She could say the same thing of her own career, which too often has found her taking jobs for the "milk money." For every Spitfire Grill or Angels in America, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award in 1993, there have been too many made-for-TV movies, too many things like Spy Hard and Space Cowboys and Desperate Measures -- paychecks, and little more. They have been movies that asked of her only to show up, hit her marks, and say her lines, and too often they've given nothing back. That is why it's important she hit the road to promote Pollock: Ed Harris stretched her and, finally, wrested from her such an astounding performance that she transcends the occasional bit of overwrought dialogue ("You've done it! You've cracked it wide open!" Krasner tells Pollock, after he's stumbled across his slash-and-drip style of painting).
In 1990, she was like the rookie baseball player who hits a home run in his very first at-bat in the big leagues. Harden was 31 when Joel and Ethan Coen cast her as Verna in Miller's Crossing, and she had never before appeared on film. Before then, she'd been a drama student at the University of Texas at Austin and New York University, she appeared in a few plays, and she struggled. When the Coens cast her as the deceptively tranquil woman caught between her gangster boyfriend (Gabriel Byrne) and sniveling brother (John Turturro), Harden thought: This is it, and this is how it will always be. For some, it would seem, the first time is the best time, and Harden spent so much of her career trying to recapture just a bit of that magic.
"I was spoiled on that movie," she says of Miller's Crossing. "I was out of nowhere. I just graduated from school, I was doing theater, and I got this amazing role in this amazing movie with these two really great filmmaking brothers. When USA Today said I'm most remembered for my performance in Flubber, I think that's bullshit. I think that's bullshit." She shouts the last sentence, through a smile. "I think Miller's Crossing was for a long time the thing I was most remembered for, and I used to think, 'It's maddening that the thing that asked the most of me and the thing I'm most remembered for is the first movie.' I used to wonder if I would always be yearning for that. Maybe you are always yearning for your first if it's such a high like that. I mean, why not? It was a great part in a great film, so you yearn for something like that, and I think some of the other stuff I did, I wasn't and maybe I'm still not such a great marketer of my films or my work. I sound like I'm excusing my career, and I don't mean to be doing that. I think that Flubber thing threw me this morning. My deep, dark art film -- Flubber."
After this interview, Harden will go back to Los Angeles and audition for another movie. Then, it's off to fittings with designers making her Oscar gown and jewelers hoping to decorate the actress in their shiny finery. For a while, she will revel in the hype and hoopla, even when there's work to be done. Maybe she figures she deserves it -- all those years of all those modest to mediocre movies no one's seen, all those years of wondering if she'd ever recapture the joy of the first time. But at the same time, she also worries about not wasting the opportunities an Oscar nomination brings. She talks of being responsible about her choices from here on in, of putting pressure on herself to select wisely -- to work for pleasure, not pay. "You don't want to follow it up with something chintzy," she says, "and some chintzy performance where I'm dancing on a pole in a bar or something." (She's referring to the lead role in last year's dreadful Coyote Ugly -- a part she was actually up for.)
But there remains one last question: Why was Harden nominated as best supporting actress when she has almost as much screen time as Ed Harris? When it's posed to her, she takes a long pause; she doesn't want to answer, to appear the least bit ungrateful. Even if she has the same questions.
