Patricia Clarkson said we could say cheers and clink glasses, since I was drinking Diet Coke. “If it was water, we couldn’t,” she explained. “I’m very superstitious.”
It’s hard to believe that Clarkson has a reason to be. Now 65, the American actress has been working steadily for around three decades, and remains at the top of her game. But she still brings worry dolls around with her.
The superstitions serve “a general feeling of, let me keep everything good,” she said recently over non-water drinks at her usual watering hole in Manhattan. “Because things are very good.”
This spring, Clarkson stars in “Lilly,” directed by Rachel Feldman. The film, which opens this week in Boston, is a biopic of Lilly Ledbetter, the American activist who fought for workplace equality after discovering that her longtime employer, Goodyear Tire, had been paying her less than her male colleagues.
In 2007, Ledbetter took the case to the Supreme Court — and lost. The Court ruled that her claim came too late, since more than 180 days had passed since her first unfair paycheck. But that narrow reading of the law sparked a broader movement.
Two years later, President Barack Obama signed a law clarifying that the countdown for filing a claim resets with each discriminatory paycheck. He named it the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in her honor.
“As political as people might think the movie is, Lilly was not a political woman,” Clarkson said, nursing a bourbon and soda. “Lilly was standing for all of us,” she added. “She was standing for men, women, and children. Because when women make equal pay, everybody benefits.”
“Lilly” traces Ledbetter’s life and work over decades, from her start at Goodyear to her accidental rise as an equal rights activist.
In the movie, Clarkson ages from 40 to 73. “Seventy-three was easy,” she joked.
Ledbetter grew up poor in Alabama, married young, and settled down to raise two children. She took a job at Goodyear in 1979 as a supervisor — one of few women in her role. It wasn’t until she neared retirement that she discovered that, in comparison to her male colleagues, she had been underpaid for decades, and decided to sue the company for discrimination.
While preparing for the role, Clarkson chose not to meet the real Ledbetter in person. Her admiration ran too deep, and she worried it would seep into the performance and soften its edges. “I had to put her feet on the ground, to look at her as just another woman I’m playing,” she explained, “and I couldn’t do that if I sat down with her and talked to her, because I knew I’d just keep falling in love with her again and again and again.”
Instead, Clarkson and Ledbetter agreed to meet after the film was finished, at its premiere at the Hamptons Film Festival. “We had this gorgeous, packed screening, and she was going to fly in,” Clarkson said. “Finally, the meeting of the Lillys.”
But Ledbetter fell ill and couldn’t attend. She died just 72 hours later.
Clarkson was devastated. She thinks of Ledbetter in every city the film team visits to screen the film. “She still lives on,” she said. “People like her are the heartbeat of the nation.”
The power of the film, Clarkson said, lies in its portrayal of an ordinary woman who sparks extraordinary change purely by force of circumstance. She sees her own origin story reflected in that arc.
“I know I look fancy, but I was not raised fancy,” she said.
Clarkson grew up one of five sisters in New Orleans. For fun, they would bounce on her neighbor’s trampoline, since her family couldn’t afford one of their own. During tough times, the girls drank powdered milk. Clarkson still remembers the smell.
Her first foray into Hollywood came in the mid 1980s, shortly after she graduated from the Yale School of Drama. At the time, it was seen as commonplace for directors and producers to schedule meetings in their hotel rooms.
Clarkson recalled one such meeting at the Ritz Carlton with a very famous man who was producing a film she was interested in. “Here I am, 25, in my little, poofy Southern dress, and my purse and my hair curled — and he comes out in a towel,” she scoffed.
In 1986, Clarkson landed her first film role, in Brian de Palma’s “The Untouchables.” The set was dominated by men. The gender imbalance was so striking that when her mother visited one day, she remarked, “My God, Patty, it’s just a mile of men,” Clarkson recalled with a laugh.
Fortunately, the production turned out to be a positive experience. “De Palma took me under his wing,” Clarkson said. When she confided in him about being overwhelmed by student debt and the cost of living in New York, he quietly revised the script, adding her to a courtroom scene that wasn’t scheduled to shoot until a month later. Clarkson would remain on Paramount’s payroll in the interim.
“That was like a fortune,” she said. “It was a godsend.”
Nowadays, Clarkson said, the industry feels more equitable. She often works with female filmmakers and is drawn to stories that offer strong, substantive roles for women.
“There’s beautiful stories to be told about women of my age and older,” Clarkson said.
She sees the impact of such films firsthand at screenings of “Lilly,” where audience members often approach her to express how much the film resonated with them. “So many women have come up to me and said, ‘This was me,’” Clarkson said.
“I think people need to see a woman who wasn’t winning,” she added. “Lilly got off those ropes and just kept coming back.”
This story has been updated to correct Patricia Clarkson’s age.