClanahan. "She was a great one to research a role, and write a backstory for her character. She never believed in phoning it in," her proud daughter said.

Newman's influence

"Her acting career went on the back burner when she met my dad. She decided to get married and have a family. In those days, she didn't think you could do both. She may be right.

"I really didn't make a commitment to be an actress until I went to college," the actress continued. "It was my freshman year at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio. Paul Newman had graduated from the school and built a wonderful theater on campus. When it opened, he came back to direct the first play in the new edifice. It was Michael Cristofer's Pulitzer Prize play, 'Shadow Box.'"

Both Newman and his Oscar-winning wife, Joanne Woodward, who accompanied him to the college, took an interest in the young student. "I suddenly realized how a director could make a role come to life," Janney said. "I couldn't wait to go to rehearsals. I'd literally run to the theater.

"Mrs. Newman was so supportive. She had attended the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and suggested that I train there. I said, 'OK, I'll do that.' I didn't realize how many great performers had gone there. She helped me to get into the Playhouse without too much fuss. What was really wonderful was I was enrolled in the theater company at the time she was directing there."

Theirs was not a short-lived friendship. The Newmans come to see all of Janney's opening nights, including her first on Broadway. According to the actress, "I knew they were going to be there, for they sent flowers and a note. I also knew my mom and her girlfriend were in that first-night audience. The play was a revival of Noel Coward's 'Present Laughter.'

"I'll never forget it. During the last week of rehearsals, I'd awake each night from a nightmare. It wouldn't be the usual worry about forgetting my lines. I had much too much imagination for that. I'd fancy myself falling into the orchestra pit or collapsing on stage.

"When opening night finally came," she remembered, "minutes before I was to go on, I started sobbing. I'd fashioned my part after my grandmother, and it had so much meaning for me. (But) no matter how nervous or uncomfortable I felt, the minute I stepped on stage, I became calm. I told myself, 'OK, here I am, and I can do this.'

"I never looked at the faces in the audience, but I could feel their warmth and anticipation. It gave me strength."

Movie roles

Janney's second Broadway part was in Arthur Miller's "View From the Bridge," and again she came through with flying colors. She received a Tony nomination, the Outer Critics Circle award and the Drama Desk award for Best Supporting Actress of 1998.

All the attention to her theatrical work -- both before and after these awards -- led to several movie roles, including "Primary Colors," "Drop Dead Gorgeous" and "American Beauty." She described her role in the latter, playing the browbeaten wife of Chris Cooper, as "the most depressed woman on the face of the Earth, straightened hair, circles painted under her eyes and as much spirit as a mackerel." She told her agent, "Don't send any film from this movie to 'The West Wing' producers, for it's light years different from their image of a press secretary!"

She recalled: "I was in Hollywood doing a film when my agent sent me the script for 'The West Wing,' which he described as the best-written script he'd ever seen. I read it and immediately thought it was wonderful. The role of the press secretary got my attention, and I told my agent I wanted it.

"When I did get the role, and the network put it on the schedule, my life completely changed. My apartment, my boyfriend, my everything is in New York. It was just like opening night; but like the Newmans told me, 'Go for it!'"

She added, "I often think of my career as a race, like the tortoise and the hare. I'm the tortoise, I'm slow and steady. My motto is, 'Easy does it.' I've always known, deep inside, that I would find work. I tell myself, just be patient and have a good sense of humor."

Success hasn't spoiled her

How has success in the TV series, rated by many critics as the best of the season, changed her? "I've always been a shopaholic. Some day I'd like to buy a house and have a trip around the world. That's a dream. The reality is, I was going shopping for a dress for an awards ceremony. The wardrobe department said I could borrow one of the pretty gowns I wear on the show. So I put away my credit card and wore the dress."

Her one real extravagance? She has apartments on both coasts. "No matter how much I work in Hollywood," the actress said, "New York is my home, and Vermont is my place to unwind."

Allison Janney could have added, "and the stage is my first love." She's hoping to spend her summer hiatus from "The West Wing" doing Shakespeare at the New York Public Theater in Central Park. Last summer she starred in its production of "The Taming of the Shrew." In effect, she's doing a Hillary -- going from the White House to New York -- and loving it.

Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate

See the original article at:

http://www.cnn.com/2000/SHOWBIZ/TV/02/07/west.wing/

Excerpt from:

Allison Janney: a Towering Figure

Associated Press

Last Updated: Aug. 7, 2000 at 6:55:14 a.m.

