Despite her name, Tuesday Weld was born on a Friday. Then why is she called Tuesday? There is no telling for sure, though in the past she has said that the name was 1) a childhood corruption ("Tu-Tu") of Susan, her given name, 2) derived from the day when all the worst things happened to her mother, and 3) a mispronunciation of two-days, the length of time her mother was in labor with her. Whatever the truth, the world is beginning to realize that, at 28, Tuesday Weld is a first-rate actress.
Weld film festivals have been held in Manhattan, and there is already something of a Tuesday Weld cult, which was partially inspired, paradoxically, by the fact that she has been so good in so many bad films. "She was undervalued year after year," says Roddy McDowall, who starred with her in Lord Love a Duck, one of her less awful movies. As a drum majorette in Pretty Poison, a fine but little-publicized 1968 film, she mixed innocence with evil to chilling effect, etching her character with acid and honey.
Now at long last she may have found a script that fits her talents. In Play It As It Lays, a movie currently being adapted from Joan Didion's novel, Tuesday portrays Maria, an actress in search of a breakdown in the vast emptiness of Southern California. "She knows the role so well she could phone it in," says Director Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife). "I tested hundreds of girls for the part, but I always knew it had to be Tuesday."
Like Maria, Tuesday has always had the reputation of being a difficult performer to work with. Like Maria, she has had a troubled private life that has made her something of an untouchable flower in lotus land. "Miss Weld is not a very good representative for the motion-picture industry," complained Gossip Columnist Louella Parsons, Hollywood's dragon lady, when Tuesday was 16 and the star of a seemingly endless series of sex-at-the-beach type minipics. Actually, Tuesday's sins—odd clothing, bare feet and open love affairs —would have seemed quite normal a decade later. Her chief offense was to be hip too soon.
Tuesday has been too soon in almost everything she has done. Born in New York's Greenwich Village, she was supporting her family—her mother and an older brother and sister—as a child model when she was four. Her father had died when she was three. When she was twelve, she appeared in her first movie, Rock, Rock, Rock, a cheapie made in Brooklyn to cash in on the rock-'n'-roll craze of the '50s. Whatever its demerits, the film projected Tuesday as the archetypal nymphet, Shirley Temple with a leer. "The girl I generally played was a little whorish teen-ager who would sleep with anybody, and yet has a childlike quality," says Tuesday.