Tempered By Her Years: The Work of Ally Sheedy

The first time I saw Ally Sheedy it was on the small screen. She was playing a sixteen-year-old Catholic School girl who, while on a class trip to at a police station, begins to seduce a thirty-five-year old detective in an episode of the critically acclaimed drama Hill Street Blues, a show my parents watched every Wednesday night and I was probably too young to be watching with them. She played the part with a perfect mix of youthful bravado and naiveté, a kind of worldly innocence. I was immediately transfixed by her as were so many people of my generation. Joel Schumacher, who directed St. Elmo’s, said in a 1998 interview with the Washington Post “You could not meet Ally and not fall in love with her,” and that quality, that “it” factor, came through in her performance.[1] Over the next few years Ms. Sheedy rose to fame making the films War Games, The Breakfast Club, Short Circuit, and St. Elmo’s Fire. In each of these, she played similar enough characters to have audiences wonder if she was being typecast or if this was the only type she could play. After nearly a decade in Hollywood, Sheedy returned to New York City and started working with acting coach Harold Guskin.[2] She made the decision to be an actor rather than a movie star. While she did television, film, and stage work, her lack of commercial success got her dropped by her agent in her mid-30s. Then came the film that garnered her highest critical praise, High Art (1998), and started talk of a renaissance. Ally Sheedy is a performer, writer, activist, and teacher whose career spans nearly fifty years from her earliest ballet roles, to her first book (published at age 12), to her more recent roles in the X-Men franchise and the Showtime comedy SMILF. She may be most remembered for her roles in the 1980s, but that is such a small sliver of all she has done that it would be a shame for our understanding of her work to be that narrow.

I don’t want to discount those early films because they helped Sheedy grow, and these early roles first defined Sheedy for a generation of fans. In War Games (1983), Sheedy, drawing upon her own athleticism from her years dancing with the American Ballet Theatre, plays Jennifer, a lively teenager almost constantly in motion. The audience learns as she learns, we understand the technology about as well as she does, and we would probably make some of the same choices if we were in the remarkable situations in which she finds herself. Sheedy handled the role beautifully, striking a perfect balance between teenaged innocence and the sudden burden of knowledge. The word that comes to mind when describing her performance is authentic. It was my favorite Sheedy role for years. Unlike most of my friends I never liked The Breakfast Club. There were too many parts of the script I found problematic or trite. For the most part, I did not see these characters as realistic, but I loved the character that Sheedy played. Her portrayal of Allison, the weirdo, was genuine, which was challenging considering how blandly archetypal all of the characters were. “With the exception of Sheedy,” wrote Pauline Kael in her review at the time, “who’s a marvelous comic sprite and transcends her role until she is jerked back into the script mechanics, the movie is about a bunch of stereotypes who complain that other people see them as stereotypes.”[3] Years later, in retrospect, Linda Homes wrote, “Allison largely exists in Sheedy’s eyes, in her gestures and even her clothes.” By the end of the film, the only character I did not feel like I had completely figured out was Sheedy’s. She was able to give enough to the role of Allison to be understood and believable, but she never revealed everything she knew about the character. I later learned that Sheedy kept first person diaries for her characters as a way to get inside of them. Interestingly, whenever the subject of The Breakfast Club comes up now, people usually say they most identify with Allison, or Brian, the nerd.

Breaking away from her on-screen 1980s persona proved difficult and Sheedy withdrew from the limelight. She saw what other women were being subjected to in order to be movie stars, most of which involved becoming more objectified and sexualized, and was unwilling to go down that road.[4] Saddled with the pejorative “brat pack” label and struggling with addiction, she returned to New York to work on the craft of acting. For the next several years she continued to act and write, she became a mother, and she searched for roles that she would be excited to perform. In the late 1990s, when it seems the viewing audience and Hollywood producers had all but forgotten about her, Sheedy delivered an award-winning performance in the independent film High Art. It is in this film that I believe we see all of the many qualities that Sheedy possess as an artist, and it remains the film that I think best represents her talent.

The basic outline of High Art is the story of an ambitious young assistant magazine editor, Syd (Radha Mitchell), who discovers she is living in the same building as a once prominent but now drug addicted photographer, Lucy (Ally Sheedy). Syd tries to lure Lucy back into the spotlight as a way to help her own career, and Lucy, not really interested in a comeback, uses this as an opportunity to seduce Syd.

