February 5, 2004

Hip, hip, Shohreh!

In an election year, the awards season reality of Shohreh Aghdashloo has a certain irony. If she could meet every voter, she would win the race going away. She wouldn’t even have to kiss the babies.

You couldn’t really build a better Oscar storyline. A person of maturity making her breakthrough American performance and more than holding her own opposite two Oscar winning actors… a woman who escaped the tyranny of Khomenei and built a new life, first in London and then in America… an actress who worked with Kiarostami in the blush of his early career and is now part of the emergence of a new and serious director, Vadim Perelman… a personality who maintains all of the giddy passion of youth, yet carries the wisdom of her years in the curve of her deep brown eyes…

And she ain’t too hard to look at either.

To sit with Shohreh Aghdashloo for an hour and a half is to sit down with a stranger with a familiar face and to end up chatting like family. We talked about process and the audition and Sir Ben and the heart of her character and her life’s journey. But as ideas flew back and forth, Shorheh brought her entire experience to the table, giving her all to a moment with a journalist that required little more than a smile and a wink and the same old stories.

But even going over territory that she has traveled verbally a hundred times in the last few months, Shohreh draws you in. Her audition for House of Sand & Fog is a minor legend, so much so that Vadim is putting the tape onto the upcoming DVD for the film. The story is fairly simple. Shohreh showed up and did an audition that caused Perelman to give her one clear direction – the character is a lost soul, not like Shohreh at all – and she was invited to come back and to try again the next day. Shohreh came back the next day and won the part, obviously.

But to watch her tell the tale… she pulled back her jet black hair because using her hair to make Perelman cry would be cheating… her simple black t-shirt and pants… Vadim’s disregard for her as she walked in the room and her return of the same as an act of both defiance and self-defense… her realization that her character was a woman without a voice in the world… rolling through all four short scenes without stopping, so the tension would build and the final scene would truly be climactic… the long pause after she finished…. and the slow applause of Vadim Perelman, followed by a hug and a “Welcome to the family.”

In her 16 years here in America, Shohreh and her husband, Houshang Touzie, have made a life for themselves by writing and performing theater for Persian audiences, while raising a daughter, who is now 14. It may seem disingenuous, reading it here, but in front of this woman, you know that she doesn’t need the spotlight of Hollywood to be happy with her life as an artist. She has plans for the future, but you won’t see next year’s pilot season on her list of “must do”s.

Shohreh insists that her next movie role will have all the richness and meaning of her role in House of Sand & Fog. Unfortunately, that’s a whole lot to ask. But beyond that, I personally would like to see her work a wide range of roles. I would love to see her in a good comedy. I want to see her as a sexy adult. I want to see her as royalty and as someone seeking to regain her place, unencumbered by a character that is not terribly verbal. (Shohreh Aghdasloo is a very verbal woman.) I would be thrilled to see a career for this actress as long and rangy as Richard Farnsworth’s turned out to be.

And did I mention that at 51 years of age, you will not find a mature actress as naturally beautiful as Ms. Aghdashloo this side of Jacqueline Bisset, who remains an absolute stunner at 59. Of course, Hollywood will be more anxious to have her as Tony Hopkins’ wife instead of Michael Douglas’. But perhaps someone out there will grow up and get it together.

She is a grand dame and a great dame. And with a little luck, she might be an Oscar winner in just 24 days.

E Me. Be grand.