Stockard Channing doesn't want to think about whether she'll be nominated for an Oscar for her work in "Six Degrees of Separation." But she doesn't have much choice.
"People keep asking me this question, so I have to think about it," the actress says. "It would be amazing and thrilling if it happened." Pause. "But it hasn't happened yet."It's a natural question, because Channing gives what is probably her best performance. She plays Ouisa, the well-heeled art dealer whose high-society life with her husband (Donald Sutherland) is disrupted by a con artist (Will Smith). Maybe because she originated the role in the New York stage version of the John Guare play (and got a Tony nomination for it), Channing seems perfectly at home in the part, tossing off Guare's smart lines in the early passages, then going through an identity crisis near the end.
Channing says she didn't worry about making Ouisa, a seemingly self-absorbed and shallow character, sympathetic. "We all like to think of ourselves as being regular fellas, and the rest of the world is self-absorbed and shallow," she says in her matter-of-fact style. "Well, I think we're all self-absorbed and shallow. How do you like that?"
Although Channing has been in nearly two dozen feature films, a handful of television movies and even her own TV show, major stardom has eluded her except on the stage. Her work in "Joe Egg" earned her a Tony in 1985, and she was nominated again for John Guare's "House of Blue Leaves."
"People say, `Oh, if you'd stuck around Hollywood you would have done more movies,' " says the 49-year-old native New Yorker. "Well, if I hadn't gone back and done all this theater, I wouldn't have done `Six Degrees' and I wouldn't have been in the movie. So go figure."
Channing was touted for stardom early in her film career, when she starred, in a role originally intended for Bette Midler, opposite Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty in Mike Nichols' 1975 film "The Fortune." "Unfortunately, `The Fortune' didn't make any money, and neither did the next two movies I made," she says. "So guess what? They don't like that in Hollywood.
"I saw it again recently, and it was delicious," she says of "The Fortune," "very strange and adorable, and everybody in it was terrific."
Chalk its failure up to bad timing, or bad marketing, or one of the many mysterious factors that determine hits and flops.
Another near-miss was the 1978 musical "Grease," which Channing handily stole as the wisecracking Rizzo. The movie made a fortune, but she says it "didn't do zilch for my career. I'm serious. I don't think it did anything for anybody's career, including John (Travolta) and Olivia (Newton-John)."
"I think they resented it in Hollywood. They couldn't believe that this kid-movie musical thing made zillions of dollars. They were very snobby about it."
Channing is encouraged by MGM's slow, careful release of "Six Degrees of Separation," which she thinks stands a chance of being more than an art-house hit because of the play's international reputation. "It's been playing all over the world. I mean, it's been in Turkey for two years, it's going to Prague. And the movie is so vigorous, so exciting to watch."
But the film industry, she concedes, "is a bit of a card game. It's too bad it's like that. The marketing is so complex now. It ain't the way it was when we were kids and there was a local movie theater and everybody just saw what was on.
"I couldn't predict what will happen with `Six Degrees,' but it's been doing extremely well.
"What do I know? I'm not running a studio."