Star Trek Monthly #?, 2003

Dramalogue, 1995/6
Transcription by Elaine Davenport
Thanks to DebbieO

There are artists in this world who really appreciate the lives that talent, luck and hard work have created for them. One of the most appreciative is Chelsea Botfield (formerly Field). Not that Botfield sits around counting her blessings, but she expresses her obvious gratitude with an enormously open joy for life.

Botfield is an athletic woman whose radiant beauty shines through as she describes her life in the entertainment industry. It is a terrific life that includes several career changes. She began as a dancer, segued into singing and is now a successful film actor. She just wrapped work on the CBS thriller Here Comes the Son with Scott Bakula and she is currently on the big screen starring in Flipper-this is her first aquatic mammal movie since making the movie about a seal, Andre. Added to all this success is her new role as a mother of a five-month-old baby. Botfield is exactly where she wants to be-though she will never be totally satisfied.

The performer thanks Drama-Logue for much of her early success in the industry. When she was determined to be a dancer it was a time when dancers didn't use agents. She found her work through the pages of this newspaper and made more than a decent living. "I bought my parents a house!"

...loved horseback riding, gymnastics and track. Dancing came fairly late. She didn't go to class until she was 17. She was told that she was starting too old to make it. "I said, 'Really? Watch.'" And show them she did. "I started with jazz. I fell in love with my jazz teacher. He was this Puerto Rican with this incredible wisdom and I fell in love with all that. Then he told me to get ballet training. I met and fell in love with a man who was teaching a ballet class. He had been with the Joffrey Ballet, but left because he had an injury. He took me under his wing and became my mentor. He got me through the most intensive ballet program in about three years."

Her outgoing personality helped Botfield get the attention of producers and directors, and her obvious skills got her the jobs. "Mostly commercial stuff, TV shows and awards shows like the Academy Awards and Solid Gold. I traveled around and worked in Atlantic City, in a great big Vegas-style show. I was the lead in that. That was a blast."

She laughs about the awards show dance numbers that always become the butts of jokes after broadcasts. "They are always the worst. They were hideous." But the work was taken very seriously. "When Michael Peters was screaming at you at the top of his lungs, 'Lift your chest and pull your shoulders down,' you took it seriously. I was still dancing at the time that a lot of choreographers had the I'm-going-to-be-mean-to-make-them-better approach. Now it is changing. I hope so for the dancers' sakes."

Botfield knew in her heart during this time though that she would never be happy just as an ensemble dancer. "When you dance on the Academy Awards or in specials, you are one of 15. I didn't feel comfortable being one of 15 or 30 girls. It sounds so trite, but I had a little bit of Cassie in me. I wanted to be the star of the show or not be in the show. I'll go to a smaller show where I can be the star."

So that's the direction she followed. She had begun to resent dancing, which had lost its joy. Now that it is only a hobby rather than a way of life, she has regained the spirit. "When I was making a living as a dancer I ended up not enjoying it. The jobs were getting more political. There was more psychological effort to keeping the job than I wanted. My first week in Solid Gold the choreographer came up to me and said, 'We are having a few complaints. You need to be less abrupt with the hair and makeup people.' I snapped, 'What the hell does that mean?' She said quietly, 'That, right there.'

"I loved the dancing, but didn't enjoy it as a job. That is what made me realize I needed to do something else, because the spirit of it was losing me. Now I go to dance class and I have so much fun, because there is no agenda for me. I am not trying to get a job. I am not trying to please somebody. I am not trying to be the prettiest, the best, the thinnest, highest kicker, whatever I was trying when I was trying to get the job. It is purely now about moving and loving the feeling."

Chelsea Botfield made a living as a singer for a few years. But it was as an actor she would blossom. Acting was something of a rebirth for Botfield. "I was really looking at what I did and wondering, 'What can I do that I enjoy just as much. Work in a bank? Don't think so. Secretary? Don't type, gotta go.' So I went to acting class. I was very fortunate to find a teacher who ran his acting class very much like a ballet class. Every Tuesday we did barre. Every Thursday got out on the floor and did dance. Every Tuesday was exercises, every Thursday we put scenes up. Had this kind of organization and discipline that dancing class had. I fell in love with it."

There is something in Botfield's make-up that never allowed her to entertain the idea that she may not make it as an actor. It just never occurred to her. "I didn't know any other way. I did not finish school so I had nothing else to fall back on. I was never out of work long enough to worry. I was very lucky. From being a dancer I had worked in commercials, so I had my SAG card. I knew how to work with a camera so no one had to say to me: 'Find your camera.' I started making a transition from working as a dancer in commercials to working as a singer to working as an actor. Suddenly I was playing the girlfriend in a Pepsi commercial instead of the aerobics teacher."

Also, this woman is incredibly verbal and quite amusing. She laughs. "I am pretty open. My agents say I give good interviews. Whenever I would have even a general interview at the studios or with casting people or whatever, I'd always go in and yak up a storm. Once I went in to audition for Rob Reiner. He said, 'So, Chelsea, what have you been doing?' I went on about making all these curtains in my house from all these vintage fabrics. I went on this 45 -minute thing about curtains. Rob Reiner let me go on and on and on. I found out from my agent a week later, 'Chelsea, he was asking what you were doing professionally.' I was humiliated. I didn't get the job, it got down to me and Helen Slater is what I was told."

