The woman walks into a hotel lobby wearing a chambray shirt, denim skirt, bulky white socks and scruffy deck shoes.
She steps onto a crowded elevator, speaking with a trademark Texas twang. No one looks twice - even when she removes her sunglasses to reveal a familiar freckled face and watery blue eyes.Sissy Spacek is at home. Being normal.
No chauffeur has dropped off the Oscar-winning actress for an appointment with a reporter and photographer. No bodyguards are keeping an eye out for overeager fans. No overprotective publicists are hovering to orchestrate the interview and photo session.
The lack of an entourage is unusual, the actress admits with a chuckle: Usually husband Jack and daughters Schuyler, 8, and Madison, 2, are somewhere nearby. But today, the kids are back at the family farm, recovering from the flu. After five days of nursing them Spacek seems pleased to be out of the house.
"Normal" isn't an adjective that pops up to describe celebrities, but the word perfectly fits Sissy Spacek - who prefers to be called "Sissy."
And Spacek isn't particularly enamored of the spotlight, even though she has embarked on a round of interviews to promote her new film, "The Long Walk Home." She's as interested in talking about her daughter's class play or the drive to collect grocery receipts for school computers as she is in discussing her latest film or her acting career.
"What's normal?" she asks rhetorically. "I think I'm normal. . . . Maybe I'm abnormal because I get such a thrill from real life, just real life, everyday things."
She's done the limo-entourage bit, she says, and even though "it's real heady" she left it behind when she and Fisk, a film director, moved from Los Angeles to rural Virginia eight years ago.
She left Los Angeles because she missed the sense of community she had as a child in Quitman, Texas.
"I loved growing up in a little town," she says. "I loved knowing people. I loved going to the store and running into people. I loved going into the store and having forgotten my bag, saying, `Charge it, put it on my bill.' I loved going to the gas station and saying, `Pete, fill it up.' I loved that continuity of life."
In a celebrity-crazed world, Spacek has chosen normality over fame and is content with her choice.
"If somebody wants to think of me as a MOVIE STAR, that's fine, that's great," she says with a smile. "It sort of makes me giggle."
Spacek has been dazzling colleagues and critics since her screen debut as a prostitute in a forgettable movie called "Prime Cut." Though some critics panned her performance, Judith Crist called Spacek "the film's sole virtue" and her next major role in the movie "Badlands" brought more praise.
In the last 20 years Spacek has earned five Academy Award nominations, one winning one Oscar. She has built a reputation as a professional who does her homework to bring uncanny characterizations to the screen.
When she's preparing for a role, she keeps reams of notes on what the character wears, what she does, how she talks. She tells the movie's story to Fisk and any friend who will listen, until the story comes alive for her.
Preparing for her portrayal of singer Loretta Lynn in "Coal Miner's Daughter," Spacek constantly carried with her a cassette player with a recording of Lynn talking. That helped enable her "to get her rhythm and to get her voice." Later, she filmed herself telling the same stories on the tape, until she got in character.
"It's the most bizarre (thing)," Spacek says. "We have that tape, you see me start off, and 10 or 15 minutes into it, you see the transformation."
That transformation fascinates her.
"It's exciting," she says. "It becomes a physical experience as well as an emotional, spiritual experience, because you're lost in the moment. It's when your thinking, cognitive - the side of my brain that I use to prepare - shuts down and the right side takes over, and you just go and get lost in the moment.
"That's what they say when you go to acting school, `Now, what you want is for it to be magic,' for it to take off, to have this really wonderful experience when the scene plays and the scene plays you."
Spacek likens the experience to catching a moving train.
"You find the track, you know the train's coming and you move along the track," she explains. "And the train comes along - and it's either going to smash you to smithereens or it's going to carry you and take you with it. . . . When that happens, it's just thrilling. It doesn't happen that often, but when it does . . . "
The actress can't talk about her life today without talking about her childhood in the tiny East Texas town of Quitman.
Virginia is "where I'm raising my children," she says, but Texas, where she still has a lake home and numerous relatives, is "my roots. That's basically how I was formed. Texas is just, well, the center of the universe."
As the third child and only daughter of a county agricultural agent and a homemaker who worked part time, Spacek says, she was perfectly positioned for an idyllic childhood. Her parents centered their lives around family, and Spacek did everything from ride horses to sew dresses for the 4-H Club fashion show.
She never particularly longed to leave Quitman and "never thought about being FAMOUS," she says, but she "had a real urge from an early age, to PERFORM."
When she was 6, she visited the nearby town of Coke, Texas, and saw the Cokettes, a local girls' drill team, perform in a talent show. "They wore these little shiny cowgirl outfits . . . and they had majorette boots and little cowboy hats," Spacek says, "and I can remember looking up at the stage and watching the Cokettes and thinking, `I could do that. I want to do that.' I had the urge desperately - wanted to be up on the stage with them."
She began playing guitar at age 13 and performed anywhere there was an audience - at the Rotary club, at church or in local beauty pageants. Neighbor Susan Merritt and other local residents remember when Spacek and her older brother Robbie "did a little Charleston act, and it was adorable." Music teacher Mary Margaret Pepper says Spacek "was perfectly at home on the stage or in front of anybody."
Spacek's comfortable childhood continued until she was 17. Her biggest problem in life 'til that time was being "a strawberry blonde (who) had to wear pancake makeup and couldn't be in the sun."
Then her brother Robbie was diagnosed with leukemia.
"I knew he was very sick," Spacek says, but, "I never really thought he would die."
The Spaceks' family life suddenly turned inside out as Robbie, only 16 months older than Spacek, battled the disease.
"Junior and senior high school years were not a good time," Spacek says, remembering her family's commute from Quitman to Houston, where Robbie was being treated.
To spare their daughter some of the turmoil, the Spaceks sent Sissy to New York that summer to stay with her cousin, actor Rip Torn, and his wife, actress Geraldine Page.
For a small-town girl who rarely had crossed the state line or seen many high-rise buildings, New York was overwhelming.
"I had a crick in my neck from looking up," Spacek says, laughing. "You can always tell who's just got off the boats because they're like this in the cab." She cranes her neck awkwardly. "Always looking up instead of looking straight ahead."
She loved the city immediately, however, and was particularly enthralled by the theatrical world of her cousins, a world she longed to be part of.
"I can remember them talking about the work, talking about acting, talking about film," Spacek says, "and whatever they talked about, it was just so exciting and so interesting. And I can remember thinking that someday what I want is to be able to join in the conversation."
At the end of the summer, Spacek carried that longing home, along with a new wardrobe, a lot of makeup and two pairs of false eyelashes. She planned to spend her senior year at a private school in Houston, but the day she enrolled, Robbie died. The family returned to Quitman.
Robbie's death changed her outlook, Spacek says.
"It overshadowed everything. Everything suddenly was like, `Well, is it a matter of life and death?' Well, if it's not a matter of life and death, who cares?"
The experience "made me a lot tougher" Spacek says, as well as "fiercely passionate about everything," including an entertainment career.
"I don't think she changed," says brother Ed Spacek. "I think she matured a little earlier. . . . You feel like life's short and if I'm going to do something, I have to jump out there and get it, I have to go for it."
Spacek was afraid her parents would be hurt by her desire to skip college, but they didn't protest when she told them she wanted to return to New York for a singing career.
Her mother said, "Well, honey, it'll just be a matter of time until they realize how talented you are."
"Bless her heart," Spacek says, remembering her mother, who died 10 years ago. "And you know what? She believed it."
So did Sissy.
Spacek returned to New York after graduating from Quitman High in 1968.