Catherine Keener

By Richard Schickel

She patiently poured oil on Capote's roiled waters. She was skittish, slightly wounded but also discreetly sexy in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. She was tough, omnicompetent and smart-mouthed as an FBI agent in The Interpreter. And she did the best she could to assert the reality principle amid the general incompetence of The Ballad of Jack and Rose. In 2005 Catherine Keener was everywhere, in big pictures and small, in hits and flops, quietly but insistently asserting her claim to being possibly the best character actress working today.

At 46, she's tall and slender with a throaty laugh and the kind of honestly pretty face that bespeaks the no-nonsense attitude of a supporting actress who really believes in supporting her fellow players. "I don't have the looks to be a Hollywood diva," she says. What she has is a love for those acting communities that quickly form to make a picture (and as quickly disperse). "That's why I'll go on something based on the director," she says. "If you're working with a director you respect, they're going to accrue people who are similar-minded. They want to work. And they want to have a good time. That doesn't mean pranks and laughter. [It means] you just feel satisfied at the end of the day."

That's a feeling she particularly took away from Capote, in which she played the writer's lifelong best friend, novelist Harper Lee. Lee is a reclusive personality, and the part is essentially a passive one, but she is the only secure anchor in Capote's demonically narcissistic reality. The film's director, Bennett Miller, cites a seemingly small moment in the film as an example of Keener's brilliance. Lee and Truman Capote are at a party after the premiere of the movie version of her one book, To Kill a Mockingbird. It's her night, but he's spoiling it with obsessive talk about his unfinished book In Cold Blood. She asks him how he liked the film. He rattles on, totally ignoring her. She drops a gentle hand on his shoulder. "If you read this on a page," says Miller, "it's so simple. She hardly says anything. But when you look at what she did, it's the whole movie in a nutshell. There's so much complexity there: from disgust to respect to compassion and understanding. She's wise in that moment."

Characteristically, Keener makes little of it. "I didn't have a plan," she says. "I just knew Phil [Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing Capote] was going to carry me through it. All I knew was that I had to clear his face so that the camera could get both of us."

Of course, she knows, deep in her heart, that there's more to it than that. Acting is all about mobilizing emotional intelligence and then disciplining it so that all the hard observational work results in a gesture so simple and right that an inattentive eye might miss it. But that's all right with Keener. Hers has been a late-blooming career, shaped until recently in movies in which she was often the only thing worth watching. She's obviously happy now to be in better films. Character roles of the kind she's currently getting, she says, "are often very well written--they're not by the numbers. There's freedom in that."

With reporting by Reported by Carolina A. Miranda/New York