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The Tony-winning actress broaches a touchy subject
The tape recorder is running, but Frances Sternhagen and I are contending with an enormous bee that, on this hot spring day, has impudently buzzed into the actress's New Rochelle, N.Y., home. The bee's fate temporarily takes priority over a subject that Sternhagen is willing, but not enthused, to discuss: what it means to be a stage actress and-Sternhagen's preferred term-an "older woman."
For Sternhagen, the topic is a bit ironic, because during much of her career she has portrayed women older than herself. There was a succession of maternal roles, including the put-upon Dora Strang in the Broadway production of Equus and the plethora of characters in Neil Simon's The Good Doctor (for which she won a Tony award). There was the spunky elderly wife in Ernest Thompson's tender drama On Golden Pond and, perhaps most memorably, the palsied but stalwart nonagenarian in Alfred Uhry's Pulitzer-winning Driving Miss Daisy. Finally, there was the role of Lavinia Penniman, the wise and good-hearted aunt in Lincoln Center's acclaimed revival of The Heiress, which garnered Sternhagen another Tony. She once told an interviewer, "I've been playing old ladies since I've been five."
But now this slim actress with...