A Performer Who Finally Grew Into Her Talent

By Jean Nathan Dec. 22, 1996

Noel Coward's ''Present Laughter'' may be the chain-smoking-est play on Broadway, and though Allison Janney maintains she had quit a half-pack-a-day habit, it looks like the actress has slid backward a bit. She definitely has all the paraphernalia. One of the play's producers, David Richenthal, has given her an engraved cigarette case, and Scott Elliott, the director, presented everyone in the cast with lighters bearing the play's title. Perhaps, she suggests, nicotine patches would be an appropriate present on closing night.

On Nov. 18, the day before her 36th birthday, Ms. Janney made her Broadway debut in the revival of the 1939 Coward comedy. She plays Liz, the former but not ex-wife of Garry Essendine (Frank Langella), a London matinee idol who heads a frenetic, neurotic show-biz family. Liz, sophisticated and wise but not world-weary, is the very conscience of the play, a sort of emotional traffic cop for the spoiled and adored Essendine.

In his review of the production in The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote, ''The most fully accomplished performance on the stage comes from Allison Janney. . . . Everyone should have a Liz in his life, as Ms. Janney plays her.''

On this recent late afternoon, the actress has hurried from the matinee at the Walter Kerr Theater to the Algonquin Hotel, where Coward stayed on his first night in New York in 1921. Wearing a fake fur hat to conceal ''wig hair,'' a pin-striped mini-skirted suit, Liz's double strand of pearls and red nail polish, Ms. Janney vamps for the photographer, pulling a rose from a vase while exclaiming, ''Ah, the sweet smell of success,'' a cigarette poised in her other hand.

It's the second interview of her career (the first was for a 1994 piece in ''Soap Opera Digest''), and she is giving a great performance. A little anxious to please, she's all set to play both roles, interviewer and interviewee. When it is explained that she needs to answer the questions, not ask them, she seems relieved.

Indeed, Ms. Janney has had plenty of time to come up with answers. These ''Johnny Carson stories,'' as she calls them (''but he never asked''), are the signposts along her road to Broadway -- one strewn with broken glass, insults and, lately, success. Settling in with a ginger ale and an olive, a mock martini to keep up the blithe spirit, she allows as to how ''it's a great thing to be able to say that I'm making my living as an actress.''

It wasn't always so. Brought up in Dayton, Ohio, she wanted to be an Olympic figure skater, despite her height, which she describes as ''5 feet 12 inches.'' Then disaster struck. She was dancing at a party at the age of 17 when someone stepped on the hem of her floor-length, strapless gown. As the dress slipped to her waist, she ran blindly through a glass door, cutting tendons and arteries and ultimately losing 75 percent of her blood.

The accident delayed her entry into Kenyon College, and when she enrolled the next year, 1978, the entire school turned out for an open audition for a play directed by an alumnus, Paul Newman. The test required talking for two minutes. When her turn came, Ms. Janney told Mr. Newman that the drive from Dayton to the college was 3 1/2 hours but that she could do it in 2 hours and 45 minutes -- an attempt to appeal to his passion for car racing. She got a part.

At the suggestion of Joanne Woodward, Mr. Newman's wife, Ms. Janney went on to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York after graduation. (''There was no doubt when any of us saw her that this was a major talent,'' Ms. Woodward said last week. ''She seemed to be able to do anything.'') But despite stints at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, the Actor's Group in New York and the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, Ms. Janney faced a persistent problem: no agent wanted to go near her because of her height.

''I don't know what to do with you,'' she remembered one saying. ''Lesbians and aliens maybe?'' When she pointed out that there are many tall actresses, Christine Lahti and Sigourney Weaver to name two, another agent replied: ''But those women have something in common. They're drop-dead gorgeous.''

Ms. Janney persevered. ''It was hard to watch other people shooting to stardom in their 20's,'' she said, ''and there I was, still working downtown and not getting paid for anything. Then I began to see myself as the tortoise in the race. I was going to stay in it.''

Eventually she found a manager and began to get more substantial roles in theater, television and movies. On stage, she appeared in Nicky Silver's ''Fat Men in Skirts'' at Naked Angels in New York in 1994, and in Richard Nelson's ''New England'' and Craig Lucas's ''Blue Window,'' both at Manhattan Theater Club, in 1995 and 1996.

Stanley Tucci, who was also in the Silver play, said by telephone from Los Angeles that Ms. Janney ''would try anything, go deeper and deeper, work harder and harder.'' When he subsequently cast his current hit movie, ''Big Night,'' he gave her the part of Ann, the shy flower shop owner who catches the eye of a chef.

Before that, Ms. Janney had played an inept maid named Ginger for more than a year on ''The Guiding Light,'' the CBS soap opera. And she will be seen in three forthcoming films -- ''The Tears of Julian Po'' with Christian Slater, Ang Lee's ''Ice Storm,'' and ''Private Parts,'' the Howard Stern movie.

Despite her experience, Ms. Janney had an attack of characteristic self-doubt two weeks into rehearsals of ''Present Laughter.'' ''I was so beside myself,'' she said, ''I called Scott to ask if I was going to get fired.''

Mr. Elliott tried to calm her. ''It must have been a Maalox moment,'' he said. ''She completely captured everything I saw in Liz.''