Janney laughs. ``Every day, I can't wait until I get to say C.J.'s lines.''

As Janney opts for a fruit smoothie rather than coffee at a Manhattan restaurant (``I don't want to vibrate''), she recalls the bracing challenges of ``making a movie that never ends. I had no idea what kind of world I was entering into.''

Soon, she was appearing off-off-Broadway and scooping ice cream to help make ends meet. And, just in case the acting thing didn't work out, she was telling anyone who asked that she was a photographer for National Geographic. ``I thought that sounded like a really romantic, wonderful job.''

With growing success, Janney dropped the ruse. She landed a 1998 Tony nomination for her performance in ``A View From the Bridge.'' She starred as Katharine in last summer's Shakespeare in the Park production of ``The Taming of the Shrew.''

So does Janney in performance. Her actor's tools are formidable. She has a sinewy voice and eyes of heavy-lidded knowingness; they seem borrowed from a character in ``Doonesbury.'' And did we mention that she's tall?

``There's something about me that says power and intelligence - all the things that I don't feel, speaking to you now,'' Janney says with a laugh. ``I play women who tend to be in the center of something that's whirling around them as they try to hold everybody in place.''

``I had done some impromptu lip-synching in my trailer that Aaron happened to be privy to,'' says Janney, ``and he wrote that into an episode. I'm kind of shy, but the more he gets to know me, the more I see familiar things in my character.''

But there's one trait that C.J. will never share with Allison: ``I know nothing about politics,'' the actress confesses. ``I'm such a pretender!''

She pauses for reflection. ``I guess people don't need to know surgery to play a doctor. Besides, I'm learning. I mean, I watch `Crossfire' now.''

See the original article at:

http://www.jsonline.com/enter/tvradio/ap/aug00/ap-ap-on-tv-alliso080700.asp

Excerpt from : People Magazine Online

by -- Jason Lynch
-- Alison Singh Gee in Los Angeles and Sue Miller in New York City

Each morning, as Allison Janney drives from her L.A. apartment to The West Wing's set, she passes a notice on her street that warns "No Access to the Hollywood Sign." Janney might have once regarded the sign as a bad omen, a warning that she would never be allowed to climb the showbiz ladder. "Years ago, one casting agent told me that the only roles I could play were lesbians and aliens," says Janney, whose 6-ft. frame was rarely, if ever, an asset. "When I said that Sigourney Weaver was tall, [the agent] replied, 'Well, she is drop-dead gorgeous.' I could feel the tears brimming in my eyes."

That was then. Now, as feisty White House Press Secretary C.J. Cregg on the NBC White House drama The West Wing,Janney, 40, is finally able to stand tall in her size 11 pumps. "It's hard to find someone that funny, that sexy, that skilled who has those chops," says West Wingcostar Bradley Whitford, who plays deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman. "She never hits a false note."

She did hit one terrible, completely unfunny obstacle along the way. As Janney was dancing outdoors at a Dayton house party in 1977, someone accidentally stepped on the back of her strapless white gown and it began to slip down. "I grabbed it and made a dash for the house," she recalls. Sprinting with her head down, she crashed through a sliding glass door she thought was open, cutting tendons and arteries on the broken shards. "I saw this small cut on my finger, so I turned around and said, 'I'm fine, it's just a cut,'" she says. "Then I looked down and saw that my leg was spouting blood. It was just like a horror film."

After losing more than half of her blood and spending eight weeks in the hospital, Janney pulled through. Twenty-three years later, the accident still resonates. "Whenever I'm onstage and I need to be vulnerable, I touch the scar on my leg," she says, lifting up her right jean leg and running her fingers over a patch of discolored skin. "There's a lot of trauma here. I use that."

Resilience has long been her ally. As a 6-year-old growing up in Dayton, Janney was determined to succeed as a figure skater. "She kept falling down, and I told her, 'We could go home and try it again some other day,'" says Janney's mother, Macy, 65, a homemaker who has been married to Jervis Janney, 65, president of a real estate firm, for 43 years. (Allison's siblings include Jay, 41, a professional bass player, and Hal, 38, a freelance computer programmer.) "She said no, gritted her teeth and persevered." By age 13, Allison was having Olympic dreams.

