Here’s something Kathleen Chalfant is sure of: “High-definition TV was not invented by middle-aged women!” She should know, because the 70-year-old New Yorker has seen herself on it a lot lately.
After four decades of steady work onstage, the Tony-nominated actress is suddenly all over the small screen. Chances are you’ve seen her face — untucked and un-Botoxed — in “Elementary,” “The Americans,” “The Strain,” “Madam Secretary,” “House of Cards” and, most chillingly, “The Affair,” where she plays Noah’s monstrous mother-in-law.
She’s been so busy lately — juggling shoots for Netflix’s “Cards” with rehearsals for off-Broadway’s “Rose” — that she jokingly wonders, “Did everyone else die?
“I don’t really understand it,” adds Chalfant, a long-married grandmother of three who lives in Brooklyn. “In the last few years, I haven’t had to audition — [the parts] have all been offered to me. I’ve been very lucky.”
Luck probably has less to do with it than talent, and her decision to age naturally in a profession that prizes youth.
“It’s hard to find women who look their age because of what the industry has required of them,” says veteran casting director Cindy Tolan. “It’s my hope that there won’t be a need for women to feel they have to get work done to find work!”
As Chalfant sees it, she’s in “the Judi Dench club,” part of a brave band of actresses who haven’t tried to stop time. Look no further than the “Downton Abbey” face-off between grande dames Maggie Smith and Shirley MacLaine: Smith, now 80, is eight months younger than MacLaine, yet her nobly unretouched face still registers emotion.
Chalfant says that how one responds to aging is a very personal decision, and a complicated one for female actors.
“I wasn’t ever a beauty,” says Chalfant, who started working in New York in 1973. “It seems to me, if you’re a beautiful woman when you’re young, your identity is tied up with how you look, and there’s an enormous amount of pressure to somehow maintain that.”
That’s true especially in Los Angeles, she says, where “the pressure is fierce to have what everyone euphemistically calls ‘work.’ The fact is, if you start Botox in your late 30s, you can look like you’re 25. But by the time you’re doing it at 65 or 70, there’s no skin left . . .
“When I go to LA, so many people look exactly alike,” she says. “It looks like a whole bunch of people who’ve been in a terrible car accident and have had their faces reconstructed.”
She also admits she’s afraid to go under the knife: “If something goes wrong, you can’t fix it, and it’s your face up there!”
The theater is more forgiving. “When people are 20 or 50 feet away, you don’t see the details,” she says. “The first time I saw myself on high-def TV was a shock — I felt I looked like the oldest woman in the world!”
But the shock is wearing off, says Chalfant, who’s amused to find herself playing so many “upper-crusty, glamorous women, many of them named Margaret, all of whom seem to wear Carolina Herrera.” She just did a pilot for CBS, “Doubt,” in which she plays another Margaret, this one a lawyer.
For now, she’s busy channeling the matriarch of the Kennedy clan in the one-woman play “Rose,” which begins previews Nov. 21 at the Clurman Theatre.
“Rose lived to be 104,” Chalfant notes, “and she looked wonderful the whole time!”