July 05, 1998|By Patrick Z. McGavin. Special to the Tribune.
Robin Tunney was like every young girl in America who imagined herself on stage, in front of a crowd, knowing intuitively she was meant to be seen and heard. She saw the film adaptation of "Grease" 16 times as an impressionable 6-year-old and knew instantly that was the world she longed for.
In 1981, 8-year-old Robin, her 11-year-old sister, Susan, and their mother, Cathy, set off for auditions for a touring production of "Annie," a role Robin believed she was meant to play. There was one small problem. Robin, she is the first to tell you, is not a gifted singer. Susan was blessed with a beautiful voice.
At the audition, Cathy Tunney was approached by a reporter from WBBM-TV who was filing a story on child actors vying to be the next "Annie." The girls' father, Patrick, owned an AMC car dealership on the South Side and by chance was in his office where he saw his wife being interviewed on television.
"They showed these kids going through the audition," Patrick Tunney recalls. "Then I see Cathy being interviewed. The reporter asks, `You have two daughters; will one get disappointed if the other is called?' Cathy says, `Oh, no, they're both professionals. They support each other, and they'll be fine.' "
At that moment, Robin burst through the door, unable to hide her pain and disappointment when Susan was chosen for a callback and she was not.
"I wanted to be Annie so bad," Robin recalls. "I'm holding (my mother's) leg, saying, `They picked her instead of me. I hate her, I hate her.' "
Patrick Tunney was watching a family drama -- his own -- unfold on live television. "They cut back to Walter Jacobson, and he says, `I don't know if I could subject my children to something like that,' " Patrick Tunney says.
"There is disappointment very early in life when you're in this business," he adds. "I'm sure there is disappointment to this day with auditions. You have to have the ability to go back the next day and not let it bother you. That was Robin. She could do that."
Anybody who ever met Robin Tunney learned not to question her resolve. Ten years later, after graduating from Sandburg High School in Palos Township, Tunney told her parents she was putting off college to go to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career.
While expressing the concerns voiced by most parents, they knew it was useless to try to talk her out of chasing her dreams, and Robin Tunney now has arrived at the moment she thought about constantly as a young girl. The 25-year-old Palos Heights native has carved out an impressive career, successfully balancing commercial assignments in high-profile studio films such as Andrew Fleming's "The Craft" (1996) with risky, daring work in small, independent works like Bob Gosse's "Niagara, Niagara."
Tunney's performance in "Niagara, Niagara" as Marcy, an emotionally scarred young woman with Tourette's syndrome, earned her the best actress prize at the Venice Film Festival in the fall. And in October Tunney married Gosse, the man who guided and shaped her performance. The couple began dating right after shooting the film and live in New York.
"At first I thought about setting him up with my sister," Tunney says. "But the more I thought about it, I realized I wanted him for myself.
Although she left Chicago seven years ago, Tunney says the guidance, solidarity and strength of her close-knit, South Side Irish-Catholic family (her parents now live in Hometown) is an essential part of her success. When she walked up to accept her award in Venice, she dedicated it to Pat Maheras, her godmother and one of her mother's six sisters, who died from complications of breast cancer just before the film's major shooting began in 1996.
"She was this brilliant, strong woman who always made me feel important," Tunney says. "It seemed so unfair, it made me hate the world a little bit. I never lost anybody in my life; I had a healthy family.
"I'm going to treasure that moment (in Venice) for the rest of my life. It was the most important thing that ever happened to me professionally."
Written by Matthew Weiss, "Niagara, Niagara" (the title derives from Marcy's habit of repeating words) is a lovers-on-the-run movie that follows the impulsive adventures of its two protagonists, Marcy and the inept, though essentially kind, petty criminal Seth (Henry Thomas) she falls for. The film documents their perilous and fantastic journey of self-discovery.
(Although The Tribune's Michael Wilmington in his review referred to the film as a "flabbergasting postmodern nutto-noir," he praised Tunney's performance: "Tunney has the showcase part, and you can see why she impressed the Venice jury. With a wide-eyed intensity that suggests the young Debra Winger, Tunney turns Marcy into a real-life Jekyll and Hyde.")
In her best-known role, the reluctant hero of "The Craft," Tunney played a lonely and rejected high school girl who unwittingly helps unleash a teenage coven of witches and then tries to destroy them when they get out of control.
