She has a gypsy bone. She lives in the Virginia countryside with Pulitzer-prizewinning writer/actor Sam Sheppard ( typically he avoided last week's Oscar ceremonies at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles ) with their son and daughter and her daughter by ballet maestro Mikhail Baryshnikov, cats, dogs and any bird theat flies by and wants a meal. Before they were in Santa Fe , New Mexico , and before that in her home countryside of Minnesota where she retains her custom-built log cabin ( no 'phone, no television) where she chops wood and watches the trout bite. There are good fishing streams and the bites are as many as the offers she gets every day from Hollywood . Many must choke on that. This was the model/bimbo who got a little lucky so long ago. Now, like Fonda and Streisand, she's the dealmaker. And they are her deals she makes. But Lange is not some snappy tyrant. She just doesn't' play by Rodeo Drive rules. That, she finds, diverts the uninteresting traffic. Movies like 'Losing Isaiah' are a choice made through many years of playing the Hollywood game. ' In a sense I think I was lucky because some people take off -- they're flying -- and then something hits them in midcareer. Suddenly, the bottom falls out. I got over all this disappointment and rejection and self-doubt and all of those things that were imposed on me for tose first couple of years. It was great for now I know none of that will ever affect me again -- or as strongly as it did.' That uncertain, unsure period ended with Bob Fosse's 'All That Jazz' in 1979. A year later she was in the successful comedy 'How To Beat The High Cost of Living.' The Kong or Klong bad rep was gone. But she believes it was in 1980 when she and Nicholson famously took over the kitchen table in the remake of 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' that her career took off. The film did not do as well as the 1946 John Garfield/ Lana Turner teaming but it proved something to the critics, to Lange and to Hollywood . She had that indefinable 'it'. She rang the bells again as the hauntingly trouble actress Frances Farmer in 'Frances' and as the space cadet soap opera star adored by Dustin Hoffman in 'Tootsie'. Those two 1982 films won her double Oscar nominations as Best Actress ('Frances) and Best Supporting Actress ('Tootsie'). She jogged off with Best Supporting and then came nominations for Best Actress for 'Country'(1984) and for portraying country and western singer Patsy in 'Sweet Dreams'(1985). She followed that with 'Crimes of the Heart' with Diane Keaton and SIssy Spaceck (Spaceck). She made the three films between pregnancies. This is one of those coping-with-it-all women who understandably makes the feminist fraternity wonder how to dit it. Lange, soft spoken,direct as black-cofee-no-sugar-but-I-would-like-the doughnut, possibly tries more than most to compensate. We've all forgotten the big ape. She hasn't. She won't. 'The hardest thing is the kids. It just kills me. The other stuff isn't hard -- working long hours, doing the whole emotional thing. But being away from the kids gets worse rather than better. The thing is you get seduced by a great part. I've always felt that each one comes at a particular time in your life to giver you the means to explore areas that are important to delve into. I do think there is some grander order so you have to be careful what you say no to. But I can look back from when I really considered myself an actress -- from "Postman" -- and I never felt like I was wasting time playing any of these roles. 'If I didn't have children I'd be a much better actress. I wouldn't be so distracted. I could pour 100 percent of my energies into it, to promote the investigation which acting is. But I can't do that so I have to pick and choose really deliberately. I must say there has been a lot of suffering along the way with misjudgments. But I've got the children, work I enjoy and the enchanted land.'
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