Rachel Ward is a beauty. That`s a given. Watch her walk into a room and you watch heads turn as if they were on a swivel. A former model, now an actress, she`s tall and so beautifully thin she`d make most people turn the color of a ripe lime.
She is also a lady with style. It comes naturally to her. Her family, back in Chipping Norton, England, are what the Brits might refer to as blue-blooded.
Seeing her, it`s easy to understand why Burt Reynolds, after seeing her photo in Time magazine, called to ask if she`d like to audition for his movie ”Sharkey`s Machine.”
Did she ever! It wasn`t her first time in front of the camera, and it certainly wasn`t her last-she was in ”Against All Odds” and ”Dead Men Don`t Wear Plaid.”
Now she`s in a strange, quirky film called ”After Dark, My Sweet,” with Jason Patric and Bruce Dern, which is playing in Chicago.
It`s Ward`s first U.S. movie in seven years, and she`s looking forward to doing more here, in England or possibly Australia, where she filmed the top-rated TV mini-series ”The Thorn Birds” and which she now calls home.
Moviegoers get to see quite a lot of her in ”After Dark, My Sweet.”
Certainly more than ever before. She and young Patric have a love scene that all but melts the film it`s preserved on. It must take all of five minutes, and not a word is spoken during that time.
More Top Picks Best Phonics Programs For Early Readers
Ward gets a bit defensive when asked about doing scenes like that.
”It wasn`t gratuitous, or anything like that,” she says firmly. ”I felt it was a part of the film, that it belonged there. I`m careful, however, to stay away from roles where I feel I would be the sexual quotient of the film.
”This is a story about two people obviously attracted to each other, but who have difficulty communicating. I trusted the director (James Foley)
completely. I certainly wouldn`t have wanted him to exploit me in any way, and I don`t think he does. The characters in this film are desperately trying to connect, and in this scene, they connect for a moment.”
”After Dark, My Sweet” is based on a book of the same title by the late Jim Thompson, a prolific writer of 29 novels, all but three of them paperback originals, and quite a few of which have been turned into films.
Easy to see why. They often deal with people on the edge, unpredictable types goaded into lawlessness by forces they don`t always understand, yet their stories are told with the kind of words that hold a reader`s interest to the end of the book, even if that reader would cross a street rather than meet one of the characters. They`re about people living outside the system, people who have fallen through the cracks.
That`s true in this film as well. Ward has the role of a bored and lonely widow living in a small town on the edge of the desert. She`s a kind of exotic hothouse flower who spends more time than she should in the local bar, hanging out with a former police officer, played by Dern with his usual manic intensity.
But this is not chic Palm Springs, and there`s not much else to do in this sun-baked town. Foley captures the sultry heat, the kind that saps energy to such a degree that sitting in front of a fan waiting for night to fall is usually the day`s major excitement.
Into the bar comes a moody young drifter, a former boxer recently escaped from a mental institution. He`s looking for work; the widow hires him, then she and Dern talk him into joining them in a scheme to kidnap the sickly young son of a wealthy family and hold him for ransom.
They pull it off, but the plot twists and turns easier than a desert snake, and at the end, who has won what? See the movie and find out.
”I know Australia sounds terribly far away,” Ward was saying on a recent trip to New York. ”But it`s not anymore. We work a lot on the stage, TV and in movies there. We`re here now because Bryan (Brown, her husband) is doing a film in this city. We go where the work is.”
With Brown, who starred in ”Tai-Pei” and ”Cocktail,” among others, the 32-year-old actress has two daughters and a home in Sydney.
Marriage and motherhood have mellowed her somewhat, too. Gone is the beautiful lady in the fast lane to whom ”After Dark, My Sweet” might have been more than a movie title.
She had been a regular at the high-stepping local discos here in the
`70s, most often with the late David Kennedy, son of Robert Kennedy.
He once got into a brawl at one of those dance places with Phillipe Junot, then married to Princess Caroline of Monaco, over Junot`s attentions to Ward.
But that`s yesterday, and Ward is definitely a today person, looking forward to working more. Anywhere. As long as there are accommodations for one husband and two children.