"My father used to say this phrase in Italian, which means, 'the art of the father is already half learned,'" recalls Mira Sorvino. "So, if you're a shoemaker's kid, probably by 10 you can make a pair of shoes. I think it's impossible to extricate being my father's child with my fascination with acting."
The daughter of Goodfellas star Paul Sorvino, Mira would visit her father on location when she was young. Watching him work, she had a realization: "Being an actor seemed like a noble pursuit. Because you are telling these tremendous stories that had the power to move people, and thereby change their hearts in some way." The actress made her own film debut in 1993's Amongst Friends. In 1995, she won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Mighty Aphrodite.
Onstage at the 68th Oscars, Sorvino shared a similar sentiment: "I wanted to be an actor who could move other people and make other people see something about the human spirit. And you've made me feel that I've made a small step towards that," she said. She also paid special thanks to her father, who "taught me everything I know about acting."
"Literally from the time I was a kid and I was acting in plays at school, and then all throughout middle school and high school, I was one of the drama kids and starred in a bunch of the plays, Dad would coach me on each one of them," she reflects. "He would tell me, 'As Sanford Meisner always said, 'A thinking actor is a stinking actor.'"
Sorvino is perhaps best known for films like Guillermo del Toro's creature feature Mimic and David Mirkin's screwball comedy Romy and Michele's High School Reunion — both released in 1997 — as well as The Replacement Killers (1998) and Summer of Sam (1999). Her latest is the psychological thriller The Image of You. To this day, one of the most important lessons that her father taught her was all the way back at the beginning of her career, when she feared that she was going to be fired from 1994's Quiz Show.
"He was like, 'Mira, everyone's going to get fired at some point in their career. What you need to do is go in there with a big artistic swing. Take a big bold leap at the character, and just say f**k it. What's the worst that could happen?'" she recounts. "You could get fired. But if you don't allow yourself the license to fail, you will never truly soar. You will be safe and give pleasant performances and no one will care about them, because they won't have that stink of your own creative instinct, of what makes you uniquely the person to play this part."
Below, Sorvino shares with A.frame five of the films that have most moved her throughout her life — as well as the life lessons she learned along the way. Come for her admiration of On the Waterfront, stay to hear her account of co-starring with Marlon Brando in his penultimate film.
Directed by: Victor Fleming | Written by: Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf
The first film that made a strong impression on me is probably the same one that did for a lot of other Americans who grew up when I did: The Wizard of Oz. Every year, we would wait for them to show it at Thanksgiving or Christmas, and sit in the living room watching it turn from black and white to color. I identified with young Judy Garland, caught up in that longing of somewhere over the rainbow. She was so amazing as a performer, so lovable and heartbreaking, and to know that she had such a hard life makes it even more impactful in a way. And then there's the glamour and glitz of Glinda; she's, like, my style icon. I love Glenda and the ruby slippers. But there is real pathos to this story.
As I grew older, I started reading all the Frank Baum books and a ton of other fantasy literature. I love those larger-than-life fantasy worlds, and The Wizard of Oz realized what was in the mind's eye in an imaginary way, without CGI or any computer intervention. Oz was so amazing, and Emerald City, and the Lollipop Guild. Everything. And every performer is stunningly good. Margaret Hamilton as The Wicked Witch of the West was incredible, and those soldiers were so frightening. As a child, I felt like from the part where the winged monkeys appear to the time that the Witch was dead, I couldn't breathe. Literally, I couldn't intake breath, because I was so scared.
That made me fall in love with the magic of cinema. That was such a formational film for me. It shaped my vision of what movies could be and how I wanted to be part of that world.
Directed by: Graeme Clifford | Written by: Eric Bergren, Christopher De Vore and Nicholas Kazan
When I was in high school, I would say that watching Frances with Jessica Lange, and to a lesser extent Children of a Lesser God and also After the Fall with Dianne Wiest and Frank Langella, those were all inspirations for me to become an actor.
With Frances, I didn't know that Frances Farmer, the real actress that it's based on, got lobotomized. I didn't know that is how her story ended, and I was devastated when it happens in the movie. I cried for 20 straight minutes at the end. But I was so moved by Jessica Lange's performance in it. It really reinforced this feeling that acting is like a noble profession. The film is a testament to this woman's experience in life and the tragedy of how she was victimized, and it was a beautiful reminder that there is a nobility to this art. So, that one was really powerful to me.
Directed by: Jeremiah S. Chechik | Written by: John Hughes
I have a real penchant for stupid comedies, and I really, really love Christmas Vacation. I know parts of it now are risqué and, as a woman, not really cool — Clark watching the model undress in his fantasies, that part is a little yuck — but there are so many great moments in it. Beverly D'Angelo's amazing. Randy Quaid is so hilarious as Cousin Eddie. Juliette Lewis is the daughter, and so many of the supporting performances are amazing. It was just so funny to me.
I wonder if I love it so much because our Christmas was marred by the fact that my dad left my mom for good on Christmas night. It was a crazy scene. She upset him in front of his voice teacher by ratting him out, because he was not on the special vocal diet that he was supposed to be on. He was supposed to avoid red wine and milk products and red meat, and he certainly wasn't supposed to be smoking his beloved cigars. My mom was trying to goad him into doing the diet, because everybody was always worried about his health. So, she outed him in front of the very controlling voice teacher, and my dad was like, "That's it, Lorraine." And he stormed out of the house and left on Christmas night. It was a f*****g nightmare.
