Three years ago Shohreh Aghdashloo was driving up the
California coast with her playwright husband, Houshang Touzie,
heading to San Francisco with members of their theater company,
Drama Workshop 79, to perform one of Touzie's plays.
To kill the time, Aghdashloo took along a copy of Andre Dubus'
House of Sand and Fog,the latest Oprah Winfrey Book Club
title.
After a few hours the couple stopped their van to get some
coffee. Aghdashloo, a passionate woman not prone to hiding
strong feelings, got out and started stamping her feet, making
all kinds of angry sounds. Concerned, Touzie asked what was
wrong.
“If one day they make a movie out of this book and do not
give me this role, it would be really unfair, really unfair,”
Aghdashloo answered.
Her husband's response? “He thought I was crazy,”
Aghdashloo says. “He kept saying, ‘Stop dreaming.' ”
Today Iranian immigrant Aghdashloo doesn't have to dream. Not
only did she, out of nowhere, win the role in the film version
of the book, she copped an Oscar nomination for her work.
Aghdashloo plays Nadi, an Iranian woman caught in the middle
of a nasty fight between her determined husband (played by Ben
Kingsley) and a fragile recovering addict (Jennifer Connelly)
over a house that both parties believe is theirs.
“House” director Vadim Perelman calls Aghdashloo the
“warm, beating heart” of the film, and there has been no
shortage of praise for her heart-rending performance.
The Calabasas. Calif., resident won supporting actress awards
from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film
Critics Association, groups that rarely agree about anything,
and has emerged as one of the great stories of this year's Oscar
race — a woman who fled the tyranny of the Ayatollah Khomeini
26 years ago and is now finally getting her due after years of
refusing to play stereotypical roles.
“I'm proud just to have met her,” says Kingsley,
nominated himself for “House” in the lead actor category.
“She gave me so much both as a person and an actor. She poured
herself and her experiences into me. Her story is so intensely
moving that it informed my work in every possible way.”
Aghdashloo, 51, had a thriving acting career in Iran in the
mid-1970s, making four films, including one for renowned
director Abbass Kiarostami. But by 1978 the writing was on the
wall: The shah's regime was crumbling, propaganda for the
ayatollah was everywhere.
Aghdashloo's theater company was shut down; the entrance to
the building blocked off with brick and cement. She agonized for
three days before leaving the country in the dead of night,
driving off in the family car with the blessing of her first
husband.
“There would be no place for a liberated woman like
myself,” Aghdashloo says. “My husband had just returned from
being educated in Europe. He didn't want to live in exile. He
said, ‘If you feel like your future lies somewhere else, I
don't blame you.' He gave me the key to the car.”
Aghdashloo moved to London, enrolled in school and earned a
degree in international relations. She had plans to try to do
what she could to change things in her homeland. She may not
have returned to acting except that a playwright friend kept her
mind when writing a story called “Rainbow” about an Iranian
forced to flee to London.
“With this play, I thought, ‘Maybe I could be more useful
this way,' ” Aghdashloo says. “And I've never stopped acting
since.”
“Rainbow” was a smash success, taking the company and
Aghdashloo on a worldwide tour that included a stop in Los
Angeles where she recognized Touzie, whom she knew from the
Drama Workshop in Tehran. She didn't like him much then,
thinking the playwright was too full of himself. But now, she
found herself intrigued.
Unfortunately, the two barely had a day together before
Aghdashloo had to leave for the next city in the “Rainbow”
tour.
When she returned to London, Aghdashloo found a card in her
mailbox. “Come and join me,” Touzie wrote. “I love you. I
want to marry you.”
Aghdashloo accepted and the couple wed in 1987, settling in
the Valley.
They have a 15-year-old daughter, Tara (Aghdashloo is a huge
“Gone With the Wind” fan), who now thinks her mom is cool,
which as any parent of an adolescent knows, is a pretty big
deal.
“She has never said anything like that about me,”
Aghdashloo says, laughing. “That's probably bigger than the
Oscar nomination.”
When “Sand and Fog” casting director Deborah Aquila put
the word out last year that she was looking for an Iranian
actress for the film, Aghdashloo's name came up time and time
again. Aquila found her, although it wasn't exactly easy — at
the time, Aghdashloo didn't have an agent or manager.
“Most of my film offers had been for terrorists and
battered Middle Eastern women, and I won't consider them,” she
says.
Perelman says: “It's so amazing that Shohreh was under our
noses the entire time. I was willing to go to Iran or Iraq to
find an actress. And here we found this luminescent person with
an incredible magnetism about her, a great actress who could
portray a voiceless woman.”
Since “Sand and Fog,” Aghdashloo said she has received
four interesting scripts, but she's in no hurry to rush into
anything. Work remains something through which she conveys her
personal beliefs, convictions that run deep and completely
inform her life.
“I do believe in the responsibility of acting and the
dedication an actor has to have toward the work,” she
continues. “So this was right up my alley. This is what I can
do. This is what I do.
