Mary Kay Place spent her first working years writing other people's jokes, and it shows: she is the ensemble player who listens, times the line and gets out of the way. Films are better with her at the table, and the lead role took forty years to arrive.
Fi1m perspective
Watch an ensemble scene with Mary Kay Place in it and you will probably not be watching her. That is the job as she does it. In The Big Chill (1983) she is one of eight mourners around a table, and our review found that she, JoBeth Williams and Tom Berenger fill it without a weak link, which is about as much attention as a good supporting player gets in a film built around Kline, Close and Hurt. In Being John Malkovich (1999) she plays Floris, a small part in a film we rate highly, and our review does not stop for her either. That is often how it goes with her. She has been cast again and again as the eccentric or free-thinking woman in off-centre comedies, and she plays them without asking us to find them adorable.
The career runs in the reverse of the usual order. She began as a production assistant on The Tim Conway Comedy Hour in the early 1970s, then wrote episodes of All in the Family, MASH and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, two series we count among the best of their kind. The acting came after, with Loretta Haggers in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976–77), a part that drew on her singing and songwriting. Then Private Benjamin (1980), The Big Chill, and a long stretch of supporting parts across film and television, with some directing along the way, including Friends*. The writer's training is the thing to hold onto. Actors who have written know where the joke lands and what the other person in the scene needs, and they do not hurry.
We will be honest about the limit of this. We went back to The Big Chill to look for her and came away remembering the table rather than the face, which is either the best compliment an ensemble player can get or a sign of how little the film gave her to do. We suspect both. Kasdan lets all eight of his mourners off lightly, and Meg is not the exception.
The lead came with Diane (2018), more than forty years after Mary Hartman. We have not reviewed it, so we will not judge it here, but the notices were the warmest of her career, and they made a point many had been making quietly for years: she had been under-used. Her own view is plain. "I think my main gift that I have to offer is as an actor." From someone who has also written and directed for television, that is a modest sentence with a good deal underneath it.
If you want to see what she does, start with The Big Chill and watch the edges of the table. Then find Diane, and see what happens when someone finally points the camera at her.
Biography
Mary Kay Place is an American actress, singer, director and screenwriter. Born on 23 September 1947 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she graduated from the University of Tulsa and moved to Hollywood to work in television production.
She is best known for portraying Loretta Haggers on the series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976–1977), a role that earned her the 1977 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Comedy Series. Place has appeared in films including The Big Chill (1983), Being John Malkovich (1999) as Floris, and Girl, Interrupted (1999). She has also recorded studio albums for Columbia Records and written for series such as MASH*.
