BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. _ Though she's been doing it 33 years, actress Sela Ward says she's not really suited to acting. While many performers plan on a career from the time they're children, Ward was 27 before she even tried it.
"It's something that did not spring naturally for me," she says. "I was really very shy and introverted as a kid. And it was a gift to me to have to draw myself out, to challenge myself to grow within. It was such a gift to me to take classes and really work on that inner artist slash person, your inner-self."
That "inner-self" started as an artist creating storyboards and learning to produce audio-visual projects until it was suggested she could boost her salary of $6.50 by modeling.
"Someone said, 'You can make $100 an hour.' I went, 'Oh, my lord.' I met Wilhelmina (modeling agent) and she took me on. My first two jobs were TV commercials, Mabelline mascara and Vidal Sassoon shampoo, the print ads and TV. I'd get really intimidated when I had to audition for something with more than one actor in it. So I took classes to help me with that," she says in the hallway of a clutch of business offices in a hotel here.
In spite of her trepidations, she had one thing going for her: She hails from Mississippi. She believes in the myth of the Southern Iron Butterfly, the idea that southern women are feminine and gracious but harbor a steely determination.
"The South was an agrarian society, they lived far apart because it was all agriculture: cotton farming and soy beans. It required a lot of strength and necessity being the mother of invention. And it required strong people. It's in the DNA," she says, dabbing her nose because of an allergy.
"I come from a long line of strong women, my mother and my grandmother. Mom kept books for my dad's business. He was an electrical engineer, had his own firm, and then he got into cable television and some systems in the South."
You can see some of that fiber in her latest role as the First Lady in EPIX's new political comedy, "Graves." Nick Nolte plays the president and while he can be bombastic, she lends a touch of class to the Beltway.
Ward starred for six seasons in "Sisters," and in the popular "Once and Again." She costarred in "The Guardian" and "The Fugitive," and in "CSI: NY" and "House." But she was often intimidated by the rituals of acting.
When she first started out she auditioned for a role in "Emerald Point, N.A.S." and instead of asking her to read the lines she'd studied, they handed her 10 pages she'd never seen before.
"I was so green, I thought, 'Well, I can cold-read.' But I was not good enough yet to do that. So I go in and I start, and I'm just so flummoxed. I say, 'I'm sorry, can I start over?' And this casting woman looks at me, (scowling) at her assistant, and looks back at me, and gives me the first line.
"I gave a terrible reading because she was so cruel and undermining and threw me so badly, and I was so young in the process," she recalls.
It turns out they had to recast the actress they hired, and Ward tried again. "This time I'm prepared to the nines and I get the part. So that taught me early on one of the biggest lessons ever _ and the sweetest revenge _ that I can persevere and I have to realize I'm living in a zoo, and there are all these members of the animal kingdom and that was just a different member of the animal kingdom that's not my tribe, and I'm going to be confronted with those people all the time."
Her second job was a Tom Hanks movie, "Nothing in Common," and Ward hired an acting teacher to coach her. "And I went to meet her one day to work, and she looks at me and says, 'I just don't quite know how you got this part, my daughter would've been so much better for the role.' This kind of stuff happened to me all the time at the beginning. But after that first experience, it would just roll off because I think I would disassociate and keep on track with my agenda, even though it was unbelievable, inappropriate or undermining, and all those things. There was so much of that that I think I created for myself a real hard, protective shield."
While she's still a perfectionist, she says, her priorities have changed. "Having just turned 60, thank God I have this delicious, fabulous role because all of the token mothers or ex-wives are so unsatisfying. There's no depth and no art. I'm not interested in that anymore. I'd rather not work," she says.
"I'd rather do something that only speaks to me. And that's what I'm doing. I'm going back to my painting, my fine arts major in college. I'm at a delicious place in my life where I have a modicum of success that makes me feel accomplished and proud and at the same time it's my second spring where I want to go back to my painting and work when it's something that really speaks to me and enriches my creative self."
