23.11.2002 By PETER CALDER
Winning two Emmy Awards in one year is the stuff that stardom is made of. But Stockard Channing isn't a star - and that's just
the way she likes it.
Channing, one of American stage and screen's busiest non-stars, earned one of the awards - television's Oscars - in September
for her role as Abigail Bartlett, the First Lady to Martin Sheen's President Jeb in The West Wing.
The other was for a telemovie in which played the mother of Matthew Shepard, a young Wyoming man fatally beaten in 1999
simply because he was gay.
She's only the fourth person - and the first actress - to win two Emmies in a single ceremony and she certainly doesn't take the
honour for granted.
"Yeah, well," she says. "They were my eighth and ninth nominations, so there you go. I've been sitting there with that smile on
my face for a number of years, so I've perfected the art of looking delighted when one of the other nominees wins."
It's hard to imagine anyone begrudging the hard-working 58-year-old the double recognition. The resume of her 30-year career
includes some hits and more than a few misses - she earned an Oscar nomination for her role as the willingly deceived Manhattan
art collector in 1993's Six Degrees of Separation - but mostly hers is the CV of an old-fashioned stage-trained thespian who
knows that success means being busy and depends on a judicious mixture of talent and solid craft.
There's plenty of sterling craft on show in Channing's latest big-screen outing, The Business of Strangers, co-starring Julia Stiles
and Frederick Weller. It's an intense two-hander which, unusually, has two women in the lead roles (the cast's only man spends
much of his screen time not entirely present) and Channing is brilliant as a corporate executive on the edge in a nuanced
performance which is, not incidentally, utterly devoid of vanity.
Channing's crowded schedule may seem to give the lie to the common charge - most vocally levelled by Meryl Streep - that roles
dry up for women when they hit middle age.
"I don't think it's false - I wish it were - but I do think that I'm very lucky. I do seem to be the exception to the rule, but it's a
pity that it seems remarkable. I've had some good roles, but I've never been at those very heady heights - and I've also never
made my reputation on my looks. I've had a career the way people have careers in other fields, but I guess I never was in
competition with my own past."
It's an odd comment coming from a woman who is still buttonholed at airports by fans who still see her as the vulnerable bad girl
Rizzo in the 1978 film Grease, the leader of the "Pink Ladies" who, at one point leaps onto a bed and croons Look At Me, I'm
Sandra Dee.
Channing says the role - inhabited by Lucy Lawless, among others, in a recent Broadway revival - has created a new generation
of fans with the arrival of home video, but she says it's never really been a burden because hardened Grease fans are largely
unaware of her subsequent work.
"It's a huge phenomenon, but I don't think about it because it's so far away. I've done so many things, people have different
assumptions about me depending on the work they've seen." It's a testament to the esteem in which she's held that The West
Wing tends to work around her: "When my schedule is clear, they write me in. If I am making a movie, we try to work out how
I can do my bit."
But for all her big-screen commitments, Channing - like many of her generation and like too few movie stars - cut her acting
teeth on the stage and returns to it as often as she can. She most recently played Eleanor of Aquitaine to Laurence Fishburne's
Henry II in The Lion in Winter on Broadway in 1999, but finds it hard to set aside the three to six months needed to do a big
show.
In the level of dramatic intensity it creates, The Business of Strangers seems theatrical although it is, in fact, intensely cinematic,
relying heavily on close-ups (the last shot is a cracker), editing and an eerily brilliant sound design.
"People think of it as theatrical," says Channing, "because its two people mano a mano but the reason it creates that impression is
because ... well, I think it's about acting."
The film was shot - in the real surroundings of the airport and hotel where it takes place - in a very fast 21 days which Channing
remembers as "very intense".
"It was all night shooting, too," she says, "which I think made us a little crazy because we were going home from work at nine in
the morning. I think it helped us a bit because we were so strung out and contributed to the bizarre atmosphere."
Channing's performance in The Business of Strangers is a slow burn: a corporate woman at a crossroads, she crosses paths with
an office junior who is more - or maybe less - than meets the eye and it's a pleasure to watch what happens next. Plainly,
Channing is happy in her work. She enjoys the relative anonymity of what she calls "my own idiosyncratic life" and the fact that
she can even go to the supermarket "depending on where that supermarket is".
"There's a lot of people who like to have their faces in magazines, who are professional celebrities," she says. "There's nothing
wrong with that, but I'm not one of them."
"That's not why I got into this. People either know me for my work or they don't. And as long as I keep working, it's fine with
me."
