Jane Alexander

An accomplished, respected, award winning actress, Jane Alexander (1939 – ) also may be remembered for her four-year stint as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. While some in Congress wanted to abolish the agency, the performer fought for its existence, eventually winning the battle, although the NEA’s budget was cut by 45 percent. Alexander turned her experiences in Washington into a book, Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics (DaCapo Press, 2001), and resumed her distinguished acting career. Over the course of five decades, Alexander, to date, has received two Emmy Awards, a Tony® Award and four Academy Award nominations.

Jane Quigley was born on October 28, 1939 in Boston, Massachusetts, the eldest of three children born to orthopedic surgeon Thomas B. Quigley and his nurse wife, the former Ruth Elizabeth Pearson. She was raised in Brookline and educated at the Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill. While still a student, she developed an appreciation for acting and was determined to pursue a theatrical career, particularly after making her stage debut in a production of Treasure Island. At her father’s urging, though, she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College where she studied both theater and mathematics. Leaving school during her sophomore year, she attended the University of Edinburgh where she studied theater. Returning to the , she eventually married Robert Alexander in 1962, gave birth to a son Jason (an actor and director known as Jace Alexander) in 1964, and began her acting career working in regional theater at Boston’s Charles Playhouse. In 1966, Alexander joined the acting company at Washington, DC’s Arena Stage. Within a year, she was cast in what would become her star-making role.

Playwright Howard Sackler had fictionalized the life of African-American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson in his drama The Great White Hope and Alexander was cast as the Caucasian woman who loved the boxer (played by James Earl Jones). The production garnered strong reviews and became the first of Arena Stage’s to move to Broadway in 1968 where the play won the Pulitzer Prize and both Jones and Alexander picked up Tony® Awards. The Great White Hope also marked the beginning of a long professional and personal relationship between Alexander and the play’s director Edwin Sherin whom she married in 1975.

In a rare move, both Alexander and Jones reprised their stage roles in the film version of the play (directed by Martin Ritt) and each received an Academy Award nomination for their work. Over the next two decades, Alexander divided her time between the stage and screen, along the way creating a galaxy of portraits of forthright women performed with simplicity and an unmannered honesty. Her theatrical work saw her play everything from the classical heroines of Shakespeare and Ibsen to contemporary figures in both comedies and dramas. She has earned an additional six nominations for the Antoinette Perry Award for her portrayals of a woman searching for just the right Manhattan apartment in Bob Randall’s comedy 6 Rms. Riv Vu (1973), the wife of a bisexual Englishman in Find Your Way Home (1974), the first female appointed to the Supreme Court in First Monday in October (1979), the wealthiest woman in the world hell-bent on revenge in The Visit (1992), a successful investment banker in The Sisters Rosensweig (1993), and a poet whose husband leaves her for a younger woman in Honour (1998) .

After her Oscar nomination, Alexander had a good part as Kirk Douglas’ wife in the western A Gunfight (1971) but it took several years before she found other strong roles. The actress delivered a complex and fascinating portrait of a mousy accountant with pertinent information to the investigation of Watergate in All the President’s Men (1976) and was memorable as a caring neighbor offering assistance to Dustin Hoffman’s befuddled parent in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), both of which netted her Academy Award nominations as Best Supporting Actress. She did yeoman work as a political figure in the prison drama Brubaker (1980) and was touching as the pragmatic matriarch of a California family facing life after a nuclear holocaust in Testament (1983), which was originally made for television but released theatrically. For her efforts in this film she earned her fourth Oscar nominations and second in the Best Actress category.

Alexander made her producing debut with Square Dance (1987), in which she also co-starred as a mother who abandoned her family and whose return upsets things. After an uncredited cameo appearance as Matthew Broderick’s mother in the Civil War drama Glory (1989), the actress was off-screen for a decade while attending to her duties in Washington. Alexander returned to film roles as Nurse Edna in The Cider House Rules (1999) and later played the mother of a motel manager in John Sayles’ Sunshine State (2002), a doctor in the horror remake The Ring (2 002), and the judgmental mother of the titular photographer in Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006). She was also seen as the supportive wife of a retired professor in Feast of Love (2007).

The small screen has offered the actress some of her best opportunities. Alexander began making guest appearances in the late 1960s on series like Adam-12 and N.Y.P.D. but it was during the 1970s that she found some of her most memorable roles. She was well cast as the mother in the small screen remake of the holiday classic Miracle on 34th Street (CBS, 1973), as the parent of a cancer-stricken youth in Death Be Not Proud (ABC, 1975), and as a volunteer at a school for special needs youths in both A Circle of Children (CBS, 1977) and its sequel Lovey: A Circle of Children II (CBS, 1978). Alexander found a signature role as the plain and forthright First Lady in the biographical drama Eleanor and Franklin (ABC, 1976), opposite Edward Herrmann, and its sequel Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (ABC, 1977). For both miniseries, Alexander was nominated for an Emmy Award, although she inexplicably lost the prize. She finally took home a statue for her memorable supporting role as the leader of a concentration camp orchestra in the controversial drama Playing for Time (CBS, 1980). Alexander also found strong roles in other biographical dramas starring as Martha Jane Canary in Calamity Jane (CBS, 1984, which she also produced), the hat-wearing Hollywood gossip queen Hedda Hopper (opposite Elizabeth Taylor’s Louella Parsons) in the enjoyable Malice in Wonderland (CBS, 1985) and as the artist Georgia O’Keefe in the PBS drama A Marriage: Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz (1991), directed by Edwin Sherin. When she resumed her career after her tenure in Washington, she made an Emmy-nominated guest appearance in a two-part crossover episode also directed by Sherin on both Law & Order and its companion series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Alexander earned her second Emmy award for her portrayal of Sara Delano Roosevelt in the HBO drama Warm Springs (2005). In 2007, she made her television series debut as a couples’ therapist in HBO’s Tell Me You Love Me, in which she appeared opposite David Selby with whom she acted in regional theater and on Broadway in a 1976 revival of The Heiress.

In the early 1990s, Alexander was approached by a member of the staff of Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI) about the possibility of serving as chair of the beleaguered National Endowment of the Arts (NEA). Although she had not really considered a career in politics, the idea appealed to the actress and by 1992 she had emerged as a consensus selection for the position. When she testified before Congress during her confirmation hearings, she noted that many of the theaters at which she worked early in her career had benefitted from NEA support. As the NEA chair, Alexander visited all 50 states touring many of the traditional cultural centers which had received grant money from the agency. Although her intentions were honorable, she met resistance from Republicans who gained control of the Senate in the 1994 elections. She found many of the politicians were suspicious of artists and the arts and found that all of her powers of persuasion failed to gain support for the institution. Since President Clinton was embroiled in his own political issues, Alexander was more or less left on her own. While there were no major controversies over funding (as had been the case with her predecessor), the agency’s budget was whittled away by those opposed to arts funding. By the time Alexander had decided to resign, partly to resume her acting career, the NEA’s budget had been slashed by 45 percent. The actress, who had previously published a cookbook, wrote a highly readable account of her experiences in Washington entitled Command Performance.—Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center