After spending an hour with Elizabeth Ashley in the Broadway hangout Angus McIndoe, it’s tempting to jump up and start belting “I’m Still Here” in her honor. Good times and bum times? You’d better believe this feisty 69-year-old actress has seen them all, and she’s not only still here, she’s starring in the Broadway premiere of Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate. With a pack of Carltons on one side and a Bloody Mary on the other, Ashley holds forth in riveting fashion on her 50-year theatrical career, which began with a Tony for her Broadway debut (in Take Her, She’s Mine), hit a high point with her performance as Maggie in the 1974 Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and endured to her current in-demand status for mature roles (including Cat’s Big Mama and Amanda in The Glass Menagerie in regional productions). Back on Broadway for the first time in five years, Ashley puts her comic gifts to full use in Dividing the Estate as Stella, an elderly Texas matriarch whose chitchat about bloodlines and supper guests masks a steely resolve when it comes to splitting up the family fortune. In person, Ashley is eternally alluring and endlessly fun to listen to, especially on the subject of her oh-so-eventful life.

Welcome back to Broadway—and how nice that the entire Dividing the Estate company is back together [from the play’s fall 2007 premiere at Primary Stages].
Kudos to Lincoln Center Theater for that. There was kind of a bidding war to bring this to Broadway, and one of the things that clinched the deal was that [artistic director] Andre Bishop and [executive producer] Bernie Gersten wanted the whole cast as it was. You almost never see a Broadway play that has this many people in it because it’s considered economically unfeasible. [Producer] Jeff Richards brought in August: Osage County, which also has 13 actors, but that’s rare.

Has anything changed for the Broadway production?
We have a wonderful new set that really looks like an old house on this estate. We have different costumes and different wigs. I’m looking much older, which isn’t that hard. When I first heard I was playing an 83-year-old woman, I was like, “Oh that’s a stretch,” but it was hardly any stretch at all.

Bull!
No, really! The second time I retired [in the 1980s], I became a sailor—not a yachtie, a rag-ass sailor—and I had a boat accident and broke almost every bone in my body. So much of my life has been “Oh, I got away with it, I got away with it,” whatever it was. As my mother, Miss Lucille, used to say, “I just hope I’m alive when all those chickens come home to roost.” They didn’t while she was alive, but I’m almost 70 years old now and they’re roosting in every bone in my body.

Dividing the Estate is a real crowd-pleaser, isn’t it?
I’ve never been in a play that audiences love more than this one. It’s Horton Foote’s genius that every person who sees it swears to god that it’s their family up there. I first read this play four years ago and I loved the intricately woven, Chekhovian aspect of it. I loved the southern gothic aspect. I loved the structure of it. It’s that rare thing, a brilliantly made play.

What do you like about Stella, the matriarch you play?
She’s so human. I love her imperfections, her determination and her unwavering belief in her principles and values. More than one of her children is a painful disappointment, but she’s able to love them and see them for exactly who they are. She’s not in denial, or any of that modern mishmash. There are no fairy tales in this play. She will recount things she remembers and one or two of her spawn will pipe up and say, “Oh that’s not true, Mama, blah blah blah.” It’s truer than true to her! The facts are not synonymous with the truth, as my mother used to say. She also said, “Success and achievement are not synonymous.” I held tight to that one throughout my life.

You’ve never done a Horton Foote play?
Never have, and I always wanted to. Horton, god bless him, had sort of become a fan [of mine], I guess you could say. He came to see me in three or four things, usually the Tennessee [Williams] things because he loved Tennessee and Tennessee loved him. He would always come backstage and have really insightful, interesting things to say. He has an inner eye for the actor’s creative process. When I did Big Mama [in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for Michael [Wilson, director of Dividing the Estate] in what I think was a brilliant production, Horton said to Michael, “She’s got to be Stella.”

You’ve worked with the two greatest southern playwrights. How would you compare the plays of Foote and Tennessee Williams?
Horton and Tennessee are actually extremely similar, although they come at it from opposite ends. Tennessee comes from the darkest of places. He’s looking into the belly of the beast and the darkest part of the human heart, but little by little he will start to shred that canvas and you see light coming through. Horton, on the other hand, is coming from the brightest, most positive aspects of normalcy, and little by little you see into the frailty and the worst fears and more venal sins in human nature. The wonderful thing about both of them is they have such affection for the human condition. They don’t judge, so there’s no need to forgive. They see life with a smile and a tear. Horton is a warrior of hope. Tennessee was, if anything, a heart-of-darkness warrior.