There are very few occupations that beg the qualifier “working” as a prefix to the job title, as if to signify a profession with something to prove. You only ever hear of one: acting. No one ever introduces anyone else as a “working CPA” or a “working plumber.” That would be like saying, “He’s a plumber — can you believe he’s making a living ?”
But there is such a thing as a “working actor,” mostly it seems, to distinguish the breed from people who say they’re actors when what they really are are restaurant hostesses and piano teachers, and people who say they’re actors when what they really are are movie stars. Nobody calls Julia Roberts a working actress.
Ellen Pompeo, who plays the title character on the ABC series Grey’s Anatomy, is a working actress. She has a job where she is expected more or less every day of a pre-established workweek. Peggy McKay, who plays the blue-collar Irish matriarch Caroline Brady on the NBC soap opera Days of Our Lives, is a working actress.
Among their ranks is Natalie Canerday, who is a working actress in both senses of the term. One, when she files her tax return every year, the tally of her income is almost exclusively from acting work. The only pay stubs that don’t correspond to work on film or stage are for when she occasionally works in the front office of Murry’s Dinner Playhouse in Little Rock, telephoning patrons and asking them to renew their season passes. (For ticket holders on the other end of the line, hearing Canerday’s unmistakable and elaborately deliberate drawl, exploited most indelibly by Billy Bob Thornton, her director in the 1996 film Sling Blade, must be a little like having the outgoing message on your answering machine recorded in the baritone of James Earl Jones, with whom Canerday once shared representation by a Los Angeles talent agency. )
Also, she occasionally works as a plus-size fitting model for the fashion design department of Dillard’s. “They’ll put me in something and say, ‘Now turn this way, now bend forward, does it itch ?’” Canerday relates, in a conspiratorial flutter of self-deprecation. These days, the 46-year-old often returns to the theme of her no longer matching the size-10 frame of her Hollywood publicity photos.
And two, Canerday is a creature of workaday habit. For the past four months — or “since tax day,” as she approximates — she has appeared almost nightly in plays at Murry’s, beginning with one called Saving Grace, followed by God’s Favorite, and then, in a production that closes tonight, A Bad Year for Tomatoes, in which she earns laughs with a succession of drunken scenes soaked in Scotch (actually decaffeinated tea ).
That’s the work part of being a working actress, but Canerday’s lifestyle is a big, actress-y tidal cycle of charisma and need that make performing the same role regularly, by the clock, possible. Even in her downtime, Canerday is a working actress. GAME SHOWS AND EYELINER
She awakens around 11 each morning in her duplex in Little Rock’s Tanglewood area. The home is decorated with posters from all her films, which also include Mike Nichols’ Biloxi Blues and Shotgun Stories, a darling of last year’s independent-film circuit so new that it was only released July 1 on DVD. In it, Canerday has two quiet but intense scenes as a mother whose sons are engaged in a brutal feud. The film’s first-time director, Jeff Nichols, who made his movie in Scott and Keo, asked specifically for Canerday.
“He said going into it, ‘I’ve written this little script I want you to read, ’” Canerday recalls. “He told me, ‘ You’re just this despicable woman who hates your children. We don’t know why. It’s never explained, but you can hardly stand to look at them.’ I said, ‘Oooh-kaaay. ’”
The posters for Shotgun Stories and Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash bio-pic for which she agreed to bob the chestnut hair she normally keeps at a south-of-shoulder-length, Jacyln Smith luster — the Internet Movie Database identifies her role as “Lady in Aisle” — are the only ones she has yet to frame. “They let me keep something from every movie I’ve done,” she says. “Oh what all ?” she asks herself, somewhat absent-mindedly, as a way of cataloguing the memorabilia. “There’s my name tag from Sling Blade, from that dollar store where I worked.
“ When you’re doing a play,” she continues, “and it’s a typical day — not a Sunday, because of the matinee — I’ll get up, watch Jeopardy !, smoke my cigarette and drink my Coke. Then, I’ll do whatever I need to do, whether it’s laundry, running errands, paying bills, going to practice, whatever. I like to get to the theater between 5 and 5: 30 — a, to beat the traffic, which is awful anymore, and b, I can relax. I can smoke a cigarette with the waiters and take time doing my face. It’s kind of calming, putting on makeup, because I don’t wear it in real life. I just wear it for money. It’s relaxing — oh, separate your eyelashes. It’s the calm before the storm of everybody coming in here at the same time.
