Kathy Baker in Edward Scissorhands

The actress Kathy Baker was born in Midland, Texas, in 1950, and first studied acting at the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s. She began working professionally at Magic Theater in San Francisco, appearing in several Sam Shepard plays before her breakthrough role in an off-Broadway production of Fool For Love with Ed Harris. Her Obie-winning performance coincided with a starring role in the film The Right Stuff, which was followed by a supporting role in Street Smart with Morgan Freeman, for which she won both the National Society of Critics and Boston Society of Critics awards.

Subsequent films include Jacknife, Edward Scissorhands, Mad Dog and Glory, Inventing the Abbotts, The Cider House Rules, Cold Mountain, andTake Shelter. In the 1990s, Kathy starred in the CBS series Picket Fences, for which she won three Emmy awards and a Golden Globe. She can currently be seen on stage in Joanna Murray-Smith’s The Gift at Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles (it runs until March 10^th).

I met Kathy Baker in 2007. We were shooting the film Last Chance Harvey with Dustin Hoffman. I was 27 and she was 57, and we clicked. She shines in every role she has ever played, speaks French, loves poetry, and seems to approach life with total openness. For this conversation, we met at the Little Flower Candy Company cafe in Pasadena.

– Liane Balaban

I. WORK

THE BELIEVER: How do you work best with a director?

KATHY BAKER: Well, I work better from encouragement and from being given room. I love a director to tell me to try another way to do it, to suggest another color. I had a director once, Michael Pressman, from Picket Fences. We had a little code where he would say, “I need you to dial up the emotion on this a little bit.” And then I would say, “Ok, I’m dialling it up. You want it up to five or seven?” And he would say, “at least seven.” So then he would come up to me and he would say, “Just one more degree.” And I like that––I like direction, I like parameters, but I do not do well with––uh, I was going to say criticism. There’s a kind of direction that makes you feel like you are all in it together, rather than the director is the king and you are…

BLVR: A puppet?

KB: A puppet. Yeah. It’s much better when we’re both the puppets! [laughs] Or both the kings!

BLVR:...