Sunday,
March 09, 2008
Lauren Ambrose (D'Ambruoso)
from "Six Feet Under", with Two Emmy
Nominations to "The Return of Jezebel James"
The
ANNOTICO Report
Lauren Ambrose,
who was born in
She looks exactly
like her paternal grandmother, a redhead, she said, adding: "There's red
hair on both sides of the family. My mother made me promise to never dye my
hair. 'It'll never come back,' she said.
Profile: Lauren Ambrose
Actress Switches Gears,
Tries Her First Sitcom Role
Sunday, March 9, 2008
By
Jane Wollman Rusoff
New
York Times News Service
Lauren Ambrose. Too passionate for her own good. Impatient. A pain in the butt.
To hear Lauren
Ambrose describe herself, you would think she has no qualms about unveiling the
woman beneath that mane of long, naturally red hair.
Think again.
"I hate talking about myself," the 30-year-old actress said.
"Interviews drive me crazy."
She has done her
share, though.
Best-known for
playing rebellious teenager Claire Fisher on HBO's,"Six Feet Under," which earned her
two Emmy nominations, Ambrose has switched gears from drama to comedy, reversing the transition that took her first from big-screen
comedy to small-screen drama.
On the Fox series
"The Return of Jezebel James" she
plays a drifter who agrees to be a surrogate mother for her older sister
(Parker Posey), an unmarried corporate executive who yearns for a child but is
unable to have one. Dianne Wiest co-stars as their
mother.
The actress has
been picky in accepting film, stage and TV roles since "Six Feet Under " left the air in
2005.
She currently
co-stars with Frank Langella in "Starting Out in
the Evening," playing an overly ambitious
graduate student.
In the summer,
she played Juliet in the New York Shakespeare Festival's Central Park
production of "Romeo
and Juliet
" -- her first stage work since a
She had never
envisioned doing a sitcom, she said, but "The Return of Jezebel James " seemed like a fun
job and a good bet because it was developed by Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino.
The show's
premise is oddly serious for a sitcom: Posey's character, Sarah, plans to
conceive a child with a sperm donor and her own egg, then have estranged sister
Coco move into her Brooklyn loft and carry the baby for her.
Ambrose struggles
to imagine being a real-life surrogate mom.
"Well, if
the conditions were right," she said after a moment. "But I'd have to
be pretty Zenned-out."
The actress
acknowledges being intense and passionate by nature.
"Sometimes
I'm, maybe, too passionate. And then I'm devastated by things and disappointed
often."
Her latest
devastation: learning that she is allergic to chocolate.
Ambrose, who
was born in Connecticut with the last name D'Ambruoso,
grew up in a food-centric household of Italian-Americans. Her father, she said,
is a caterer at Amarante's in
She looks
exactly like her paternal grandmother, a redhead, she said, adding:
"There's red hair on both sides of the family. My mother made me promise
to never dye my hair. 'It'll never come back,' she said. I don't know if I can
live up to that -- actresses are always asked to do crazy things."
So far, though, so good.
Ambrose, a fan of
sitcoms, still enjoys "I
Love Lucy
" and "The Cosby Show", programs
that inspired her to become a performer.
The notion of
participating in a weekly sitcom, though, is "scary," she said.
"It's
different from anything I've ever done. But that's what attracted me to the
whole thing."
Not that she is
new to comedy. She made her film debut in a comedy, "In and Out "
(1997), and her breakthrough role came in "Can't Hardly Wait " (1998), a
high-school comedy in which she and Seth Green stole the show from nominal
stars Jennifer Love Hewitt and Ethan Embry.
She went on to
"Psycho Beach Party
" (2000), a black comedy based on an
off-Broadway cult play. As a surfer chick with multiple-personality disorder,
she recalled, "I had a chance to be really wacky and take risks."
Her decision to
tackle "The Return of
Jezebel James "
stemmed from a desire to "try on those comedians' shoes and work in the
way that they, like Lucille Ball, did."
Her take on the
comedic arts falls in the classic vein.
"Comedy
comes out of being truthful to the pain of the moment," Ambrose said.
"The more pain you can be in, the funnier it is."
Despite her
childhood fascination with sitcoms, Ambrose aspired to be an opera singer,
studying voice for years. When acting jobs came calling, though, singing took a
back seat, and she probably won't be getting back to it anytime soon: She has a
full slate of upcoming movies, including "Cold Souls "
and "A Dog Year, " in which she
plays, respectively, the assistant to a mad doctor and the daughter of Jeff
Bridges' character.
She'll also be heard
in the big-screen adaptation of Maurice Sendak's
classic book, "Where
the Wild Things Are," due next year.
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