Los Angeles magazine, November 2010
When Melissa Leo was 12, her family was evicted, and all their belongings were put out on the street. That helps explain why the 50-year-old actress loves junk stores. It’s as if part of her is searching to find where her once loved possessions ended up.
“Objects really have a weight and importance to me, you know?” Leo says moments after entering the Wertz Brothers Antique Mart in Santa Monica. Her eyes wander over the store’s battered leather suitcases, the bronze ashtrays, a forlorn pile of old scripts (The Pelican Brief, Flipper). “There is something alive in the memories that objects elicit.”
She’s just stepped off a plane from Texas, where she’s shooting a movie with Robert Duvall. Later she’ll be heading to HBO to talk about promoting another of her upcoming projects, director Todd Haynes’s miniseries, Mildred Pierce. While she’s at the cable network, there will likely be talk of Treme’s next season; she plays lawyer Toni Bernette on the New Orleans-based show. And she has two new movies in theaters—Conviction, with Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell, and Welcome to the Rileys, with James Gandolfini and Kristen Stewart.
But today she’s here—her red hair pulled into two crooked pigtails, a baseball cap that says Utopia Ranch Rodeo perched on her head—poking around in the precise place (or was it one aisle over?) where she found two brooches to wear to the Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2009.
Yes, that’s right: After Leo was nominated for her performance in the 2008 indie Frozen River (which also put her in the running for the Academy Award for Best Actress), she went shopping for accessories to wear to the ceremony herself, sans stylist. She lived with a revolving crew of actors in an A-frame on the “wrong side” of Culver City then. She furnished the place mostly from the Salvation Army. There was an O’Keefe & Merritt stove she inherited from a friend and an ancient refrigerator she got for $125. “I put it entirely together as I went along,” she says of the house. The same might be said of her career.
You may not realize it, but you’ve seen Leo everywhere. She works a lot—before she was nominated for an Oscar, “I had probably said no to offered work five times in 20-something years”—and she has a way of getting in your head and staying there. At five feet seven, Leo is not a big woman, but she can be fierce. Whether playing Sergeant Kay Howard on the brilliant ’90s TV series Homicide: Life on the Street or Marianne Jordan, the long-suffering wife of Benicio Del Toro’s born-again ex-con in the 2003 film 21 Grams, there’s something about her—the tight line of her mouth, her determined stride—that says she’s a woman to take seriously.
Leo starts to survey Wertz’s merchandise in earnest. She’s got a great eye, she says, when she knows what she’s looking for. Recently she found a terrific belt buckle because she had an image of it in her head. Give Leo clear direction, let her understand what’s needed, and there’s no stopping her. “Even when I was in the third or fourth grade,” she says, “I never did anything without purpose.”
Born in New York City, Leo was a child of the East Village until her parents’ divorce knocked everything sideways (the eviction she tells of came after the split, when the rent went unpaid). She moved with her mother to a commune in Vermont, then to London in her teens. After getting a GED back in the States, she went to SUNY Purchase but dropped out and returned to the city to waitress and try to act.
One day in 1983, in the middle of a shift, Leo asked a friend to cover for her so she could audition for Bill Murray’s passion project The Razor’s Edge. She waited two hours for Murray to get there, only to hear him say she was much too young for the part. “But you came, you waited—read it anyway,” he told her. So she did. “I could feel the room shift as we read,” Leo recalls. Murray seemed floored. “Well, you’ve got something going on there,” he said of her acting. “If you really want to do this, you should just do it.”
She quit her restaurant job the same day. “In that moment I made a decision to only take work as an actor,” she says. “I had had an upbringing that allowed me to go without. I didn’t need a new pocketbook. I didn’t need to go out to parties. What I needed was to act.”
Leo lived on nothing, filling Baggies with 50 pennies each for subway money to get to auditions. But after she beat out Julia Roberts for a role on the soap All My Children, she began to get a little traction. Parts on ’80s TV shows led to her big break in Homicide as the strong female cop who can pull her weight and refuses to be defined by her sexuality. Leo wasn’t rich—she still isn’t—but she was doing what she loved.
Along the way she had a son—now 23—with the actor John Heard. She never married and is resolutely single. While her child will always come first, the actors and filmmakers she’s worked with make up her “family of choice,” she says. In David O. Russell’s much anticipated film The Fighter, due for release in December, Leo’s overseeing a big brood: She plays the mother of real-life boxer Mickey Ward and his eight siblings.
“It’s probably the greatest movie I’ve ever been in,” she says of the project, which also stars Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, and Amy Adams. “It’s huge, it’s universal, and it’s deeply personal. It moves from the moment it begins.”
Just like Leo. Next it’s back to Texas to finish Seven Days in Utopia with Duvall, then home to upstate New York. She owns a house there and rents another one in New Orleans. Both are full of objects, carefully chosen. “I still have some pieces I found on the street,” she says. “I think I’m sort of drawn to seeing what’s been left behind.”
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