“ Then I’ll stay up to 2 or 3 in the morning. Sometimes we’ll hang out here, or we used to go to Zach’s Place down the street. Anymore, I’m just a homebody.” She sighs.
The aggregate of income that creates financial peace of mind for Canerday is mystifying, but less so when you consider that each time a major TV network like NBC, ABC, CBS or Fox airs Sling Blade, she receives a residual check for $ 5, 000. A cable channel repeat earns her a smaller residual check than a broadcast airing, but a larger one than a hotelroom pay-per-view. Then there are her shares of DVD rentals and sales. Canerday estimates that she takes in $ 128 a year in residual payments for a voice performance she once contributed to the animated series King of the Hill, and another $ 50 for airings, in some form or the other, of Biloxi Blues.
“You never know, so I try not to bank on it,” she says of the payments, which the studios involved generate automatically. “I try to pretend like there is no money coming in. You could figure out the odds and amounts to Oaklawn easier.” YOU’RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE
One thing that Canerday can bank on is her voice. Her voice — a tone-for-tone, emphasis-for-emphasis replica of the way an exceedingly polite young Southern woman might address a hard-of-hearing, slightly addled older Southern relation, as a show of deference and a bid to lull them with a familiar cadence, but applied to every single verbal situation Canerday encounters — is Natalie Canerday, at least the way casting directors see her.
To Canerday, the accent is a spice blend of her father’s side of the family, a Northwest Arkansas clan, and her mother’s side, spread across a swath of south Arkansas including Pine Bluff, Star City and Fountain Hill. Others disagree.
“It is distinctive to me,” Canerday admits of the familial singularity of her drawl. “Mother said I didn’t use to talk this Southern until I worked at Dogpatch.”
During summers away from her native Russellville, where her parents sold motorcycles, followed by chickens, and on break from her formal theater training at Hendrix College in Conway, Canerday did character work at Dogpatch U. S. A., the Harrison theme park modeled after Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip. Canerday roamed the park playing Moonbeam McSwine and, one summer, Dateless Brown, a kind of bizarro Daisy Mae who wielded a shotgun to entrap men. “Hi little feller, come own over,” she drawls as an example of the theme-park ad-libbing her mother blames for forging her tongue.
The only person to have ever been insufficiently impressed with the degree of difficulty in Canerday’s execution of the Southern accent was Thornton. Canerday recalls him introducing her to Lucas Black, the young actor who would play her son in Sling Blade. “He said, ‘ I want you to hear this kid, ’” Canerday says. “‘ He’s from Speake, Ala., and, oh my God, he makes you sound like you’re from the f ****** Bronx. ’”
But to Hollywood ears, there was no mistaking where she was from. Just before Christmas of 1996, Canerday moved to Los Angeles to capitalize on the industry word-of-mouth surrounding Sling Blade. “I met with six different agencies, ranging from William Morris — you know, the Wal-Mart of agencies — to this woman who sold real estate part time,” Canerday says. “Like, during the meeting, she told me to hang on three times while she answered the phone for real-estate calls. The big ones — William Morris and Creative Artists Agency — were like, and I wasn’t even big then, I was half of what I am now, they were all saying you need to lose weight, do something about your hair — because I’m getting a little bit gray — and you need to lose your accent. The woman at William Morris said, ‘ The South is dead.’ “ Well, noooo,” Canerday says, still smarting at the slight. “I don’t think so. They were basically not wanting me to be me.” Eventually, Canerday was offered a contract with Bauman-Hiller, the agency that had once represented her Sling Blade co-star John Ritter. Her agent with the firm gave her until after the new year to consider the offer of their representation. “He said, ‘Well, here’s my home number, here’s my cell number, have a good holiday, whatever you do, don’t dye your hair blond, don’t get your tits done and, for God’s sake honey, don’t lose that accent.’ They were the only ones who wanted me, as is.”
RETURN ENGAGEMENT Canerday’s idiosyncratic appeal — limited not only to her accent but also including her canny ability to step into the callouses and careworn frailties of a dust-bowl-era matron, aided by her own period girdle and stockings which instruct her body language — sustained her in Los Angeles for a while. The qualities are how she came to be cast, as the mother to a then still up-and-coming Jake Gyllenhaal, in October Sky, a big-studio film which also endures as a residual-payment cash cow.
