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So many film and TV actors start their careers in the theatre, working their way up from stage plays to the screen. That’s exactly what happened with Allison Janney, too, but it only took one performance to alter her life forever.
In 1994, Janney was getting a lot of work in movies and TV series. It wasn’t anything sexy, though. By that year, she played not one but two different characters in Law & Order, a show which seemed to be a requirement for any up-and-coming actor, and would cap things off as “Woman in Christmas Shop” in Miracle on 34th Street.
As a woman in her mid-30s who had yet to break out, it had to be an anxious time for Janney. Then it happened. In an interview with Bafta, she talked about how a performance on one fateful night changed everything: “We had done a play called Fat Men in Skirts with the Naked Angels theatre company in New York City with Marisa Tomei and Stanley [Tucci] and Matt McGrath”. Critical of herself, she told Tucci that she didn’t think anyone was noticing her on stage, but she couldn’t have been more wrong.
Watching her every move were some very famous people, and one of them caused a chain reaction which carried her to where she is now, recalling still in awe, “And I found out that in the audience that night were Jackie O, John Kennedy, Al Pacino, Ellen Barkin, Mike Nichols, um… It was an unbelievable, star-studded, and I have no idea why they were all there for that one performance,” she explained.
In the 1990s, there were few directors more respected than Nichols. He was the mastermind behind classics such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, and Regarding Henry. In 1994, a bit of change saw him sign on to helm the werewolf thriller Wolf, with Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer. Despite working with such legends, Nichols, who had directed plenty of stage plays as well, saw something in the little-known Janney.
The actor recalled what happened next, saying, “He saw me in that and wrote me a lovely letter, and then he put me in, proceeded to put me in Wolf in a really teeny part”. It was a small part, indeed, with Janney in the role of ‘Party Guest’; a glamorous Hollywood life it was not.
Two years later, however, Tucci cast her in his movie Big Night, and two years after that, Nichols was back in her life, this time giving Janney the role of a nervous librarian opposite John Travolta doing his best Bill Clinton impression as Governor Jack Stanton in Primary Colours. The political drama earned two Oscar nominations and the attention of another political junkie.
Janney told Bafta, “Then he put me in Primary Colours, and that movie is what got me West Wing. Because Aaron Sorkin was in love with Mike Nichols, too, and then… oh, it was so great, but everything just starts in the theatre and leads on from there.”
The West Wing, which ran on NBC from 1999 to 2006, was a fantasy for the sane about how politics could really be. For her role as press secretary turned chief of staff CJ Cregg, Janney earned four Emmys. The award recognition hasn’t stopped since, but none of it would have happened if not for Nichols watching Janney on a night when she thought no one noticed her.
