Gorgeous Gael

Before the opening curtain of A Moon for the Misbegotten on Broadway, Director Jose Quintero hugged Colleen Dewhurst for good luck. "Good luck?" the actress asked indignantly. "You think that after 16 years of rehearsing this play I am going to fumble now " Indeed, Dewhurst first played the role of Josie Hogan (an Irish- American farmer's daughter who attempts to conceal her clumsy body and a troublesome virginity in a smokescreen of Gaelic bluster and barroom humor) in Quintero's 1957 production at Spoleto and again at Buffalo's Studio Arena Theater in 1965. Nevertheless, Jose, Colleen and Leading Man Jason Robards were unprepared for the thunderous reception that greeted this Moon.

Good Notices. "I want to stand in front of the audience and shout 'I am so happy!' " exults Dewhurst. "It seems to me that I have spent all my life getting good notices. Then the producer visits us backstage"--in a split second her gray-green eyes flash from fawnlike softness to New England granite--"and the next thing we know everybody is crying because we can't stay open."

In 27 years of openings and closings, though, Dewhurst has won a reputation as one of the stage's most lavishly gifted actresses (Hollywood has never especially taken to her, nor she to it). Among her collection of accolades are a Drama Desk award for her portrayal of the mother in Mourning Becomes Electro (1972), an Obie for Abbie Putnam in Desire Under the Elms (1963), a Tony for her widowed mother in All the Way Home (1961). Moon, however, is her first commercial smash. After the opening night, Producer Richard Horner assured the cast: "You can unpack your bags; you are not going on the road. We are staying in New York."

A tall handsome woman with a voluptuous figure, Dewhurst is well suited to O'Neill's full-blooded Earth Mother conception of women. She believes in acting from the gut rather than the brain. "I love to see people's intelligence tripped up by their emotional drive," she says. "I can't play the human goodies, the perfect miss going through God's trials because it was God's will. I would be in a rage." Says Quintero: "She draws her strength from the bottoms of her feet --she loves to run barefooted. And Colleen is endowed with one of the great faces in the world; you can read her whole history, from the time she was a girl through womanhood."

The daughter of a hockey player, Dewhurst was born in Montreal. When she was seven, the family moved to the first in a succession of towns in the Midwestern U.S. Her mother, a Christian Scientist, "brought me up to be a person. It never entered her mind to raise a daughter just to be married." Dewhurst no longer practices the faith--she is a chain-smoker and enjoys white wine --but she insists that "everything I like about myself comes from the religion, and when I get in a bad bind, my mind goes back to it."

After a desultory two-year career at Downer College in Milwaukee and a stint as an elevator operator in Gary, Ind., in 1946 Dewhurst entered New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts. A year later, she married Fellow Student Jim Vickery, and for the next dozen years lived with him in a series of cold-water flats, supporting herself with bit parts and odd jobs. At one point she had to turn down a major role when Director Joseph Papp, who had only heard about her, asked her to read for Juliet. "Oh, Mr. Papp," Dewhurst told him on the telephone, "you haven't seen me yet. I couldn't play Juliet when I was twelve." In 1963, however, she did a notable Cleopatra for Papp's Shakespeare Festival in Central Park.

In 1958 Dewhurst played a jailer's daughter in an off-Broadway revival of Edwin Mayer's 1930 Children of Darkness. Appearing opposite her was a young actor named George C. Scott.Their meeting, which Scott later described as a "bus accident," led to divorces from their spouses and their own marriage in 1959. They bought an 18th century farmhouse in South Salem, N.Y., combining acting with raising a family. In 1963, while Scott was filming The Bible in Italy, he encountered Ava Gardner, and the marriage to Dewhurst dissolved. Four years later, Scott and Dewhurst remarried. In 1971, however, Scott met Trish Van Devere on the set of The Last Run, and a year later he and Dewhurst divorced again. "George and I would have made a great brother and sister," Dewhurst comments.

Pets and Guests. Surrounded by four German shepherds, five cats and two birds, Colleen and her two sons by Scott live in South Salem, along with a housekeeper and assorted transient and semiresidential house guests. Some of the latter arrive at night while their hostess is asleep and greet her at breakfast, which she always prepares for the boys, even if she then returns to bed until 3 p.m. Will Dewhurst's new post-Moon status affect all this? "At 49, with nearly three decades in the theater," she says, "being called a star doesn't have the same thrust it would have had at 30." Tugging a baggy sweater down over vintage denims, she smiles ruefully: "I am what I am now. I will still have the same friends I have had for the past 20 years, and my house will always look as it does now--messy."

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