Sissy Spacek grabs my shoulder with both hands. She’s so sweet that it’s not startling, though it is surprising. ‘If I’m working with a new person, I always have to touch them or hug them before a scene. Because if they’re supposed to be your husband or your child or your dear friend and you haven’t even touched them and felt their heartbeat?’ she asks, incredulously. How could a person exist that way? What, she wonders, is not merely her job but life itself about if not connecting?
What I feel in that touch is a connection to another time. Spacek still lives the way artists of the 1970s tried to, with unabashed sincerity. She’s intensely present and yet holds it lightly. The more we talk, the more I feel unsure about what year it is. Or how old she is.
Which has been one of her tricks as an actress. When Spacek was 24, she played a 16-year-old in Badlands. At 27, she acted as another 16-year-old, Carrie, the eponymous heroine of Brian De Palma’s horror classic. At 31, she played a 13-year-old Loretta Lynn in the first act of Coal Miner’s Daughter, and a 40-year-old Lynn in the final scene.
A 24-year-old Sissy in New Mexico, 1974
Now 75, curled up in a booth next to me at Wolfgang Puck’s Cut restaurant in New York City, her pale blue eyes looking straight into mine, her hair still long and still strawberry, her upturned nose inches from me, her hands waving as she talks, she still seems like a child. Everything is a wonder. ‘Look at that colourful, beautiful painting,’ she says with her Texan twang, about the artwork across the room, which looks a little generic to me. ‘I mean, how magnificent things are.’
Even without her appreciation for everything, it would be hard not to see her life as a wonder. In addition to starring as the bullied telekinetic teenager in Carrie – the 1976 Stephen King adaptation, which turns 50 next year – she’s one of the very few performers to have gathered six Oscar nominations (one more than Nicole Kidman, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor or Olivia de Havilland). She won in 1980 for playing country singer Loretta Lynn in Michael Apted’s Coal Miner’s Daughter.
‘I want to enjoy things that, when I was young, I was too busy to do’
Her home life has been even more stable. She has been married to production designer and director Jack Fisk since 1974, raising two daughters on a farm in Virginia where they still live. This year she has played the mum in Hulu’s Dying For Sex and Robert Pattinson’s mother in the upcoming Die My Love, which stars Jennifer Lawrence, who also produced the film. Adapted from the novel of the same name – Martin Scorsese read it in a book club, then called Lawrence to suggest she star in it – the story centres on a woman with the most extreme form of post-partum depression imaginable.
Spacek got a call about the part while she was in Vancouver, babysitting her young grandchildren for the summer. Even though the movie was casting right there in Vancouver, she turned down a meeting with director Lynne Ramsay (We Need To Talk About Kevin) due to her babysitting gig. Later, when Ramsay offered to meet at a nearby restaurant (and childcare was secured, of course), Spacek agreed. While she understood little of what Ramsay said in her Scottish accent, Spacek was entranced enough by her passion to accept the part.
Sissy with husband Jack and their daughters, 2011
After a career playing the lead, and having supporting actors help tell her story, Spacek was happy to serve that role for Lawrence. She viewed her character, who is beset by family troubles, through a very Spacekian lens. ‘This baby’s coming, and they’re going to carry on, and they’re going to take over the farm. That’s what I thought of,’ she says. ‘How you can be lifted out of the depths of despair by something like a new baby.’
1972: Makes her film debut in Prime Cut alongside Gene Hackman and Lee Marvin.
During one long emotional scene with Lawrence, Spacek says she got, in her words, ‘discombobulated’, and Lawrence ended the take. ‘She came out of her character and comforted me. She took off her actor hat, put on her producer hat, and was really there for me. I’ll never forget it. And it paid off,’ she says, before stopping to collect herself. ‘This is an English audience. I’m not going to embarrass them by crying,’ she says, taking a sip from her camomile tea with honey, which is all she’ll order during our 90-minute lunch.