[**Spoilers ahead**]

The film requires Sheedy to hold back some of her natural energy for the role of Lucy, muting some of the jerky, kinetic, physicality that was part of her early roles. Additionally, Lucy is a photographer, an artist who works behind that camera, an observer, but Sheedy has spent most of her life on stage, in front of the camera, which is a different point of view. Holding back the performer and becoming the observer while still coming across as authentic, showcases Sheedy’s development as an actor. Her restraint is on display in a scene early in the film, the second time that Syd goes to Lucy’s apartment to try to fix a leak that is dripping water from Lucy’s bathroom downstairs into Syd’s. Standing in the bathroom Syd is talking about a picture on the wall, Lucy is listening to her and visibly processing the depth of the analysis as Syd goes on. We can almost see Syd’s words breaking through the veil of drugs that obscure Lucy in earlier scenes. Suddenly becoming self-conscious of her own rambling Syd demurs, “Am I going off?” Lucy blinks back the veil and smiles, “No, not at all. I haven’t been deconstructed in a long time.” The two women connect in that moment for the first time, Syd’s commentary and praise of Lucy’s photographs start to bring clarity back to Lucy, reminding her of what she once enjoyed about putting her work into the world. As if by having Syd see so much in her work, Lucy is reminded of who she is as a person and an artist. In a later scene Lucy brings photos she has taken for the magazine to Syd, who has become her editor. Through both the prints she has selected and the way she presents them to Syd, Lucy is trying to tell Syd that she has made a decision about her life. Again, Sheedy’s movements speak volumes where Lucy’s lines do not. She never says she is going to get clean, she never says she want to be with Syd going forward, instead Lucy hands Syd the pictures she took of her and fixes her with a hopeful. When Syd, clearly thinking about this as an editor and not a lover, brings up the pictures of Greta Lucy hands them over. There is something about the way she does it, something dismissive and a little hurt about the look in her eyes and the motion of her hands that shows Lucy is disappointed that Syd isn’t understanding her, but she does not try to explain herself any further. It is a wonderful performance. Sheedy plays Lucy as intense yet unfocused, cynical yet vulnerable, broken yet unbroken, and at first an opportunist willing to use and be used, but in the end, as a woman struggling with love and addiction.

In discussing the role Sheedy has said that she felt very close to the character, that Lucy “felt like a second skin.” The similarities are there for everyone to see; both women are less famous at the moment of the film than they had once been, both seem to feel like they were not entirely prepared for that early fame. Sheedy left Hollywood to return to New York and focus on acting rather than fame. Lucy, it is said in the film, left New York, breaking ties with the art world, but as Syd says, “she never stopped working.” Both women have struggled with addiction and the pain that comes from being dedicated to your art when the world no longer seems to want it. Lucy says to Syd, who is trying to understand what happened to the once famous photographer, “I stopped working commercially ten years ago, it was kind of a mental health decision.” More candidly Lucy says, “I loved the attention I just couldn’t handle the impact. I felt sort of pigeonholed.”[5] A line that might describe Sheedy as well and shows that a part of Lucy’s experience lives inside of Sheedy. Lucy felt trapped by the way other people viewed her work and success. She tells Syd that people, “just glommed on to something I was doing then, and I just got trapped.” When Lucy agrees to meet with the senior editors at the magazine where Syd works, they question her new work not on its merits but based on how dissimilar it is to her old work. They offer Lucy the cover of the magazine but want a more retrospective look at her life and work, they want her to pick up where she was ten years earlier. They are not interested in Lucy as an artist, they are interested in Lucy as the artifact, a cultural phenomenon from a decade earlier as cultural curiosity now. This is, we understand, in part what drove Lucy away from the industry in the first place. This is what I have heard a variety of artists say in real life. The band that explores a new direction only to have their fans complain that it doesn’t sound like the old albums, the actor who plays against type only to be told the public wants to see them playing more roles like they used to. One can imagine the number of times Ally Sheedy was approached to play some version of Allison or Jennifer, or any of the characters she played in the 1980s, the cute quirky girl next door who teen-aged girls could identify with and teenaged boys could pine for. Sheedy refused, and taking on the role of Lucy was part of that refusal to go backwards. She pushed herself as an artist and looked for new roles and challenges. Lucy, however, takes the offer from the magazine, but she seems to do it for Syd rather than because of any interest she might have in reflecting on her earlier work. Still, Lucy also seems to view putting together new work for a magazine, and especially working with and being with Syd, as a potential path away from what her life has become—an almost zombie-like existence of drifting between highs with a small group of people she sometimes photographs. Lucy sees in Syd the ambition that she has lost and a part of her wants to get back, but because her art is connected to who she is, she makes Syd the subject of her new work.

