Key Points
Katherine LaNasa tells EW that she “didn’t own a television” and “didn’t know anything” about Dennis Hopper before meeting and eventually marrying him.
The Pitt star recalls “mysterious” auditions Hopper would hold at their home for “brave” actresses trying to break into the industry.
LaNasa explains how Hopper, Sydney Pollack, and the influential acting teacher Sanford Meisner all played pivotal roles in her transition from ballet to acting.
Katherine LaNasa‘s route into the heart of Hollywood was unconventional, but paved by a trio of legends.
A classically trained ballerina, the standout star of the hit medical drama The Pitt opened up about her transition to acting on a recent episode of Entertainment Weekly’s The Awardist podcast.
“I came out here on tour, and I met Dennis Hopper, and I started dating Dennis Hopper. I was about in my early 20s; he was in his early 50s. I sat next to him at a table, and we sort of started dating across country,” LaNasa told host Gerrad Hall.
Though Hopper had been a legend in the business for a good number of decades going at the time, it hardly mattered to LaNasa, whose world had until then been defined by dance.
“I didn’t even know what [director of] a movie meant. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know anything about him. And I didn’t own a television or really go to the movies much, except I liked Robert Duvall from Tender Mercies,” she laughed.
So she moved to Los Angeles, started living with Hopper, and a new journey began.
Dennis Hopper and Katherine LaNasa at a taping of ‘Saturday Night Live’ in New York City in 1987
Credit: Ron Galella/WireImage
“I stayed with him and I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll get to do all this experimental dance [that] I can’t afford to do in New York because I really have to dance for a living.’ And there was nothing happening out here,” the actress recalled. Nothing in the way of dance, at least. Over at Hopper’s, though, the legendary filmmaker would regularly “hold auditions in the house and actresses would come over. I just thought they were so brave, but the whole thing was really mysterious. You know, and he was so far past the training place. He was just this guy that had this craft that did this thing and it just all had this aura of mystery around it to me.”
Then, a turning point.
“I saw a documentary about Sandy Meisner when I was nine months pregnant with my son, and that’s when the penny dropped. I was like, ‘I need to find that. I need to go to that guy and do that.'”
Sanford Meisner was an occasional actor known around the world for his influential work as a teacher of the craft. The so-called “Meisner technique” that he developed while working with New York’s legendary Group Theatre took off as both an offshoot of and sharp rebuke to the Group’s famed Method technique. Meisner’s last screen role, ironically, would be a spot on ER opposite Noah Wyle, who currently stars on The Pitt with LaNasa.
She eventually became his student, joining a long list of legends that included Duvall, James Caan, Michelle Pfeiffer, and a new acquaintance who would provide her next leg up — Sydney Pollack.
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
When Hopper registered LaNasa’s interest in training as an actress, he arranged a meeting with Pollack, who had produced the 1990 documentary, Sanford Meisner: The American Theatre’s Best Kept Secret. Pollack, in turn, arranged a meeting with Meisner.
“Dennis told me to tell him that I wanted to be in the class more than anything, because I had no credits and no education in acting. So I did it and he took me. I remember him saying,’What have you done?'” LaNasa remembered. “I said ‘Nothing, but I want to be in this class more than anything.’ And he took me and I loved it. I have to think that he really liked me, too — we had a great rapport, and I just adored him. I think he was the best teacher. I use everything he taught me to do all the time.”
But LaNasa’s journey wasn’t over. “I auditioned for like two years and nobody would take me. My agent was going to fire me. A friend gave me a tiny part in their movie, and I ended up getting cut out of it,” the actress continued. “I couldn’t get a job. I would go out, and I just couldn’t get a job. Then, finally, I got this job.”
It was 1994’s Jack Reed: A Search for Justice, the third in a series of TV movies directed by and starring Brian Dennehy. LaNasa previously appeared in brief roles in films like Brain Donors and Hopper’s Catchfire, but remembers the Dennehy film as “one of the first things that I did [that was] not just dancing, getting the talking part that the dancer had. Like, [I had to] go and audition for a part. And he was great. He was a great director.”
You can listen to LaNasa’s full interview on The Awardist above.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source malaysia.news.yahoo.com ’
