The Winning Ways of Mare Winningham

Sitting as a judge for the annual Humanitas prizes for television scripts that best espouse human family values, I was not just impressed but bowled over by “God Bless the Child,” a stark and totally uncompromised story about a homeless Chicago mother who must finally abandon her daughter if the daughter is to have any kind of life at all.

Dennis Nemec’s script indeed took the top Humanitas award this year, and I did not see a finer, more moving performance than Mare Winningham’s as the mother. It was quietly intense, never flamboyant, never the actress seen to be acting, and I suspect that no one who viewed the program will ever forget the anguish as Winningham watched from concealment while a sympathetic social worker by pre-arrangement drove the child away from a playground.

Winningham, who is currently co-starring with Sean Penn and Danny Aiello in David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly” at the Westwood Playhouse, knows about motherhood. At the age of 29 she has five children, four sons and a daughter, the oldest 7, the youngest born just three weeks before she was hired for “Hurlyburly.”

“I’m only on stage in the second act,” she said earlier this week. “I nurse the baby during Act I, then do the role, then nurse him again during Act III.”

In “Hurlyburly” Winningham is again playing a single mother, keeping some sort of life together for herself and her daughter by working as a topless artiste, doing graceful things with a large balloon while the customers (you have the feeling) are hooting for more torrid stuff.

She’s a kind of earth mother in torn black tights, who has been given a hard time by the world (e.g., men), but who remains a generous, compassionate figure in a small, druggy enclave unable to see beyond its own over-indulged hang-ups. She is a born survivor among those not sure they can, or want to.

Winningham is terrific, of course, but then again she always is. She is one of those exceptional actresses who assumes a role so thoroughly that what you see is the character, not the actress, even though the actress has poured all her own experience, feelings and intelligence into presenting the character the author had in mind. It is acting in the tradition of, say, Geraldine Page.

I also have memories of Winningham in her first motion picture, “One Trick Pony,” as a young groupie sharing a bathtub with Paul Simon, smoking a cigarette, exuding a blithe, hip confidence and singing “Me and Bobby McGee.”

She sings very well and was discovered, improbably, by the agent, Meyer Mishkin, while she portrayed Maria in a production of “The Sound of Music” at Chatsworth High School. (Mishkin similarly discovered Richard Dreyfuss in a production at Beverly Hills High.) She also writes songs and has a now-and-again folk group called the Waybacks.

Mishkin, Winningham says gratefully, plotted her career perfectly: no entrapment in a series and no commercials. “He looked very hard for good television movies.” He found them. Within weeks she had a role in “Special Olympics” (1978), as one of Charles Durning’s daughters.

She earned an Emmy for best supporting actress in the 1980 “Amber Waves,” as Dennis Weaver’s rebellious teen-age daughter who returns to his Kansas wheat farm when he falls ill.

The next year she starred as another teen-age runaway who has become a hooker, in “Off the Minnesota Strip,” which she regards as the turning point in her career. “It called for me to give more than I’d ever given before.” She was still not 21.

Winningham is herself one of five children, her parents both educators. Her mother taught English at Grant High in the San Fernando Valley and is now the college counselor there. Her father is athletic director at Cal State Northridge.

The parents, she says, encouraged all their children to pursue their individual dreams. Her sister teaches English at Grant High, a brother is an economist, another teaches Transcendental Meditation, another is a rock ‘n’ roller.

When it became clear, in junior high school, that Mare was destined for acting--she was christened Mary, but it became Mare, which stuck--her parents steered her to the Teen-age Drama Workshop, a rigorous summer program at Cal State Northridge, which began with four hours of classes each morning and ended with an all-afternoon rehearsal. She spent three summers there. She made her debut in “Hansel and Gretel” and later appeared in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

She was also active in drama at Chatsworth High. “There are high school play festivals all over Los Angeles. You get to know everybody.” Everybody, it also seems clear, gets to know you, and somehow the word reached Meyer Mishkin about someone to watch in “The Sound of Music.”

Winningham has been nominated for an Emmy in the excellent “Love Is Never Silent” and played the title role in “Helen Keller . . . The Miracle Continues.” Thus far her most conspicuous roles have been in television rather than in films, although she got and deserved fine reviews as a heart-transplant patient in the challenging but little-seen Richard Pearce film, “Threshhold” (1981). She was a pregnant wife in Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Shy People” (1987).

She and her husband Bill Mapel live now on a farm high in the eastern Sierra, 22 miles up a dirt road from no place, with Reno the nearest airport. They are pursuing a dream of eventual self-sufficiency. They have no television, but a generator for electricity (to be replaced in time by solar power). They grow much of their food and will add chickens.

“I start supper at 4. The kids set the table at 5 and then we eat by candlelight and we talk, because that’s what there is to do. The kids are getting to be very lively conversationalists.”

Only one of the children is yet of school age and their county has a home-teaching program, so for the moment Winningham is continuing the family tradition of teaching. While she is appearing in “Hurlyburly,” the family is temporarily renting a house in Los Angeles and may stay while she does another project.

But even the winters are livable in the Sierra. “We were snowed in for a week once. We debated about trying to get plowed out. But we had plenty of supplies and we said the heck with it. We sat it out.”