On the Brink

Her hair is just plain brown, and so are her eyes. Her mouth is big and arranged haphazardly, as if it were something new and unfamiliar, possibly hers only on loan. Her bosom is barely discernible, her legs too straight to be alluring, and she walks like a child in her mother's high-heeled shoes. As an actress, Joan Hackett, 28, does not begin to look the part. But. like the good actress she is, there is hardly a part she doesn't manage to look right for.

A Hundred Roles a Day. Joan Hackett is typical of a relatively new and relatively unnoticed phenomenon: the television-trained pro. Before television, actresses whose ambitions ran to serious acting--Margaret Sullavan, Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis--got their training in road companies, straw-hat theaters, or in Hollywood's now-all-but-vanished B pictures. Disdained by highbrows as inferior, ignored by serious critics in search of "specials," television nonetheless offers young actors a wonderfully flexible working stage and an audience millions of times greater than anything Ogunquit or Provincetown ever knew. There are a hun dred available roles to be cast each day. a thousand each week; not since the early days of motion pictures, and before that the traveling troupes of strolling players, has such repertory training been possible.

Among the current crop of young actresses who have served at least a part of their apprenticeship on TV: Zohra Lampert, currently appearing with Anne Bancroft (another TV graduate) in Brecht's Mother Courage; Salome Jens, notable as well for her off-Broadway role in The Balcony and on-Broadway part in A Far Country; Collin Wilcox, who made a mark in TV's The Member of the Wedding, won excellent notices (along with Zohra Lampert) in Broadway's Look: We've Come Through. Of them all, none works more consistently, nor more consistently well, than Joan Hackett.

She has appeared on almost every major TV series going, and some that have already gone. In the past two seasons, she has been pregnant and unmarried (The Nurses), a dope addict (The New Breed) and an assault suspect (The Defenders); she has suffered medical miseries ranging from a simple subdural hematoma (Dr. Kildare) to epilepsy (Ben Casey], will appear next month as a girl about to enter a convent (Empire). She played the second Mrs. De Winter (to James Mason's Mr.) in a widely acclaimed special of Rebecca, and won a slew of awards for her performance as the promiscuous heroine of off-Broadway's Call Me by My Rightful Name.

Even so, Joan is finicky about her scripts. Last year she turned down 15 movies. "I'm so particular about what I do, I may never work again," she says cheerily. This year, already in rehearsal as Gertrude Berg's daughter in Dear Me, the Sky Is Falling, she broke her contract and pulled out: "The part was wrong for me," she says. "I wasn't allowed to play it the way I felt I should. Then Gertrude Berg started saying 'But she doesn't look Jewish,' and I knew I had to go."

Born in Harlem to an Irish father and an Italian mother, Joan became a model after high school, worked for two years in the garment district. Twentieth Century-Fox spotted her picture on the cover of Harper's Bazaar, gave her a screen test, and offered her a contract. She turned it down, but committed herself to acting. "I couldn't live in Hollywood. I'd spend all my time in the pool and believe producers when they said 'I've seen the rushes, baby, and I cried.' "

Die by the Sword. Joan claims to have practically no technique at all ("I can't fake it; if I do I look like the ratfink of the century"). Too old to be a starlet and not yet a star, perhaps destined by her own temperament and whimsy never to be one, she is hovering on the very brink of success. But, like a hummingbird, she hovers confidently. "I've found something to do," she says, "and I want to do it very well, so that when I die and they ask me 'What did you do?' I can be proud of everything. You have to decide, at some point, what you care about. You can't decide five years later, after you're a matinee idol, that you want something else. By then you're Errol Flynn and forever with the sword."

Last week Joan Hackett was offered the female lead in a Harold Prince com edy, slated to open on Broadway this fall. Tentative title: She Didn't Say Yes. Joan, happily, did.

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