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Most actresses would have taken pride in the daft charm that Lange brought to her debut in King Kong; few actresses could have gracefully endured the Kong hype to which she was subjected. "I was naive," she says, "and it brought me pain. For a while I lost control over my own life. I didn't work for two years." So when Bob Rafelson walked into a motel room in North Carolina, where Lange was appearing in a threadbare sex comedy, she was ready to show him what moviegoers had missed. Rafelson recalls that he found "an incredibly sensual woman who made no effort to be sensual. I thought that if I could get this woman to be on-screen the way she was in repose, she would be utterly striking." He took her to Hollywood for screen tests with Jack Nicholson. Two years before, she had tested for Nicholson's Coin' South. She lost that part, but he sent her roses and a note that read: "I'm sure we'll work together some time soon. We will have lots of fun and make lots of money. Love, Jack."
As the child of a dreamer-drifter who changed jobs and home towns every two years, Jessica had developed an active fantasy life, seeing Gone With the Wind 14 times, writing letters as Rhett Butler to herself as Scarlett. Now she would invent a life for Cora, to flesh out the novel's sparse details. Says she: "I imagined Cora's movements from the Midwest to Hollywood. I painted her parents with people familiar to me. I was from the Midwest. I had worked as a waitress. I had a grasp of reality."
Nicholson says that the kitchen-table scene was acted "at a pretty high energy level. You film two people making love, and it is not simple sex. It moves out of reality into an erotic ballet that touches everything: compulsion, love, death. Jessica made me sexy. She does that. Few are the men who do not want to fall at her feet. She's a big, consensus movie sex bomb." Miss Scarlett, meet Mr. Butler.
Lange is more modest, as befits an actress on whose erotic and dramatic appeal The Postman will succeed or fail at the box office. "That kind of ferocity can happen to any woman or man," she says. "When it happens, the emotions are magnified a hundred times. The erotic is basic to life, and it's basic to the film's story. If people see it that way, I'll be very pleased."
-By Richard Corliss. Reported by Dean Brelis/New York