Jean Smart has been enjoying much-deserved ballyhoo this spring.
The 69-year-old actor offers a memorable supporting performance in HBO’s grim limited series “Mare of Easttown” -- and an even more memorable star turn in the streaming comedy series “Hacks.” This has led The New York Times to herald “The Re-Re-Rebirth of Jean Smart.”
But while the Newspaper of Record, in celebrating this “Jeanaissance,” rolls back through Smart’s long career -- her recent scene stealing in “Fargo” and “Watchmen,” her early 2000s Emmy wins for “Samantha Who?” and “Frasier,” her leap into the big time with the 1980s sitcom “Designing Women” -- it skips over some key Northwest dues-paying.
Namely, Smart’s breakout 1970s performances at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where the native Seattleite established her bona fides not as a comedian, but as a dramatic actor.
Jean Smart stars in the new HBO series "Hacks." She's also appearing in "Mare of Easttown." (Jake Giles Netter/HBO Max/TNS)TNS
In three Ashland seasons starting in 1975, Smart played eight roles, eliciting kudos from critics and audiences alike.
Smart’s first splash in southern Oregon came in Eugene O’Neill’s classic family dystopia “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” with the 23-year-old Smart wearing a wiry white wig and heavy makeup to portray the haunted, morphine-addicted 50-something mother. William Hurt, two years older than Smart and five years away from his Hollywood breakthrough in “Body Heat,” played one of her sons in the production.
“Hurt is sensitive but perhaps a bit too remote as the morbidly preoccupied would-be poet,” The Oregonian’s Ted Mahar wrote.
Jean Smart, seen here with Kelsey Grammer, won two Emmys for guest appearances on "Frasier."bn
Though on the fence about Hurt, Mahar had unreserved praise for Smart, writing that she was “outstanding as the mother …. Her delivery is musical and her tone vague, befitting an addict half in her own world. But Smart gives vivid glimpses of the tortured soul trapped in that body and in that family.”
The Oregon Journal’s theater critic, Arnold Marks, also singled out Smart, writing: “Plaudits should go to Jean Smart for her quiet, penetrating portrayal of the hopelessly addicted and mad mother.”
The same month “Journey” opened in Ashland, Smart showed up on local television sets in the Oregon Educational and Public Broadcasting Service’s “The Woman and Her Weapons,” which featured festival actors declaiming from Shakespearean texts to, in Marks’ interpretation, “put over the point that women manipulated men in Shakespeare’s time as they do now and that women’s lib is nothing new.”
Jean Smart was one of the stars of the 1980s sitcom "Designing Women."
Proving that 1975 truly was the Summer of Smart in Oregon, The Oregonian’s Fran Jones profiled her and another Ashland actor, Larry Ballard, in a full-page Sunday feature.
“The word to describe Jean Smart is ‘presence,’” Jones wrote. “It projects across the footlights, and when you meet her in person it is still there.”
Jones, embracing the amateur psychoanalyzing that was popular in feature writing at the time, speculated that Smart was able to play a tormented, middle-aged character in part because she was diabetic and so was “keenly aware of chemical imbalances and what they can do to the mind when things go haywire.”
Smart appeared to hold questions about her personal life at bay, but she acknowledged to Jones that she was married to a Marine Corps officer who had joined the military after he “did the hippie trip for a while.”
Jean Smart
The profile added that Smart’s husband would complete his “tour of duty next year and they will have to decide what to do about two careers. … Also, she wants children, and being a diabetic, wants to bear them before she is 30. She is considering nursing as an alternate career.”
(That early marriage didn’t last, and of course Smart stuck with acting over nursing. In 1987 she married fellow actor Richard Gilliland, and they raised two children. Gilliland died early this year.)
Smart was back in Ashland again in 1976, and then the following summer she returned one more time, not just to the festival, but also to Eugene O’Neill, this time in the dispiriting, rarely produced drama “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” essentially a “Long Day’s Journey” sequel.
William Hurt, center, with Jean Smart, right, in "Long Day's Journey Into Night," at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1975. (Hank Kranzler/The Oregonian archive)LC- Hank Kranzler
Smart, wrote reviewer Susan Stanley in the Journal, played “the apparently sluttish” Josie Hogan, with whom O’Neill’s protagonist James Tyrone Jr. connects.
Stanley added:
“Jean Smart’s portrayal of Josie was a fine thing to see. After a slow start, she wove together a fascinating woman -- one full of tough talk and self-diminishing references to her sexual escapades, only momentarily permitting herself the luxury of lapsing into expressing what she truly felt.”
The Oregonian went further, with Mahar calling Smart’s performance “overwhelming … her dramatic power almost seems to radiate from the stage.” (Mahar added: “To quibble, she is probably too attractive for the role…”)
During that last Ashland sojourn, Smart also played Lady Grey in, the Journal wrote, a “wildly lively” production of “Henry VI” that spilled over with “battle scenes, treachery, fathers killing sons, sons killing fathers, sons being killed in front of their mothers … and on and on.”
After that, she was ready for Hollywood.
-- Douglas Perry
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