As a child, actress Piper Laurie often was paralyzed by her shyness, so scared to speak up in public that she bombed her first screen test for Warner Bros., a prize she won after her mother entered in her a Hollywood talent and beauty contest.
So it’s a small miracle that the girl born Rosetta Jacobs eventually ended up a successful actress, three times nominated for an Academy Award and the winner of an Emmy and a Golden Globe.
And it might be even less likely that she’d eventually write a heartfelt, personal and times quite revealing memoir about her life, though it’s that book – “Learning To Live Out Loud” – that’s partly responsible for bringing her to Orange County on Sunday for a discussion about her life and career.
“I hadn’t really thought of it in terms of the public,” Laurie says when asked what motivated her to share her life’s memories. “But I had thought it was time to put them down. I’d had a pretty interesting life and a lot of people in my family were confused about when things happened and what happened.
“I just thought it was a good idea to get it down on paper,” she says. “And I’d never written anything before, but I decided I wouldn’t get any help, so if it was good or bad it would be all me.”
It took her three years to finish the book, says Laurie, now 80, and when it was done, despite some measure of trepidation over opening up so much of herself, it felt good.
“The actual process of writing it, especially the emotional parts, was sometimes difficult,” she says. “But I made myself do it and as I went along I found it really cathartic. Some of it was a great deal of fun. I’d just laugh and laugh over some of the things that happened.”
It’s a story that goes from a childhood in which her parents left her for several years in a sanitarium for sick children – though only her sister, an asthmatic, was ill – before reclaiming them and settling in Hollywood. She was drawn to the bright lights of the stage and screen though she was too scared to speak in front of others. And almost by chance found her voice through the words of others, in acting classes, and before long as a teenager signed to Universal as a contract player.
“Once I found out that in using other people’s words I could communicate in some way that was a joy for me,” Laurie says.
There are stories of working alongside stars from Tony Curtis and Ronald Reagan to Paul Newman and Mel Gibson, and of love affairs with some of them, too, details of which made for part of the buzz about the book when it first came out.
“Most of (the reaction to the book) was very nice and very positive,” Laurie says. “I found that I had real friends out there and people who felt very connected to me. Strangers would write me and they said it really connected. And that was a lovely surprise.
“I guess the part that I didn’t like, some of the people who didn’t actually read it and were told what happened on the Internet,” she says referring to a chapter in which she describes how as a young actress she surrendered her virginity to her much older costar Ronald Reagan one night. “Really crude versions of what happened. That was nasty and I didn’t appreciate it.”
Disappointed at the quality of scripts and projects she found herself offered in the ’60s – “The Hustler,” with Newman, her Oscar-nominated exception – she quit the business until the mid-’70s.
“The years at Universal under contract were extremely painful and hateful to me,” Laurie says. “I despised every moment of it once I caught on that it was this factory. And I tried very hard to get out of my contract.”
Finally, after more than six years and the contract almost up, she cut a deal that allowed her to work on live television in the original production of “The Days of Wine and Roses,” and for the next few years she did mostly live TV and theater, leading up to “The Hustler.”
“And then I just took 15 years off because the world was changing,” Laurie says. “The civil rights movement had started, the Vietnam War. And I just felt I had no respect at that time for being an actor. I just felt it was as silly thing to use my energy for. So I got married and had a child and lived in upstate New York. And I didn’t miss performing at all, except once in a while.”
Director Brian DePalma lured her back on screen with a juicy part as the over-the-top mother in his adaptation of Stephen King’s “Carrie” in 1976 and from then on she worked steadily, playing George Clooney’s mother on “ER,” one of the devious townspeople in David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” and more highbrow roles in TV movies of works by the likes of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.
On Sunday, Laurie will talk about her life with film historian Foster Hirsch of Brooklyn College in a program at the Bowers Museum presented by the museum and OC Public Libraries. A half-hour montage of scenes from her career will screen and she’ll take questions from the audience. All of it, she says, is easier having done the book.
“Writing the book made me verbalize feelings and things that happened to me,” Laurie says. “And so it’s not that difficult for me to (talk about her life).
“I think if I had tried to do this – I know – I was not very good at it before. I did it and then I decided to be brave.”
Contact the writer: 714-796-7787 or plarsen@ocregister.com