I've often asked myself, why couldn't he have just waited a day, rather than breaking up the family on Christmas? But that's the way life happens. I know that a lot of people have crazy things happen around the holidays, and I think I liked the escapism of everything going wrong in Christmas Vacation, but it having a hilarity to it. I embraced it because it did have this sort of It's a Wonderful Life ending, and that allowed me to laugh at the drama in our life until I could make Christmas my own again by having my own kids and creating all the traditions with them and rewriting it to be happy. That's a very dark reason to love a comedy, but it's true.
Written and Directed by: Tim Robbins
Susan Sarandon is an amazing woman who gives zero f***s. She really doesn't care about toppling the apple cart. She will just say what she thinks and believes, and that's incredible. The story of Dead Man Walking is so incredible too. I love movies where characters transform, and Sean Penn is playing so hard and tough most of the movie, and then at the end, you see that there's this scared boy inside of him. There's a weak, scared boy who did something cowardly and terrible, but the admission of it, that owning up to it, and the absolution of his sins by actually bringing them to the fore, that was really something else.
Susan's character, Sister Helen Prejean, being able to bring him to this cathartic state, even though his life is lost — it was super powerful. Sister Helen is a real-life nun who works against the death penalty and is still working against it in her 80s, and I think that film is a very good argument that the death penalty is cruel, even though his impending mortality becomes the catalyst for his change. Her presence and who she is and her intervention in his life brings him to the place where he actually comes clean. I'd say that's one of the most powerful films that I've seen.
Directed by: Elia Kazan | Written by: Budd Schulberg
On the Waterfront is, I think, a perfect film with the most incredible actor. Marlon Brando was the king in his youth. What a powerful, unexpected, moving, fascinating persona he was in his greatest roles. Everybody in the cast is great. Eva Marie Saint is incredible in that scene where Marlon is trying to talk to her and he's playing with the glove. And when he walks that walk after he's been turned into hamburger meat on the docks, and he's broken but unbowed — that moment is so incredible. Everything has been taken from him, but he still persists. It is so powerful and so masterfully directed. I just love that film. I think that's my favorite film of all time.
I had the opportunity to work with Brando years later on a film that... defies categorization [1998's Free Money]. Charlie Sheen and Thomas Haden Church thought they were in a buddy comedy, and Brando was in a weird arthouse black comedy, and Donald Sutherland and I were in a drama. But it was extraordinary to have the chance to work with him, to get to know him, and then to be rejected by him for a little while. He got mad because I asked him to do his lines off-camera. I did not know that he had an allergy to that, and I did not know that he had not spoken to Rod Steiger since the "I could have been somebody, I could have been a contender" scene in On the Waterfront. Because Brando left after the two shot and left Rod Steiger alone to do his coverage without Brando giving him his incredibly powerful monologue. They didn't speak for 20 years or more because of it. Actually, he ran into Rod Steiger while we were making that movie, and they made up. Which is crazy.
But I didn't understand that he did not like to do off-camera for people. I had signed on to do this movie because this was my hero. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I get to work with Marlon Brando! What a dream!" We were doing this scene where he's threatening me in a bathroom with a gun, except he's not there. It's the French-Canadian director holding the gun and saying, "Stop or I'll shoot" with his French accent. He wasn't really putting his whole heart and soul into it. Brando's intimidating, and I was not intimidated. So, I said, "Is Mr. Brando on set today?" "Oh yes, he's in his trailer." I was like, "Do you think you could ask him if he could come here and do his lines?" He showed up, but then for two weeks from that day, he wouldn't talk to me.
I would walk up to a table where he and other cast members were eating and he would put in earplugs. He would say really derogatory things about Italian women's butts and things like that. I sent him flowers and said, "I'm so sorry. Did I offend you?" "Oh, no dear, it's nothing." But, in fact, it was a huge thing. Before that, he had been entertaining me in his trailer and playing little parlor games with me. It was an amazing experience. Although, he was sort of flirting with me, which I was like, oh no, he's 73, what's happening? But I just brushed that off. I think his whole life, it was just in his nature to try and seduce anything that walked. But to be rejected by him was heartbreaking.
Here comes another life lesson: I would wake up in the morning and be so down, because my hero hated me. Then one morning, I was like, "That's it, Mira. I don't care who the hell he is. You don't let anybody make you feel this way." I walked onto set that day, and he could smell it on me. He said hello to me and I was cold and walked away. All of a sudden, he was on me like white on rice. All of a sudden, he was back to telling me stories about Marilyn Monroe. So, we made up, but it was wackadoodle to go toe-to-toe with him.
And he looked crazy in the film. He was heavyset at that point, but he actually padded himself further, and he shaved his hair in a bald ring around his head, and he had a tattoo on the back of his skull that said, "Jesus Saves." He looked wild. But the weird part is, one of the times that I had a private audience with him, there was this half light coming through the slots in his trailer, and in the center of his face, it was still the old Brando. There were no wrinkles. You could see Stanley Kowalski, or you could see Terry Malloy. That was really quite trippy. It was an amazing journey for me, but I was very proud that I was able to come to that. Not even Mr. Brando can destroy me.