But after five years on the West Coast, when Canerday got a call that Murry’s was casting a production of the spiritual musical Smoke on the Mountain, she rented a U-Haul and cleaned out her Los Angeles apartment.
“I was getting real homesick,” says Canerday, seated at a desk a few feet from Murry’s buffet line, darkened and empty of the pickled beets and seafood Creole that would be ladled into it a few hours later. The box-office telephone bleats as she talks and office workers dart in to collect stray forks in a basket on the desk. Ike McEntire, the theater’s owner, stops in to pay respects to the actress he calls “our resident ham.”
“The novelty of me had worn off,” she shrugs. “The calls weren’t coming in as much.”
If Canerday has conflicted feelings about the spiky chart reading of her Los Angeles appeal, she does not telegraph them in her monologue. Asked for a high point of that time, she names getting a call from her agent that the Sling Blade cast had been nominated in the Best Ensemble category of the annual Screen Actors Guild awards while she was still living in an unfurnished apartment.
“I didn’t have a refrigerator yet. Refrigerators don’t come with apartments out there. I literally had cheese and beer in an ice chest, and I was sitting on it. I didn’t even have a chair. We didn’t win. We got beaten by The Birdcage. But I got to doll up.”
Asked for a low point, she stares at the wood-grain desktop for a moment in thought. When the answer finally comes, it has nothing to do with rejection or the dispiriting grindstone of homogenity. “Traffic,” she decides. “Too many people in too small a place. It was claustrophobic. Smothery.”
Canerday’s voice is still her calling card. At a recent performance, a young girl sent a note backstage begging Canerday to come out and meet her. She recognized her not from her blackand-white thumbnail photograph in the playbill, or even from her appearance onstage; it was her voice that gave her away. “She told me I was one of her two very favorite actors,” Canerday recalls. “The other was Morgan Freeman.”
Canerday films parts in a handful of small-budget independent films per year. She is rarely asked to audition and is matterof-fact when auditions don’t go well. By her account, she flubbed readings for Come Early Morning, filmed by Joey Lauren Adams and starring Ashley Judd, and for War Eagle, Arkansas, which premiered at this year’s Little Rock Film Festival, and lost the character parts she had picked out from those scripts. Before the end of the month, she’ll film two backto-back in Tennessee, and word of a possibility of a role in a Hal Holbrook movie finally drifted to her recently like a seaborne message in a bottle.
“On the Internet, there’s that Internet Movie Database, and apparently there’s no contact information on there for me,” Canerday laments. “So the guy shooting this feature just called information in Russellville and got Daddy, and Daddy sent him here.”
The people who populate Canerday’s world are similarly out-of-date on the particulars of her status. “There’s a little place on 12 th Street where I buy cigarettes,” she says. “The guy who runs it is always like, ‘Oh, moooovie star, how are ya ?’ He has no idea who I am. He just knows I work in plays. I said something last year like, ‘Well, I’m going down to Atlanta to make a movie.’ He said, ‘Well, good for you. See ? Things are gonna happen.’ He has no idea. And I like it that way.”
After a recent weeknight performance of the farcical A Bad Year for Tomatoes, Canerday slipped out to Murry’s back patio to smoke a cigarette in the moonlight with two of her younger co-stars. The treeshrouded enclave, roamed by stray cats and raccoons, felt very far away from the dinner theater’s berth on South University Avenue, let alone from Hollywood.
Canerday stood while everyone else sat. She swatted away June bugs that would come to rest on her companions’ shoulders, straying from the coronas of light above the stage door. The motion of her hands put her in mind of the ostentatious manicure she had received in preparation for a giggly, bosomy role in the comedy The Boys of Summerville. (The movie’s trailer is available for viewing on what Canerday calls “the new YouTube,” which, from her mouth, came out like, “tha naaaewe Yaaa-ewe-Taaa-ewb.” )
She went to a Korean (“ Koeree-uhn” ) salon near her house and asked for super-long artificial nails painted a shade she described as “whore red.” The nails made it through filming, but one night at home she held her hand wrong for support as she was sitting down on the couch and her boyfriend heard one of the nails snap from a different part of the house. Canerday laughed a throaty, smoky, bawdy, whiskey laugh that carried off to the empty asphalt of the abandoned parking lot, and the show, whose curtain call had come half an hour earlier, seemed far from over.
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