Sigourney Weaver on...

10 April 2012

In The Ice Storm I play Janey, an elegant, adulterous, middle-class Seventies wife and mother of two sons whose family is breaking up. Janey is a careful woman in a world where appearance matters. Her only release is through sex with Kevin Kline, who plays her next-door neighbour.

Janey is like a character in a Chekhov play. Always seething inside. Dissatisfied with her life and very frustrated, wary and dry. She is like many middle-class women in the Seventies, who were good wives and mothers but didn't have jobs or careers and were desperate to experience a moment of passion - which, of course, leads to another moment and another moment.

The point about the people in The Ice Storm is they wanted to taste the sexual revolution without paying a price. In the film this is manifested through a 'key-party' game where they swap partners and then go back to normal life. No question of divorce. They didn't take big risks but in the end everything changed and they were the last to see it. Director Ang Lee's take on it is definitely not a moralistic one.

My experiences of the Seventies were somewhat different. I was a student and there were so many things going on in America then, such as Watergate and Vietnam. The sexual revolution, that important turning point in America, didn't get much of my attention.

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