Harden Fast

SPOTLIGHT

Marcia Gay Harden's not quite herself Not in her breakthrough movie, Miller's Crossing, in which she played a gangster's moll. Not as a brassy Ava Gardner in the recent mini-series about Frank Sinatra. And certainly not in Used People, the new film that features her as Shirley MacLaine's troubled daughter, who can find comfort only by taking on the identity of others. She turns herself into the Barbra Streisand of Funny Girl, goes to her bank job as the Faye Dunaway of Bonnie and Clyde, imitates Anne Bancroft's seduction in The Graduate, trips across the screen like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, dons pillbox and veil to become the widowed Jackie Kennedy, and shows up in the kind of white dress Marilyn Monroe wore over that subway grate. Given Harden's love of transformation, you might well wonder if she is a wounded spirit in flight from a dark past. But the actress says the spur for her eagerness to change identities is the fact that her father was a navy captain who moved his family with gloomy regularity; as for trauma, she recalls only the long sulk during her scuffling years, when she labored as a department-store demonstrator squeezing cheese onto crackers. "I like to set up disguises—I want to be a chameleon," she explains, in a voice we'll take on faith is her own. "I like it when casting people say, 'Bring Marcia in. She's not totally right, but she can transform.' The only problem with this disappearing thing is that you never totally leave yourself behind. I never quite convince myself."

JESSE KORNBLUTH