Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 6, 1993 TAG: 9311090250
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
This week she's back as an equally determined grandmother who sets out not only to gain custody of her granddaughter, but also to put her daughter-in-law behind bars, in ``A Matter of Justice'' (Sunday and Monday nights at 9 on WSLS-Channel 10).
In one fact-based story, she fails; in the other, she wins. In both, when tiny Duke turns on her laser-like gaze, watch out.
Duke said the scheduling a week apart of CBS's ``No Child of Mine'' and NBC's miniseries was a coincidence. Probably not, and Duke should take that as a compliment: Networks offer their best products during ratings-sweeps periods.
This week's story focuses on Mary and Jack Brown of rural Gadsden, Ala., whose son, Chris, joined the Marines at 17, married a seductive woman he met in a bar and was later found stabbed to death. He left behind a young daughter.
Martin Sheen is Jack Brown, a frustrated and disappointed man who saw his son's need to get off the farm and tried to protect him from his mother's plan to keep him at home. Jason London plays Chris Brown, and Alexandra Powers (``L.A. Law's'' new attorney) is Charlene ``Dusty'' Johnson.
Parents may want to shield their children from the stabbing and sex scenes during the first night.
Duke, 46, plays Mary Brown, who suffers a mother's worst nightmare: the murder of her only child. If she looks appropriately drawn and tired, it is not without reason. Making the movie last summer in hot and humid Kansas, only 10 days after her 79-year-old mother died, took a toll on Duke.
``I did something that I probably should not have done,'' she said. ``Ten days after my mother died, I began the CBS movie. Under the circumstances I might have been forgiven for taking some extra time, but the theory was that you should get back to work. So I postponed the grief process.
``When I started the miniseries, I was at my fighting weight, 104. We worked a 36-day schedule, six-day weeks, 18-hour days, a half-hour break for lunch. By the time we had finished, I had lost 16 pounds. I didn't take very good care of myself. And I've found that skinny-skinny is not so good for the face.''
Except for 10 days between the movies, Duke had been away from her Idaho home almost three months, she said. ``Then I had to come home and acknowledge that my mother was indeed dead, and that I needed now to stop living other people's agonies and start living my own.''
For the last few days of her mother's life, Duke said, she brought her mother back from the nursing home where she had been living. Mother and daughter made peace after turbulent lives recounted in Duke's autobiography, ``Call Me Anna'' (her given name).
``She was lucid, she was funny, she was filled with love. Almost all of my family members were able to come and talk with her before she left. So I don't feel that there is unfinished business. But what I do feel is loss and grief. I've played this many times, but it was all an approximation. ...
``Being an actress is, I think, an extraordinary thing to get to be, but at least out loud, I never acknowledged that she was my prime audience. So when I was going to work on the second one, suddenly I was weeping and realized that never again will I hear: `Anna, you're the best actress that ever lived.'''
Duke is a veteran of dozens of television movies and series and holds four Emmys. She first appeared on television's ``Armstrong Circle Theatre'' in 1955 at age 8. But she made her mark as an actress when she played Helen Keller in ``The Miracle Worker'' on Broadway in 1959 at age 12.
Three years later, she and Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan won Oscars for the movie version. In 1979, she took the Sullivan role in a television remake with Melissa Gilbert as Helen.
For three years, Duke has lived on farm in upstate Idaho, near Spokane, Wash., and the Canadian border, with her husband, Mike Pierce, and their son Kevin, 5. They met when she was making a television movie at Fort Benning, Ga., and he was a drill sergeant assigned to familiarize her with Army life.
by CNB