She was equally impressed by Lawrence as an actress. In the film, Lawrence expresses enormous emotions subtly, much as Spacek often does. ‘You worry for her, the things that she’s doing, taking off her clothes and swimming with little kids,’ she says of Lawrence’s role.
1973: With Martin Sheen in Badlands, which earned her a Bafta nomination for Most Promising Newcomer.
It’s the kind of raw, natural performance that was more common when Spacek first started acting. She grew up as Mary Elizabeth in a small town in Texas, where her older brothers called her Sissy, a not uncommon Southern shortening of ‘sister’. Her older brother died of leukaemia at 18 and, partly to get away from the tragedy and partly inured from the fear of failure after such a loss, Spacek moved to New York City to make it as a singer named Rainbo. When that didn’t take off, she hung out with her cousin, actor Rip Torn (who would receive an Emmy for The Larry Sanders Show and an Oscar nomination for Cross Creek), eventually taking an acting class at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio.
1976: Her starring role in Carrie led to the first of six Oscar nominations for Best Actress.
About five years after arriving in New York, she moved to LA and scored a starring role in Terrence Malick’s first film, Badlands. Her portrayal of the real-life Caril Ann Fugate, the 14-year-old accomplice to a serial killer, ignited her career. Malick, who avoids all interviews, is her daughter’s godfather. They still see each other several times a year.
1980: Wins the Best Actress Oscar and a Golden Globe for playing Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter.
Before they started shooting the film in July 1972, Malick invited his art director, Jack Fisk, to meet her. ‘Sissy came down the stairs in blue overalls and a cub scout shirt. I remember thinking that she didn’t look much like Caril Ann Fugate, but she sure was cute,’ he tells me by text. Spacek also remembers their first meeting. ‘He had a big smile and a big gap between his two front teeth, and he was just a kind of do-er. He was the sort of guy who was like, “We get to do this.” It was never, “We have to do this.” His whole approach to life was so beautiful,’ she says. ‘He also called his mother from the wall phone in the commissary of the motel where everybody was living who worked on Badlands. I thought, “That’s my kind of guy. He’s just standing up in front of everybody talking to his mama.”’
1982: Her performance in thriller Missing gains her another Best Actress Oscar nomination.
The first two people Fisk wanted her to meet in LA after they started dating were his sister and his best friend from growing up in Virginia, David Lynch (the visionary director behind Eraserhead and Blue Velvet), who was living in the horse stables at the American Film Institute, where he was studying. ‘When they met in eighth grade, their thing was to live the art life,’ she says. ‘And I became the lucky recipient of that. I got to join the gang.’ On their way to elope at a chapel in Santa Monica, where the witness signature on their marriage licence in April 1974 is their dog’s paw print, they sat at a traffic light. ‘We look over and there’s David waving at us from his little beat-up Volkswagen. So we always considered him our best man.’
1984: Stars alongside Mel Gibson in The River – bagging her a fourth Oscar nomination.
After Badlands, Spacek and Fisk’s careers took off. (Fisk has been nominated for three Oscars for production design and art direction and directed four movies, two of which she starred in.) Spacek’s next standout role was in cult classic Carrie, which people still approach her about. ‘The best thing about Carrie for me is that it has ingratiated me to 50 years of teenagers seeing me in the grocery store and going, “Look, I have a tattoo of Carrie on my arm.” And my answer is, “Does your mother know? And does she hate me?”’ she says. ‘That movie just speaks to something deep in teenagers that really endures. That’s when we suffer the most, when we’re teenagers. I think every teenager has suffered in some way. God bless Stephen King. It hit a nerve, and it continues to hit a nerve, which means things haven’t changed for teenagers. That’s a tough time. So, parents, be kind to your teenagers.’
After that, she had a string of hits, and after nearly every one, she went back home to her parents’ house in Texas. ‘I’d stay for a month or so and remember who I was to them. Because the person they thought I was is who I felt the most comfortable being. When you’re a young person, you can get off your hinges, and you need to go home. Not everybody has a home that makes them feel like that.’
