Lisa Eichhorn, 'It' Girl of '70s Cinema, on Returning to the London Stage in Cool Hand Luke

Lisa Eichhorn was a celluloid “it” girl three decades ago, leaping to stardom opposite Richard Gere in the 1979 film Yanks, followed by the cult classic Cutter’s Way alongside Jeff Bridges. Several trans-Atlantic crossings (and husbands) later, Eichhorn, now 59, is making her West End debut at the Aldwych Theatre in the new stage adaptation of Cool Hand Luke, the gritty prison drama best known from the 1967 Paul Newman film. Eichhorn spoke to Broadway.com late one recent afternoon about returning as an American to the British capital where she launched her career and staying the course in a profession in which—Cool Hand Luke notwithstanding—maintaining the heat can be hard.

How nice it is see you on stage in London, where you trained at drama school back in the 1970s. Is this a sign of more theater to come?
I hope so. I’m not bored; I’m not tired. I can honestly say I love it as much today, or more, as I did when I was young and just starting out.

This version of Cool Hand Luke owes more to Donn Pearce’s novel than to the Paul Newman film. What’s it been like so far?
What’s very, very extraordinary is that we’ve had no out-of-town tryout; there’s been no shopping it in the provinces first, so this feels very bold. But I’m so grateful to have this opportunity. I play Luke’s mother, who’s ill, as she is in the film, and I come to see him in prison because she’s concerned about her son’s soul.

Jo Van Fleet played your role in the movie, but I assume everyone in the stage show is putting the film to one side.
Of course I’ve seen the film, but I made a point not to go back and re-review it, though I’m sure I will in the future, just for fun. [The show’s creators] left that aspect of it to us; nobody ever said that it would be a bad idea to look at the film, but I think they believed that the actors they hired were responsible and would do what they thought best for their character.

It must be interesting to be playing an American on stage in the very town where, 30-odd years ago, people often mistook you for English.
In the U.S., too—for the first, I would say, 15 years of my career, I would walk into a room in New York or L.A. and say hi and people would say, “You’re British, aren’t you?” I’d say, “No, I’m American.” [Eichhorn was born in Glens Falls, NY.] That all dates back to when I had just left RADA [the London drama school], so I had an accent and people sometimes asked me if I was Irish. I think I just felt as if I was sort of in the middle of the ocean somewhere [laughs].

You passed yourself off as English to get cast in Yanks [in which Eichhorn played an English postmaster’s daughter who falls for Richard Gere].
What happened was that I was told to pretend to be British English, so when I went to the audition, this correct English voice came out and I just used it through the whole process, from the first meeting onwards. At one point, [Schlesinger] asked me where my parents were from, and in that brief instant I figured I would tell him that my father was British but was living in America. A couple months later, I called him up and said, “I need to see you, please,” and I confessed to being wholly American. Later, in front of the Hollywood Foreign Press, he said that I had fooled him completely.

Shades of Meryl Streep, no? A facility for accents is surely no bad thing.
True, though it’s interesting that what can be considered an amazing accomplishment for one actor can become an albatross if you’re good at it to a degree that leaves people confused [laughs].

Yanks set you on a film trajectory that included The Europeans and Cutter’s Way, but one gets the impression that you then gave up on Hollywood.
I think in a lot of ways I wasn’t ready for Hollywood. I had the English way of doing things in my heart and in my system. I went to Hollywood all by myself and didn’t really have any friends or support, and it turned out that I had an agent who was one of the nastiest men alive; he’s since died, God rest his soul. He was awful.

What did he do?
He was always saying grotesque things about my boyfriend to the extent that even his own agency would say, “You have to stop that.” It was really vile. The coup de grace was at a party at [director] Norman Jewison’s beach house in Malibu for Swing Shift, on which a friend of mine was the set decorator. At the party, my agent said of me, “She’s a cunt.” My friend said that he had better be quiet, because he was going to tell me and that I could sue for slander.

That sounds like a scene out of the Robert Altman film The Player!
I did move on from him; I may have been ignorant, but I wasn’t stupid. What’s fascinating to me is that young actors today are so much more savvy; they have managers or publicists, and I had nothing. It wasn’t that I was blissfully naive, I just didn’t know! I remember when Yanks came out, someone said to me, “What are you going to do for your Oscar campaign?” I had no idea; it was a case of total ignorance not being bliss [laughs].

Did your Yanks co-stars Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave offer advice about the industry?
I don’t know if it works that way. Gere at the time was on his own blinkered trajectory to stardom, which would happen with American Gigolo, and Vanessa was very politically active and probably didn’t think a young actor needed any help, because what happens is that you just keep acting. She’s about to open here in Driving Miss Daisy and I will go see her and renew the contact, just to make the circle complete.

How did you decide to return to London?
I moved back in 2003, having been at a memorial service the previous year for the principal of RADA, Hugh Cruttwell, who was a wonderful, wonderful man. There I was, with all these people who’d been there with me and before me, and I felt, perhaps erroneously as it turns out, that I belonged: Just being in the room with those people who were happy to see me and who knew me was all it took, and two months later, I had decided to re-settle [in Britain].

I gather you’re now remarried [to an English lawyer].
And my stepson, who’s now 20, just started university earlier this week!

Is acting still a priority?
The fact is, I don’t have to work, but I want to work. I have a burning passion to work. I’m fortunate, I think, in that the ups and downs of my career haven’t deterred my desire to do it. I don’t feel bitter and twisted in any way; I just feel grateful to be acting.