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BIRMINGHAM, MI

248-644-6506

FAX 248-644-3632

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Featuring wonderful, traditional favorites...
a superb variety of dining specialties

The only
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Hours: Monday thru Sunday
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Flexible Part-Time
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Available at the Jewish News in our growing
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813
1999

86 Detroit Jewish News

At The Movies <

In the meantime, Shaye chain-
smokes her way through the raucous
Detroit Rock City, opening today, as the
repressed and repressive mother of a
teenage son who wants nothing more
than to attend a forbidden KISS con-
cert at Cobo Hall with his three friends.
Set in 1978, Detroit Rock City,
directed by Adam Rifkin, once again
puts Shaye in an unflattering physical
role, but she dives deep into Mrs.
Bruce, and finds the humanity behind
her seemingly intractable intolerance.
"This is a Catholic single mother,"
Shaye explains in Los Angeles, "who's
raising her son, and trying to control
him and protect him from her fears.
She believes that her salvation will be
his salvation.
"I'm a mother," she continues,
"and I'm already learning that I can't
protect [my son] from everything.
What frightens me doesn't frighten
him, and what saves me doesn't neces-
sarily save him. Every person has to
find his own way, and as a parent, you
have to learn to let go."
Shaye's own family background
couldn't be any more different from
her Detroit Rock City character. Raised
in a Conservative Jewish household in
the solidly middle-class Detroit neigh-
borhood bordered by McNichols and
Seven Mile, Hamilton and Livernois,
Shaye found at an early age that she
loved performing.
"I used to entertain myself," she
describes, by making up plays with my
animals and dolls. I was always doing
theater, all the school plays. But it never
occurred to me as a profession."
Her father, Max, now 88, owned a
wholesale grocery business with his
brothers (they started out selling sugar
at Eastern Market). He imparted a
solid work ethic to his two children,
who would both make their mark in
the entertainment industry. Lin's older
brother is Robert Shaye, founder and
president of the powerhouse indepen-
dent film studio New Line Cinema.
"My dad's philosophy of life,"
Shaye explains, "is you've got to try to
do what you can with what you want
to do, and see what happens." •
In addition to a practical side, "the
artistic streak is definitely in our fami-
ly," she continues. She saw it in her
father who began a second career in his
50s,•as the painter Maximilian Shaye.
Her mother, Dorothy (who died
in 1989), "always had a very theatri-
cal personality, shall we say. I feel a
lot of my sense of humor and energy
is my rnon-l's."
But as much as Shaye loved acting,
she was uncertain about making it her

livelihood. At the University of
Michigan, she performed in plays but
majored in art history. This led to a job
as registrar at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art. It was in her
field but still a desk job — document-
ing the comings and goings of works
of art — and she kept looking for act-
ing opportunities during her off hours.
Then she took the plunge, moving
to New York and enrolling in the
graduate acting program at Columbia
University. This began Shaye's 14-year
love affair with the New York theater
world. She studied with theatrical
luminaries Lee Strasberg, Uta Hagen
and Stella Adler, became a member of
the prestigious Actors Studio and per-
formed in venues ranging from
Lincoln Center and Broadway to "a
closet with a lightbulb, where we
invited people" to see a performance.
While still in New York, she land-
ed her first film role in Joan Micklin
Silver's Hester Street (1975). It turned
out to be an enlightening experience.
Set in a Jewish enclave in New
York's Lower East Side at the turn of
the century, the low-budget, beautifully
realized Hester Street is a seminal film
of American independent cinema. But
Shaye approached it "like a play. As far
as I was concerned," she says, "it was
their job to figure out the camera."
It wasn't until she moved to Los
Angeles and began getting film work
on a regular basis that she really
understood the differences between
acting onstage and onscreen.
"Now I love it," she says of film
acting. "It's like putting together a
fabulous puzzle. When you do the-
ater, you have that long process of
digesting a character. In film, it's a
different technique. You have to look
at what you created and then build
the next scene around what you know
you've already [done]. It's really excit-
ing, and its always different."
On a personal note, Hester Street
offered her parents another opportuni-
ty to see her work. But the end result
wasn't quite what Shaye envisioned.
"I played a Jewish prostitute," she
explains, "who was earning money to
bring her family over from Poland. She
could earn more money being a prosti-
tute than working in the sweatshop. I
was really excited; it was my first movie
role. There in the credits, it said, 'Lin
Shaye: Whore,' and my mother walked
out of the theater and threw up."
That role is mild considering her
subsequent work in Hollywood, and
Shaye muses about her mother's reac-
tion to her onscreen extremes. "Maybe
somewhere in the great beyond," she

.