1986: Her turn in Crimes Of The Heart results in a fifth Oscar nomination and Golden Globe win.
When in 1982 she and Fisk had their first child (the actress and singer Schuyler Fisk), they decided to leave LA for a 200-acre farm in Virginia, near where Fisk and Lynch had grown up. They’ve lived there ever since, breeding horses and growing hay, though they kept a house in LA where their daughter used to live. Earlier this year, the home was destroyed in the Pacific Palisades fire. It survived the first day, so they thought it was safe. Then a neighbour sent a video of the house burning, with firefighters pointing hoses at it but no water coming out. She hasn’t been to see it, too upset that the neighbourhood she used to walk around is gone. ‘We’d had that house for almost 30 years, so it was filled with all our stuff that we’re trying to remember,’ she says. ‘When I think about California, it’s still there [in my memory]. I can walk through the rooms and see where everything is.’
At least, she says, the place was in order when it burned. ‘The house was clean. Car had a full tank of gas. We left it wonderful. And a friend of ours had stayed there for several weeks and they left all kinds of little gifts for us,’ she says.
2001: Wins a Golden Globe and lands her sixth Oscar nomination after starring in In the Bedroom.
It’s an odd aspect to find comfort in. But she has felt it before. When she and Fisk lived in the Topanga area of LA, they had to evacuate quickly during a fire and were incorrectly informed that their home had burned down. And she felt similarly comforted. ‘We left the clothes in the closet with all the hangers going in the same direction. I heard stories of my mother, who lived in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, talking about her parents when they were young, and [Mexican revolutionary] Pancho Villa was making his robberies. They’d go in and – well, I shouldn’t be telling people how to do this – but they’d take their valuables, throw them on the bed, bring the blanket up, and carry it out. We did that when we evacuated. And I remember thinking, at least it was clean, and everything was right. I guess that’s just the way my brain works. I always used to say, when I was young, about dying, I wanted to be sure that I’d returned my neighbour’s cake pan. I wanted to be sure I’d returned everything I’d borrowed from people. It’s much like thinking of my house burning. I want to know it was organised and clean. It’s a strange thing that I feel, so I honour it.’
2011: In The Help, which went on to scoop an ensemble cast win at the SAG Awards.
Lately she’s been doing the same in her Virginia house. ‘I’m going through closets and getting rid of things so our children don’t have to,’ she says. She’s also spending more time tending the hydrangeas and hostas in her English flower garden, after her gardener of 20 years decided it had become too much work. ‘It’s a real gift because I get my hands in the dirt. I went out the other morning and heard an owl. I hadn’t heard an owl in years,’ she says. ‘I want to enjoy the things that when I was young, I was too busy enjoying other things. Know my neighbours. Take walks.’
She’s wearing her farm clothes here in the restaurant, ones she might have worn as a singer named Rainbo in 60s New York. She has Levi’s, a denim jacket over a blue linen shirt and blue denim Mary Janes, which had got so wet in her garden a few weeks earlier they stained her feet blue. The garden helps her be present, a version of the transcendental meditation practice that David Lynch got her into, which she regrets letting go of.
2025: Stars in psychological drama Die My Love, playing Jennifer Lawrence’s mother-in-law.
The connection she taps into by being present is the reason she won’t play villains. ‘I believe everyone has the god particle in them. So everyone has a goodness in them. Even the worst, somewhere in there.’ When she says something during the interview that’s the tiniest bit critical about a person that most of the public believes is a real-life villain, she begs me not to include it in the article. Other wholly positive comments she makes about people cause her to pause and ask if they sounded mean. They do not. Because Sissy Spacek never sounds mean.
After 90 minutes she leaves to take a nap at her hotel and, as we shake hands goodbye, I hold hers for a few extra beats. I don’t think I can feel her heartbeat. But I’m going to keep trying this with people until I do.
Die My Love is in cinemas now
