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Edwards

Stacy Edwards adjusts to role

By David Pecchia

Stacy Edwards was cast in CBS' "Chicago Hope" in what seemed like a New York minute.

"I was actually auditioning for a small role in a film; I wasn't even there for 'Chicago Hope,'" recalls the actress, still glowing from the accolades she received for her work as the hearing-impaired Christine in "In the Company of Men."

"I was just sitting there talking to them, and all of a sudden they came back with a script and said will you come back tomorrow and read for 'Chicago Hope'?"

Edwards, of course, agreed. Things went swimmingly, and she got a call that very night to come in the following week and be tested on film.

"So I test on a Thursday, find out Thursday night that I got it," she says, still visibly excited about the whole ordeal. "Friday I'm in wardrobe, and Monday I was filming."

Be careful what you ask for, they say. Edwards and her new husband, Eddie, were, she said, "so out of our minds with excitement" that they couldn't sleep two winks that weekend.

"It was so scary, my first episode," says the former dancer, originally from Glasgow, Montana. "I'm doing brain surgery. I'm reviving somebody who's coded (code blue, which means life-and-death serious), and I'm talking about all these different diseases. I was just par-- ..." Edwards is about to say "paranoid," it seems, when her thought process shifts gears.

"I would call home every day ... 'Honey, I don't know what I'm doing.'"

Chalk that up to insecurity, for Edwards clearly does know what she's doing. The daughter of an Air Force officer, she was aware not long out of the womb that she'd be bouncing about the globe on a regular basis. She also knew early on that she wanted to dance and ended up hoofing well enough to win a scholarship to Chicago's Lou Conte dance studio at 18.

Then the acting bug took a bite, and Edwards says her itinerant formative years helped form a fertile foundation from which a talent for acting can emerge.

"Growing up being the new girl in school, if you didn't go up and introduce yourself, you remained friendless for a very long time." She laughs. "And so I think that's helped me in this industry."

From Guam to Belgium to Alabama, she gleaned enough about life to enable her to parlay that knowledge into what appears to be a lucrative and satisfying profession.

But could it have prepared her for the tough and tricky role of Christine?

Since the small, independent "In the Company of Men" didn't quite outmuscle "Men in Black" at the box office, a little background is in order. In the movie, Christine is an attractive deaf woman who, by way of a deal concocted by two single men in town for a few weeks on business, becomes the object of their romantic interest and intent. She dates them both for a short period, and one of them falls sincerely in love with her. She, however, grows to deeply love the other one, who promptly breaks her heart for the sheer sport of it.

And Christine's accent, that of a deaf person (though viciously mocked by the man who will ultimately gleefully dump her), is what helps make her performance so touching.

"That is a major thrill for me, and a victory to have anyone think that I'm hearing-impaired," says the 32-year-old actress. No one in her family is audibly challenged, she says, so she had to get the vocal struggles so inherent in that character perfected from scratch.

"I found out that Cal State Northridge had this awesome hearing-impaired department for those who are deaf or those who want to communicate with them," Edwards says. She spoke with a number of deaf people there, including the librarian who works at its research library.

In the process, she learned something about herself.

"Keep in mind that (we all) are individuals," she admonishes, "so one deaf person may have a thicker accent than another. And one deaf person may be able to read lips better than another, so I think it's easy for us to categorize people. I'm guilty of that as well."

What Edwards wasn't braced for was the audience polarization "Company" induced. Aaron Eckhardt, the actor whose character shatters Christine's silent world in the film was confronted in the real world by women, verbally excoriating him, even after he explained that it was just a role.

Why?

"I'm sure there are many reasons, but in a nutshell I think it's because everyone can relate to being betrayed," Edwards said. "I think that tugs on everyone's heart and those memories in particular (elicit anger) when you observe them happening to somebody else."

Edwards recently completed a small but pivotal role ("I'm not supposed to reveal much," she says with a smile) in next spring's "Primary Colors." It will be a big film, what with John Travolta playing a guy patterned closely after President Clinton, but that doesn't mean she wouldn't enjoy a few years or so with her new "Chicago Hope" family. She seems to be fitting like a glove with the cast, in spite of all the tossing and turning she did before that first day on the set.

"It's great because they did write my character struggling to meet and make friends and not really being accepted right off the bat," Edwards explains. "Not that the actors were like that, but I think that my discomfort and my own fears as Stacy really helped and served the character."

(c) 1998, David Pecchia. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate

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