The relationship between Lucy and Syd turns romantic as both feel the allure of new relationship energy and begin seeing the constraints of their current relationships. Lucy’s live-in girlfriend Greta (Patricia Clarkson) is locked in a self-destructive cycle of drug abuse and living in her own past. Lucy wants to help her, but Greta seems to be beyond her reach. Syd’s boyfriend James (Gabriel Mann) was not supportive of Syd when she was an intern at the magazine and is even less supportive now that her career seems to be moving forward. He only sees Syd inhabiting a world he is not a part of, and he rejects the possibility of not being the most important thing in her life. Lucy is torn between old love and new love, between her life behind the veil of drugs with Greta, and the success she walked away from because she felt suffocated on one side and Syd, the possibility of professional renewal, and a life clean of drugs on the other. Metaphorically, within the film, it is the photos that Lucy took of Syd while not high that the magazine chooses over ones she took of Greta, presumably while high, that they say are flat and have no context. The struggle between the life Lucy has and the life Lucy can see herself creating with Syd is the soul of the story. As an observer, Lucy is not great with words and does not always find a way to articulate herself, all of the context and subtext is played out in Sheedy’s gestures and glances.

At the end of the film Lucy has gone away to get clean and sort things out, she has chosen new love and Syd, but she needs to end things with Greta first. She returns to the city and her apartment to tell Greta things need to change. Greta manipulates Lucy, playing on her love and vulnerability as someone who has just begun the process of recovery, and asks her to get high with her one more time. Lucy tells Greta it won’t change anything, it won’t change her decision to get off drugs and be with Syd, but she does a line of heroin with Greta and dies. Lisa Cholodenko, the writer and director of the film, says she saw Lucy’s death as an accident, but Sheedy has said she saw it as a choice. Perhaps her own struggle with addiction informs her interpretation of the scene but Sheedy believes that in that moment Lucy chose what was easier—her old life behind the veil—rather than the challenge of living clean, of living with the expectations of a new relationship, and a return to the commercial side of being an artist. Lucy never stopped taking photographs, she just stopped sharing them with people she didn’t know. This is, of course, one of the scariest things about being an artist, putting your work into the world for consumption and criticism, something that Sheedy knows well.

When asked in an interview what motivates Lucy to create art Sheedy responded, “I think it’s much purer than that. I think it’s simply something that she was born with, a gift that she loves to do… And the problem was that she just did it and suddenly this attention came around it and I think made it impossible for her to just simply do her work, and I also think because she’s so thin-skinned… I don’t think she could handle that.”[6] This analysis seems to blur the line between Lucy and Sheedy. The first time I saw the film I thought that Sheedy seemed so mature in this role but that was because I was still connected to her earlier performances. After watching High Art, I watched The Breakfast Club and War Games again and saw what I had missed before, that Sheedy was truly acting in those roles. That what made Allison the one character that remains the most popular and enduring of the TBC characters was Sheedy’s performance, the layers she brought, the backstory that existed only in her eyes and body language. Similarly, Sheedy’s performance as Lucy is incredibly intimate because she knows the character in a way that is so personal and because she has the unique ability to convey all of that understanding on to the screen.

High Art was well received and after years out of the spotlight, Ally Sheedy became a film festival darling upon its release.[7] This time around, however, she was tempered by her years in and away from Hollywood and in her interviews, she seems to give a little less of herself than she did in her twenties when she was, perhaps, unaware of the toll it would take to be so genuine so often. Unlike Lucy, Sheedy seems to have learned that there needs to be something leftover for yourself after the public has had their time with your art. Ally Sheedy will not go down in history as the most commercially successful actor of her generation but she may prove to be one of the most talented, if under-appreciated.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1998/06/21/ally-sheedy-leaver-of-the-pack/c3a3daf2-0c36-4bc7-8295-e5661cf1a312/

[2] https://charlierose.com/videos/6758

[3] Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, April 8, 1985

[4] http://nymag.com/nymetro/movies/features/2740/

[5] High Art (1998)

[6] https://charlierose.com/videos/6758

[7] https://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/14/arts/film-ally-sheedy-makes-a-bid-to-be-taken-seriously.html