Before he began the first season of his Emmy-winning TV series, Six Feet Under, writer-director Alan Ball gave each member of the cast and crew a book to read.
It was The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, written by an accomplished poet and small-town undertaker from Michigan, Thomas Lynch. "Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople," the book begins. For the past two seasons, every episode of the HBO drama kicks off with a fresh corpse.
Frances Conroy, who plays the Fisher family matriarch in the program, says Ball - and his spellbinding series - was inspired by Lynch's poetic take on the mysteries of grief and love. "It was a very good book for all of us to read because it shows that death is not a ghoulish business," says Conroy, a veteran of the stage before she landed this TV role of a lifetime three years ago.
"An undertaker plays an indispensable role for people who are grieving. Especially if a death is one where the person who has died is unrecognizable, mutilated or badly, badly damaged. People, visually, need to embrace that person once again. The poet/undertaker saw beauty in the saddest things. Alan is like that too. His work is brilliant because he is a student of human nature."
The 49-year-old Conroy is conducting interviews from her home in Los Angeles, where she and the rest of the cast are almost finished filming the third season of Six Feet Under, which premieres in Canada tonight at 9 p.m. on The Movie Network and Movie Central. Fans of the quirky TV show have been promised a startling opener. Conroy won't divulge family secrets, but she promises audiences will be intrigued.
"Alan read a lot of physics last summer, and the foundations of the writing [for this season's early episodes]are based on the fact that a number of world-renowned physicists believe that we exist in separate realms of reality, simultaneously," adds the actress.
Intuitive, unpredictable and honest, Six Feet Under has been critically hailed as one of the best programs ever to appear on TV. This season promises more of Ball's peculiar brand of haunting realism. Conroy - who was described this week in a Newsweek article as the "forgotten woman," one who never gets magazine covers and is rarely quoted in articles about the show - will be allowed to explore the inherent contradictions of her character.
In the first two seasons, the Ruth Fisher character that Conroy plays has tended to be dismissed with eye-rolling sighs by her family, who largely forget she's a real person, not just a Mom. This year, Conroy says, Ruth is going to loosen her bun and apron.
"Ruth's going on a journey this season," says Conroy. "These news friends she meets will take her to a lot of new places to experience things. If she senses something she desires, Ruth is going to go for it. She won't stop herself. Thankfully, Alan is not falling into the Hollywood trap, where all women over 50 are automatically dismissed as being uneventful or uninteresting."
Season three begins on a bizarre, light note, seven months after last year's finale. Ruth's eldest son Nate (Peter Krause) nearly died, but has miraculously recovered and is now blissfully married to an old girlfriend, Lisa (Lili Taylor). The pair are raising their baby girl. Nate's wanton ex, Brenda (Rachel Griffiths) is absent for the time being. The rest of the cast is back: Ruth's teenage daughter Claire (Lauren Ambrose); her gay son David (Michael C. Hall) and David's partner Keith (Mathew St. Patrick).
Ball, who won an Oscar three years ago for his screenplay of American Beauty, introduces some new characters to Six Feet Under, such as Catherine O'Hara as Carol, a neurotic Hollywood producer, and Kathy Bates as Bettina, a free spirit who becomes Ruth's new best friend and gets her into a whack of trouble.
Conroy describes Bates's character as a "real life force, who bursts into my life and presents me with all sorts of adventures that shake me up."
Conroy welcomes the turmoil. "Ruth is a very important character. She has a lot of colours and a scope that I don't think has ever existed for a 50-plus woman on television, except maybe in some madcap comedy series."
Conroy's Ruth Fisher is a paradox. She dresses dowdy and looks bland. She cleans house and cooks religiously. And her kids seem to have outgrown her. But she is also wickedly funny, and even experimental. In the series opener, her husband was killed when the Fisher family hearse was slammed by a bus. Ruth was devastated. She also had a dirty secret: a two-year-old affair with her hairdresser. Her romances in season three promise to get more complicated and racier.
Conroy, whose nickname is Franny, is a Juilliard-trained actress who spent 15 years as a favourite of Arthur Miller and Edward Albee.
Indeed, she was finishing up Miller's The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (she earned a Tony nomination in 1999), when her agent approached her with the script for Six Feet Under .
"I very much wanted to meet Alan Ball,' says the actress, who has made many movies ( Maid in Manhattan and The Crucible in the past few years) and has had guest appearances in shows like Law & Order (in one episode playing a murderous dominatrix, in another, a murderous nun).
"My only concern was that they wouldn't consider me old enough to play the part of Ruth because of the ages of the sons." After two readings, she landed the part.
Conroy says she sees some similarities in the story lines and themes of Six Feet Under and the works of major American playwrights such as Miller and Albee - themes such as the Puritan tensions between virtue and desire, and the idea of America as a tarnished Eden.
"Alan Ball was a playwright before he wrote television, and before that, he was an actor," says Conroy, who is married to actor Jan Munroe.
The couple has a houseful of (mostly) stray cats.
"Alan's versed in the great works of American theatre, both the classics and the new works. The richness of Alan's material does fall into line with American plays that reverberate. Perhaps that's why this show has had such wide, critical appeal."
Conroy says drama, at its best, forces people to stare truth in the eyes. Six Feet Under , she believes, has developed a cult following because it is remorselessly real.
"This show is about life. Life surrounding death. It is complex and it is easily recognizable. There is nothing sugarcoated here."
Gayle MacDonald