Jump to: navigation, search

Calgary Herald (23/Nov/1990) - Actress breaks silence with horrifying stories

Details

  • article: Actress breaks silence with horrifying stories
  • author(s): Jamie Portman
  • newspaper: Calgary Herald (23/Nov/1990)
  • keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Mariette Hartley

Article

Actress breaks silence with horrifying stories

Some know her best as the witty lady who did all those Polaroid commercials with James Garner in the early 1980s.

Others recognize her as the multi-talented actress who worked for such major film directors as Alfred Hitchcock and Sam Peckinpah in the early 1960s before moving into a TV career which saw her in a myriad of roles — from a female doctor on Peyton Place to her Emmy-award winning performance as the Incredible Hulk's bride.

She's now winning fresh plaudits for her engaging work as TV news producer Liz McVay on the new CBS drama series W.I.O.U.

But Mariette Hartley's life also has a dark and terrifying side. As a 15-year-old, she slit her wrists when she wrongly suspected she was pregnant. She had alcoholic parents who fed on each other's addiction. Her much-loved father committed suicide and her mother attempted suicide several times.

Her first husband beat her. Then there was her own alcoholism, culminating in the nightmare days when she would sit drunkenly on the kitchen floor "drinking vodka and eating everything, including Purina Cat Chow."

For much of her three-decade career, Hartley's winning public personality concealed the private horrors that once threatened to engulf her.

"I walked around with this exterior image. But now, I'm far enough away from the original pain of what happened to me to be able to deal with it with joy and humor."

She's talking about her new autobiography, Breaking the Silence, which has just been published by Putnam.

Written in collaboration with journalist Anne Commire, the book is brutally honest in chronicling Hartley's public success and private desperation. It's also funny in places.

"Well, there has been humor in my life," she says. "I'm an entertainer, which means I know how important it is to be a communicator. So there's no way I could just write a black book."

Still, some sections are uncompromising in their bleakness, such as the day her father shot himself:

"We heard this `pop.' It was like no other `pop' I'd ever heard before," she writes. "Mom and I instantly knew. When we rushed into the bedroom, we saw Dad lying on the bed, the gun slack in his hand . . . ."

Hartley, 50, has for many years been happily married to producer Patrick Boyriven and is the mother of two children — Sean, 15, and Justine, 12.

Why is she exposing her emotional scars now?

Much of it stems from her off-screen humanitarian work. She's national spokesperson for the American Suicide Foundation, which recently honored her with a special award for her efforts in suicide prevention and research.

More recently, she's been giving speeches on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health, calling for more research to combat mental illness in children and adolescents.