Jessica Lange’s Dark Magic

The Oscar-winning actress Jessica Lange started her career as the ultimate ingnue — the beautiful helpless blonde in King Kong, then the sweet soap opera actress in Tootsie. Since then her roles seem to have gotten steadily darker: from the troubled actress Frances Farmer to Big Edie in the HBO movie Grey Gardens. “The rational and the reasonable, that stuff doesn’t interest me as much as the emotional frailty or borderline madness,” she says.

Now she’s leading the cast of the FX series American Horror Story. Each season is like a miniseries, with a new set of characters and story lines that mix drama, camp, and the supernatural. Lange has led the cast all three seasons, and now portrays a powerful, ruthless witch in New Orleans. “It’s kind of the perfect world because you have twelve episodes, so you have twelve hours to establish a character and investigate it,” she tells Kurt Andersen. “You’ve had more time than you would have had in a regular film but you’re not compelled to try to keep this character interesting year after year.”

But Lange says the next season of American Horror Story will be her last. And she reveals that after a couple more movies and a stage play, she’ll call it quits as a performer. “If I don’t make something definitive, things just kind of keep going and keep going,” she explains. “But if I somehow say that I have two or three more years to do this and then I’m done, it will force me, like in the old days, to begin a new adventure.”

Jessica Lange’s new children’s book, featuring her photography, is It’s About a Little Bird.

Jessica Lange’s 3 for 360