Christine Lahti plays capable, odd, well-meaning women without once asking to be liked for it, and she is at her best when a director leaves her alone with a room and a habit. Housekeeping is the proof, and the place to start.
Fi1m perspective
Sylvie Fisher eats supper with the lights off. When the two girls in her care ask why, she tells them, plainly, and passes the potatoes. Christine Lahti has built a career on that kind of moment: a woman doing something strange as if it were ordinary, and declining to wink at us about it. In Housekeeping (1987) she keeps her coat on indoors and sleeps on top of the bedclothes with her shoes on, and she plays none of it as eccentricity. Sylvie is polite, fond of the girls and always slightly elsewhere, and the film never asks us to find her adorable.
She came to films by way of the stage, arriving in New York in 1973 and waiting tables before ...And Justice for All (1979) put her opposite Al Pacino. The eighties were supporting parts, most visibly Hazel Zanussi in Jonathan Demme's Swing Shift (1984), a big, comic, noisy performance in a home-front ensemble that critics found thin around her. Then Bill Forsyth gave her the lead in Housekeeping, and Sidney Lumet cast her as Annie Pope, a mother on the run from her own past, in Running on Empty (1988). From the mid-nineties she went largely to television, most substantially as Dr Kathryn Austin in Chicago Hope (1995–99), and began directing, with the short Lieberman in Love (1995) and the feature My First Mister (2001).
What she does is preparation you cannot see. She is known for writing long biographies for her characters and doing the physical research first, then letting instinct take over, and what reaches the screen is behaviour rather than acting: the coat, the shoes, the stacked newspapers. She has said she prefers the stage and small independent films, and the parts bear that out. The women she plays are professionally capable or socially impossible, usually both, and always in some quarrel with the rules around them.
The cost is that she can pull a film off its axis. In Swing Shift the reviews noticed her more than the story, which was not the plan. And the career has mostly been supporting work and television rather than leads in large studio pictures, which is why a reader who knows her face may not know her name. Her later film appearances, such as Ellen in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), are brief.
We were quietly upset by Housekeeping and did not expect to be. It was Lahti's face at the dinner table in the dark that did it, attentive to the girls and listening for a train a long way off; she is kind to them and she is already halfway gone. She has called Sylvie her favourite character and Forsyth one of her favourite directors, and we would not argue. Start there, and give it the patience it asks for.
Biography
Christine Lahti is an American actress and filmmaker. She was born on 4 April 1950 in Birmingham, Michigan, and studied fine arts at Florida State University before earning a bachelor's degree in drama from the University of Michigan.
Lahti made her feature film debut in ...And Justice for All (1979). She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Swing Shift (1984) and won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for directing and starring in Lieberman in Love (1995). Her other film roles include Housekeeping (1987), Running on Empty (1988), Leaving Normal (1992) and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), in which she played Ellen.
On television she is known for her role as Kate Austin in Chicago Hope (1995–99), for which she won a Golden Globe and an Emmy, as well as recurring parts in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Hawaii Five-0 and The Blacklist. She has also appeared on Broadway in productions including The Heidi Chronicles (1989) and God of Carnage (2009).