Any hope of that ended with her accident. But when Janney enrolled at Ohio's Kenyon College in 1978, she auditioned for a play directed by alum Paul Newman -- and stumbled on a new dream. "We had five minutes to talk about anything we wanted," she says. "I talked about how quickly I drove, to impress him." The racing enthusiast gave her a part, and Janney also impressed Newman's wife, Joanne Woodward, who directed her in Off-Off-Broadway plays during the '80s. Woodward, a huge fan, calls Janney "one of the great talents of her generation."

After a lengthy dry spell in which she supported herself waitressing and scooping ice cream in New York City, Janney began accumulating raves both on Broadway, with a Tony-nominated role in 1998's A View from the Bridge,and in Hollywood, with memorable roles in Big Night, Primary Colorsand American Beauty(she played the benumbed wife of the redneck ex-Marine). "When Allison fell down the stairs in Primary Colors,she really captured my heart,"says West Wingcreator and executive producer Aaron Sorkin, who hired her for his hit show in February 1999. "There's nothing she's not great at."

Nothing, that is, except mustering up the courage to walk down the aisle. Janney's boyfriend of six years, computer programmer Dennis Gagomiros, 48, still lives in New York City, and as far as marriage goes, "we're in negotiations," she says. "I'm afraid of commitment, and so is Dennis." She's much more at ease with her long-awaited good fortune. "You know what I love about having success as you get older?" she says. "You appreciate it so much! It means so much more to me than to a kid who gets it right away." If you want perspective, she says, "give me a group of actors who got success later in life any day."

-- Jason Lynch
-- Alison Singh Gee in Los Angeles and Sue Miller in New York City

See the original article at:

http://people.aol.com/people/pprofiles/ajanney/bio.html

Excerpt from:

Admissions Newsletter
September 1998

Actor Allison Janney sees her star rising

"I just want to be a great actor, and I don't have to be a superstar," Janney says. "That's not what it's about for me at all, but I think you always want more. I have to sit back and make myself be happy. I don't ever feel like, wow, I've really made it."

One of her most recent film roles--and her largest to date--was opposite Jennifer Aniston in last spring's The Object of My Affection. In the film, she plays actor Alan Alda's wife. Alda's daughter, Elizabeth Alda, was a classmate of Janney's at Kenyon. The first time Janney met Alda, he was "Mr. Alda," father of Liz.

"So I made the movie, and there I am calling him 'Sweetie,'" says the thirty-seven-year-old-actor. "It was just so weird."

Janney's voice is soft and throaty, and her attitude toward being a serious actor is accentuated by her surprise that people are interested in her life and career. There is no air of celebrity about Janney--nothing to let you know she's worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. While it's tempting to contemplate her recent success as placing her "on the brink of stardom," that's not a subject she'll approach. "I never trust this business at all," she says. "My feet are always on the ground. It's a roller-coaster ride. Maybe it's because it's taken so long for me to get any sort of recognition, but I'm always afraid I'm not going to work again."

After leaving Kenyon, the road wasn't easy. Janney lowers her head a bit, her voice becomes a little softer, and she shakes her head as she recalls the difficult times early in her career. "People would always tell me how great I was and that I was so talented, yet the business side didn't want me. Nobody. You have to be so dedicated and want it so badly. Otherwise, you'll just die," says Janney. "I don't know how I made it through those early years."

See the original article at:

Hyperlink to Kenyon College Article

Excerpt from:  TV'S FIVE FRESHEST FACES

By MICHAEL GILTZ

Who: Allison Janney

Age: 37

Hometown: Dayton, Ohio

Role: C.J. Gregg on "The West Wing" (NBC; Wednesdays at 9 p.m.)

Winning trait: smart as a whip . . . and just as stinging

Best previous role: take your pick; she's always good.

From the imperious Kate of "The Taming of the Shrew" (performed for Shakespeare in the Park) to the near-comatose mom in the acclaimed film "American Beauty," there's seemingly nothing Janney can't do.

She's triumphed on stage in revivals of "Present Laughter" and "A View from the Bridge" (garnering a Tony nomination). She's scored in movies with her hilarious, frenetic turn in "The Object of My Affection" and her touching romance with Stanley Tucci in "Big Night."

She's even received the ultimate acting benediction: a role in a Woody Allen film ("Celebrity").

Now Janney's got the juiciest female role on "The West Wing," a drama teeming with terrific actors. She plays C.J., the press secretary for the president who must daily placate a hungry mob of reporters and a frenzied staff without betraying the trust of either.

Here's the plan: "West Wing" turns into a hit, Janney gets more name recognition and maybe an Emmy nod, and - finally - the leading parts in movies that her talent and charisma demand.

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