Jessica Lange: The Oscar-winner laments the loss of 'wonderful stories' – and explains why her venture in photography is the perfect move for an actor

“I have suffered from loneliness off and on throughout my whole life,” says Oscar-winning actress Jessica Lange, “and especially doing this book because so much of it is about loneliness … The lockdown was a perfect physical situation in which to really explore that loneliness.”

 

Lange, 74, is speaking to me by phone from her apartment in Greenwich Village, where her walls are lined with thousands of books and images by some of her favourite photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson. “I don’t think I can get any more photographs on the walls,” she says. “I never tire of looking at them.”

 

During lockdown, in the absence of any acting work, Lange spent her time walking the streets of New York with her Leica camera. The result is Dérive, her third book of photographs. Filled with striking grainy, black-and-white images of 21st-century city life at its most shocking, it features homeless people, boarded-up buildings and graffiti-covered walls on abandoned, windswept streets. Her wanderings through the city were inspired by French philosopher Guy Debord and his theory of the Dérive or drift, an unplanned journey. 

 

The photographs depict many of the homeless people she encountered during lockdown. “Since I was spending hours a day just wandering, they would very often be the only people that I would speak to. I think that, with homeless [people], the fact that nobody knows their names, nobody takes the time, is normal. It was important for me – and it was important for them – to have somebody who was interested in them and who spoke with them.”

 

Each of her subjects agreed to be photographed, sometimes posing, although Lange herself has always had an uncomfortable relationship with being on the other side of the camera. She tells me that she politely turns down any fans who often stop her in the street to ask for a photograph. “I say, ‘No, I’m sorry, I never do that’, and they say, ‘Well, can I get a hug?’” And she admits that even today she has never got used to fame. “I just don’t want to be photographed by everybody who recognises me,” she says.

 

That might soon be a situation that she rarely has to deal with, as she suddenly casually says: “I think I’m going to start phasing out of filmmaking.” 

 

I assume I’ve misheard her: she can’t possibly mean that she wants to retire, can she? After all, she is one of Hollywood’s most well-known and admired actresses. Her recent projects include American Horror Story and The Politician, but she first found fame in 1976, making her debut as the damsel in distress in King Kong, beating actresses Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn to the role. She went on to win Oscars, three Emmys and five Golden Globes, among other awards for classic films including Tootsie, Frances and Blue Sky. 

 

Are you actually thinking of retiring, I ask? “I am,” she confirms. “I don’t think I’ll do this too much longer.”  Her decision, she tells me, has nothing to do with her age but is due to her sense of deep disillusionment with the type of films being made today.

 

“Creativity is secondary now to corporate profits,” she says. “The emphasis becomes not on the art or the artist or the storytelling. It becomes about satisfying your stockholders. It diminishes the artist and the art of filmmaking.” 

 

She laments the loss of “wonderful films by really great filmmakers, wonderful stories, great characters. That’s rare, isn’t it now?”

 

Lange’s criticisms are hard to ignore. As the star of both screen and stage for the past four decades, she has captivated audiences with the emotional breadth she has brought to classic roles such as tragic heroine Blanche du Bois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Her performances have been described as “mesmeric” by producer Bill Kenwright, who once said: “If there are two or three better actresses than Jessica, I’ve yet to meet them.”

 

She still recalls her disbelief at being cast as the female lead in King Kong back in 1976. At the time she was working as a waitress and a model in New York, but also taking acting classes. “I fell into acting,” she says. “It suddenly felt right.”  She went on to star in memorable roles including an adulterous waitress in Bob Rafelson’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, doomed actress Frances Farmer in Graeme Clifford’s biopic, Frances, and the fearful housewife in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear.

 

Given the calibre of the roles and the directors she’s worked with, it comes as no surprise that she says she “has no desire to see 90 per cent” of today’s offerings. In an apparent reference to American superhero films based on the Marvel Comics, she says: “I’m not interested in these big comic-book franchise films. I think that they’ve sacrificed this art that we’ve been involved in … for the sake of profit.” 

 

She loathes, for example, the “frantic editing” in today’s productions, unlike films of the past where the camera would linger on actors and allow dialogue to develop. “I don’t know if it’s because the filmmakers think that they can’t hold the attention of the audience anymore,” she says. “That kind of filmmaking drives me crazy.” Ageism is another aspect of Hollywood she criticises, observing that “even when it’s run by women, I don’t see a huge difference”. 

 

Born in Cloquet, Minnesota, by the age of 18 Lange had lived in 13 different homes and attended eight schools, due to her father’s job as a travelling salesman for an oil company. “He was a restless man,” she says. Forever the new girl, she would lose herself in daydreaming.

 

“I had a very strong imagination and I spent a lot of time just creating stories in my mind,” she says. “That was a good way to escape, a means of entertaining oneself before there was all this media. I worry sometimes about children, these last couple of generations raised with a screen in front of them, just feeding them all these images and information. What happens to the imagination?”  

 

 

Intensely private, she won’t discuss her relationships, including her long-standing partners, the late Sam Shepard, the actor and writer who was her partner for 27 years, and who gave her a Leica camera, and the Soviet-born American actor and ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. 

 

Although she confirms she is still friends with Baryshnikov, she adds: “I really don’t want to talk about the men in my life. It’s way too personal.”

 

While she has a large family, with three children and two grandchildren, whom she sees “often, but not enough”, she also has three siblings, all of whom are “very close”. But she lives alone, and says that she has come to terms with loneliness, immersing herself in her photography, which was an early passion.

 

“When I first went to the university, I fell in with a group of young photographers, filmmakers, and I was fascinated with it,” she recalls. “But then my life went in a different direction and I never pursued it until much later.

 

“I found that it was a perfect kind of balance to a world where you’re always observed in film or on stage. And now I could be anonymous. I could be behind the camera and be a fly-on-the-wall just observing.”

 

She feels that photography builds on what an actor tries to achieve: “The idea of being present, of actually being inside the moment. It makes you practise the art of seeing.”

 

Despite her gradual retirement, she hasn’t given up on performing quite yet. She’ll next be seen on our screens in an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Long Day’s Journey Into Night, alongside Ed Harris, and she also has a Marlene Dietrich biopic in development. “It’s a project that I would love to do, but there’s no guarantee that films like that are going to get made.”

 

But, with typical modesty, she dismisses the suggestion that her retirement will be a loss to the film industry. “I’m sure they won’t miss me at all,” she says.