Sissy straight from the heart

Glance through the credits of 52-year-old actress Sissy Spacek and you'll notice that almost every other film is a mom or wife-inperil saga.

She gave one of her strongest performances in Costa-Gavras's 1981 political thriller Missing, as the wife of a young American writer who vanished after the military coup in Chile in 1973.

In her Oscar-winning role as Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter, she spent much of the movie squabbling with her ne'er-do-well husband, Tommy Lee Jones. She stood by her man (Mel Gibson) in The River, Mark Rydell's yarn about a beleaguered farming family. More recently, there was her put-upon wife opposite a nearderanged Nick Nolte in Paul Schrader's psychodrama Affliction, and her cameo as a daughter fretting anxiously while her father (Richard Farnsworth) sets off across America in a minitractor in David Lynch's The Straight Story.

In her new movie In The Bedroom (already garlanded with a Golden Globe for Best Actress and strongly tipped for Oscars), she is again playing at unhappy families. She is cast as Ruth Fowler, a middle-aged Maine music teacher struggling to cope after the murder of her son.

Imagine Clytemnestra transplanted to smalltown America and you'll get some idea of the intensity of her performance. She captures brilliantly the mixture of sadness, cold fury and humiliation that Ruth feels in her bereavement - and her rage against her son's killer.

"It was all in the written word," she says when I ask how she sets about playing characters as traumatised as Ruth. "That screenplay was beautifully written. But whenever you do a character that emotional, you draw from your own life. I think as human beings, none of us get away unscathed. We all have many, many things to draw from."

With her freckles and long red hair, Spacek was never the most glamorous of stars. On one level she embodies a kind of idealised ordinariness. A former homecoming queen who grew up in rural Texas (she was born on Christmas Day in 1949), she seemed to be shaping up as a sort of latterday Doris Day. One of her first roles of note was as Sarah-Jane Simmons in the Waltons. (As the "femme fatale" who tried to lure John-Boy down the aisle, she uttered one of the most famous oneliners in the series: "When are you going to stop being John-Boy and start being John Man?")

Spacek, however, refused to be stereotyped as a Little Miss Wholesome. She studied with Lee Strasberg and took a bit part in the Andy Warhol film Trash, something Doris Day would never have done. In 1973, she established her reputation by playing the delinquent girlfriend of mass murderer Martin Sheen in Terrence Malick's Badlands, and then in 1976 took the role with which, for better or worse, she is still probably most closely associated - that of the gawky adolescent-turned-avenging angel in Brian De Palma's Carrie. Yes, she admits, it's true she turned up to her audition wearing her favourite dress from high school - even though she was, by then, in her mid-twenties. (She credits the dress, which made it into the movie, with winning her the role.)

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Spacek worked sparingly. As she puts it, "family came first". When she did accept a role, it wasn't uncommon for the entire clan to accompany her. "We'd have the kids, the tutors, the grandparents - it was like America on wheels."

She now lives with her husband, Jack Fisk (who directed her in Raggedy Man), on a farm in North Virginia. Her two children, Schuyler - a highly rated young actress who makes her big-screen debut opposite Jack Black and Lily Tomlin in teen comedy Orange County - and Madison are teenagers and it's less of a wrench to leave home than it once was. Nevertheless, she remains particular about what she'll do. "Once or twice a year, I take a project that appeals to me for its redeeming social value."