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."