Tovah Feldshuh found that taking a Hebrew stage name got her career off the ground
Sheli Teitelbaum Los Angeles
THERE IS A SCENE IN ACTOR-director Tony Goldwyn's recent film debut, "A Walk on the Moon," in which Tovah Feldshuh, packing 20 pounds of new weight and prosthetic padding of the rump and bust, turns the archetype of the maliciously meddlesome Jewish mother-in-law on its head. As one Internet reviewer, Jamie Feldman, observed, "Especially notable is stage diva Tovah Feldshuh, whose 'Bubbe' Lilian shows extraordinary depth and strength, single-handedly holding the family together."
A mild clairvoyant given to reading tea leaves and tarot cards, the otherwise down-to-earth Bubbe has been getting worrisome vibes from her daughter-in-law, Pearl (Diane Lane). A Brooklynite beauty who clearly married too young, Pearl, 30, has become enamored of a sideburned Adonis (Viggo Mortensen) who peddles blouses to bored Jewish women marking time at various Catskill bungalow colonies.
This is the summer of 1969, when men first walked on the moon and freaks wallowed stoned in the mud at Max Yasgur's farm in nearby Woodstock. Locked into pedestrian existences, people like Pearl and her daughter (Anna Paquin), now experiencing her own powerful pubescent stirrings, sense that a transitional moment is passing them by.
Little, however, passes Feldshuh's Bubbe unnoticed. As the two women pick berries one morning, Lilian bursts out, "You're shtupping the blouseman. I knew it!"
"So are you going to tell Marty?" Pearl asks, referring to her faithful TV repairman husband. With most other movie mothers-in-law, Jewish or otherwise, the question would scarcely be worth asking - Pearl's marriage would be toast, and we could turn in our popcorn tubs and go home wondering what that might have been all about. But Feldshuh's Bubbe is no bargain-basement yenta. She prefers to let Pearl think through the implication of her actions. Bubbe's not above meddling. But she's wise enough and has enough heart to know that some things, including those we are least proud of, are simply bashert - fated.
The word is a favorite of Feldshuh's, although, like Bubbe, she believes too that one still writes one's own destiny with every waking choice. The reason for this, she told The Jerusalem Report during a visit to Los Angeles this month to perform her one-woman show, "Tovah: Out of Her Mind," has to do with the seminal effect her Hebrew stage name has had on her life.
As a three-time Tony award nominee whose Yentl on Broadway in 1974 Isaac Bashevis Singer declared infinitely superior to Streisand's a decade later, Feldshuh has also portrayed Sarah Bernhardt in "Sarah in America," Emma Goldman in the Broadway version of "Ragtime," Czech freedom fighter Helena in the NBC miniseries "Holocaust" and defense attorney Danielle Melnick on "Law and Order." But Tovah grew up on the Upper East Side of New York, and later in Scarsdale as, well, Terri Sue Feldshuh.
"I fell in love with a boy in college," she recounted shortly after performing at the University of Judaism in Bel Air. "He happened not to be Jewish, but he couldn't stand my name. It was a crazy name, he said, there was no fit. Did I have another one? Well, at Hebrew school, I said, they called me Tovah. 'Ah, Tovah, now that's a name!' he said, and so I changed it. And for years, people thought it was a Danish name, Tove, that I was a Nordic Minnesotan or somesuch. I had no idea just how religious my name sounded to Yiddish-speakers, or to other Jews, until I moved to New York.
"The change in name," she declares, "changed my fate. My career took a turn, maybe for the better, certainly for the more interesting. As Tovah or as Terri Sue, I'm sure I would have become widely known and as successful. But as Terri Sue I don't know if my work would have been profound, or my involvement in Jewish themes and issues so pronounced. The struggle with being Tovah, of course, was in proving to Jews I could play non-Jews, of dealing with the anti-Semitism of some Jews (in show business) afraid of being seen as too Jewish" by working with someone with such an obviously Jewish name.
Terri Sue Feldshuh was born nearly 47 years ago to American-born Jewish parents with roots in Russia, Austria, England, Germany and Canada. Feldshuh's father had attended Harvard Law School on scholarship. "Harvard really changed his life," she recalled. "It gave him an opportunity to reach for the stars, and he did very, very well." Tovah would later marry a lawyer herself, Andrew Harris Levy, a New York-based representative of a high-powered Los Angeles firm.
Feldshuh attended Sarah Lawrence College, and then won an acting fellowship at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where she played over 20 roles in two seasons. She made her Broadway debut in the musical "Cyrano," and had the distinction of being cast on the basis of her name as Miriam Polodnik in Garson Kanin's "Dreyfus in Rehearsal," without having to suffer the indignity of an audition. "Sure it was typecasting," she says, "but I didn't care. I was walking onto Broadway without an audition."
The play failed, but Feldshuh proceeded to the non-musical Broadway production of "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy." Interviewed in the New York Times in 1984, Singer, the creator of the character, sang Feldshuh's praises even while panning Barbara Streisand.
"I did not think that Miss Streisand was at her best in the part of Yentl," he said of her film musical. "I must say that Miss Tovah Feldshuh, who played Yentl on Broadway, was much better. She understood her part perfectly, and was charming, and showed instinctive knowledge of how to portray the scholarly Yentl I described in my story." Feldshuh, who became friends with Singer during rehearsals for the stage production, got stuck years later in an elevator with him. With Singer captive, she says she defended Streisand's efforts, insisting that whatever his misgivings, "she's immortalizing your story for the whole world."
Feldshuh's Yentl won her her first Tony nomination for best actress, as well as the Obie, Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk and Theater World Awards. Other Broadway roles followed, notably in "Rodgers and Hart," "Sarava" and "Lend Me a Tenor," and the tyrannical matriarch Bessie Berger in a 1994 revival of Clifford Odets's "Awake and Sing."
Feldshuh says she favors stage over film, even though, "with the gentleness of film, you can get away with a lot more." The stage demands "discipline, craft and tremendous pride of excellence. In New York you are judged by your prowess in a given field, not by your beauty. People now in the senior years of their careers are given tremendous honor and respect."
Last year, Feldshuh pulled off an audacious performance as Tallulah Bankhead, a role more traditionally evoked by male actors performing in drag. "Well, call her a daredevil," declared the Times. The show, "Tallulah's Party," it went on, "is as thin as melba toast - but don't count Miss Feldshuh among the superficial elements. She wraps herself in the role with such wild devotion, and looks so good in Tallulah's wig and Margo Channing's off-the-shoulder dress, she almost makes you forget that 'Tallulah's Party' is intolerably flat and cliche-ridden."
Still, film has its uses, not least that it gives her more time to spend with her husband and two children. She doesn't buy into the popular mythology in Hollywood that says that there are no roles for women of a certain age, or that there are no positive roles for Jewish women.
"Look, I don't want to be obnoxious," she argues, "but I just did four films in three months. I also did the 'Cosby' series, and I'm returning to 'Law and Order.'"
The year 2000 will see Feldshuh appearing in "Friends and Family," an independent film shot in New York with Tony Lo Bianco, about a Midwestern mother who runs a para-military group on the side. She has a part too in Brad Anderson's "Three Little Wolves," as Marissa Tomei's mother.
Feldshuh insists: "You must discard mythologies that are not useful to you. 'There are no parts for women over 35' is a useless mythology for those of us who are well over 35. So forget it. There are plenty of parts out there. You just gotta go grazin'."