Finally her big feature break came. She was to star in Masters of the Universe. "That was my big break. I'll never have that feeling again, I don't think, unless maybe if I win an Academy Award. It was such a pure thing. I auditioned so many times for that job. They had me come back so many times and I thought if I had to roll around with a laser gun and sword one more time, I'd go crazy. There was a lot of doubt about whether I could do the role because I had never done anything. They were starting on Monday and it was Friday afternoon. By the time I drove home my phone was ringing and my agent said, 'You got the job.' I remember feeling like I had ... big game of the year. It was an incredible feeling and sometimes I think back on that and think, 'Wow it will never be like that again.' But it's okay because that moment is etched in my memory."

Since then she has worked continually. Her current feature Flipper was a delightful experience, much like her time on Andre. It was the perfect time for a fun and relaxing film experience. "It was a happy-go-lucky set. The director will set the tone of a movie. Alan Shapiro, who directed Flipper, has a great childlike spirit. He loves life and was so excited to be doing it. He wrote it and directed it and it's his big chance so he just embellished every moment."

She had a great time absorbing the happiness of the set. "Part of being an actor is remaining extremely sensitive and having all your feelings right under your skin so you can get to them. Flipper was a very supportive family environment. We were a family in the film. Also, Alan had a baby. Our first A.D. had a baby. Our second A.D. had a baby. Babies all over the place. I found out I was pregnant during that time. So this is a family movie from beginning to end. It is a different feeling."

But Botfield doesn't always look for happy-go-luckiness in her work. She enjoys tension and frustration when it helps create the right mood for a different kind of film. She did a film called Passion to Kill, that gave her a rush of acting experience that she enjoyed, but does not necessarily want to repeat. "I was so tense I remember saying, 'I'll never get this wound up and uptight about a part ever again.' I was like a dishrag by the end, I was so spent. It took that type of really intense energy to be able to do that movie. There is a scene that I cannot watch. I walked out on the screening-unfortunately an L.A. Times critic was right behind me. I couldn't stand to watch myself do this scene where I am stabbing what I think is a person and ends up being a bunch of pillows in a bed. I had to go so berserk in my own mind to get to that ...was a very difficult thing. I knew what they wanted was some cool B-I-T-C-H to be able to like whip it out. I told them this is how I had to play it."

Though she has never played a psychotic killer since, she has just finished a film that requires a great deal of psychological anguish. In Here Comes the Son she plays a woman who just gave birth to a son, but is in the midst of a nervous breakdown and is forced to give up the child to his father, Scott Bakula. The part was particularly affecting since she had just had her own son.

She first read the script for a friend and liked it, never expecting she might have a chance to play it. "I reread it when they asked me to do the role. I had just had a very bad experience up in Vancouver. I was completely stressed out because it was the first time I had left my baby for more than five hours and I was going to get stuck there over-night and had all these problems. When I reread the script I went, 'Oh, yeah, this is me stressed out to the max.' I used that and many other things. I had just had a baby and my father had just suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. So when they said to me, 'This woman has a breakdown,' it was like, 'No problem.'

"The first day they were nervous because physically I was maybe too healthy looking for the role. One of the pivotal scenes where I come to this man's doorstep and announce I have had this baby and have to be right on the verge of a nervous breakdown and I have a baby on my back who is screaming and is supposed to be laughing. I am running around singing trying to make him happy. Trying to do my emotional work. Talk about the broom up your rear end as you're sweeping the floor as you go-I had 95 things going on! But when the director came up to me and said, 'That's great, let's do another one and I want you to go as far as you can without totally losing it. How much time do you need?' I said, 'None, roll.' It was finally like someone saying, 'Go ahead, show us what is really inside of ...this hospital bed just crying and it was just right there. They must have done five takes and it was a dolly shot and it was like 45 minutes of bawling my head off. They never had to say, 'Okay, start again.'"

There have been a few moments of absolute actor's rapture like that. One came unexpectedly n the set of Tony Scott's The Last Boy Scout with Bruce Willis. Scott was having her try a particularly dramatic scene scores of different ways. At one point he wanted her on the verge of tears-she did it. Then he came to her and pulled her face to him, cameras still rolling, and slapped her hard across the face and yelled, Action! "To this day I can hear the sound and feel it. I was so shocked. But my training kicked in and I just started the first line. This was one of those moments where there was not one ounce of energy that was outside my body. A minute and a half of the most honest thing you could ever see on film. I said to him afterwards, 'First, you have lots of chutzpa to do that. Second, if you don't use that take I am going to kill you.' But in the end they didn't use it because it was inappropriate for the scene."

This and every experience has helped shape Botfield's very happy life in art as well as her personal life. "Things are great. Mostly. It is bittersweet. I love being a mom. My son is incredible. It is one of the best experiences I have ever been through. It is also just really hard. When you are 20 and have a baby it is a different thing than when you are in your 30s and have a couple of careers. I have had a real independent life. Fortunately, my partner is a wonderful father. Still, it is a challenge."