Memphis-born actress steps into director role with 'The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond'

Photo courtesy of Paladin/Constellation

Memphis-born actor-director Jodie Markell works on location in Louisiana, shooting a scene for her feature-film directorial debut, "The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond."

"The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond," which opens Friday in Memphis, ends with this dedication: "For Tennessee."

The reference is primarily to the great playwright Tennessee Williams, but it also applies to the home state of Jodie Markell, the Memphis-born actress who makes her feature-film directorial debut with "Teardrop Diamond," adapted from a previously unproduced screenplay written by Williams in 1957, when he was at the height of his fame yet fighting a deep depression.

Photo courtesy of Paladin/Constellation

Director Jodie Markell (right) works with actress Ann-Margret on the set of "The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond," the Tennessee Williams screenplay that Markell is bringing to the big screen.

Photo courtesy of Paladin/Constellation

Memphis-born actor-director Jodie Markell works on location in Louisiana, shooting a scene for her feature-film directorial debut, "The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond."

"In general, my overall guiding principle was to be as authentic to Williams' intentions as I could be," said Markell, who said she has been "hooked" on the writer of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "A Streetcar Named Desire" since she was a 15-year-old Lausanne student, when she was cast as the fey "Laura" in a Memphis University School production of "The Glass Menagerie."

Friday's opening of "The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond" at the Malco Ridgeway Four could be described as something of a homecoming for Williams as well as for Markell.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist — born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Miss., in 1911 — was in Memphis when his first produced play, "Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!" was performed by a social theatrical group known as the Garden Players in the backyard of a house at 1780 Glenview, in the summer of 1935.

"The laughter ... enchanted me," Williams later wrote. "Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse."

Williams lived in St. Louis at the time, but was in Memphis for the summer, staying with his grandparents, Rev. and Mrs. Walter Dakin, who lived on Snowden Avenue near Rhodes College, next door to Bernice Dorothy Shapiro, the credited co-author of the play.

No doubt these experiences influenced "The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond," the story of an impulsive young heiress and reluctant debutante named Fisher Willow who recruits poor but handsome Jimmy Dobyne — the son of an alcoholic father and a mad mother, and one of her father's plantation workers — to be her escort to the fall season's cycle of "Memphis parties" in 1923.

Fisher — whose very surname suggests sadness — is a typically sensitive yet provocative wounded Williams woman. In Europe, she studied at the Sorbonne, but also was treated at a "mental clinic" in Zurich. She's called a "murderer's daughter" because her father drowned several sharecroppers when he blew up a levee to flood out rival planters to the South, but she claims her relative lack of popularity among her Memphis peers is due to "my foreign education" and "my tendency to make sharp remarks about things that strike me as stupidly provincial — I'm considered sarcastic."

Fisher is a role the swanlike Markell, 50, could have played in earlier years. Instead, the headstrong heroine is portrayed in the movie by Bryce Dallas Howard (daughter of actor/director Ron Howard), while Jimmy is played by Chris Evans (perhaps best known as "the Human Torch" in "The Fantastic Four" movies). When one of Fisher's borrowed $5,000 diamond earrings disappears during a party, Jimmy is among the suspects.

The impressive supporting cast includes Ann-Margret, Will Patton, Ellen Burstyn (as a bedridden opium addict) and Meryl Streep's daughter, Mamie Gummer.

"I love working with actors and I love being able to provide an environment for them to make discoveries," said Markell, a veteran stage actress, who gathered the cast for five days of rehearsal prior to shooting — a rare luxury in film production.

First published in 1984, "The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond" was forgotten and essentially unknown until it was discovered among the author's papers after Williams' death in 1983.

Williams once told a reporter he was writing the script for actress Julie Harris and Elia Kazan, director of the Broadway and movie versions of "A Streetcar Named Desire," but it's not known whether they ever read "Teardrop."

In the 1950s and through the first half of the 1960s, Williams was a hot name in Hollywood as well as in theater, with his name on the credits of such adaptations and original films as "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "The Fugitive Kind," "Suddenly, Last Summer," "The Night of the Iguana" and "Baby Doll," to name a few.

Markell (whose parents, Herman Markell and Joanne Markell, and two sisters, Ilene Markell and Alison Wetter, live in Memphis) said she devoured all the Williams she could find in high school. Leaving Memphis, she studied acting at Northwestern University and later New York, where a teacher introduced her to the then recently exhumed "Teardrop Diamond" script.

"I immediately felt a connection and affinity with Fisher Willow," Markell said. "I related to her as a young woman with artistic tendencies who felt out of place. ... And I just couldn't believe the setting was Memphis."

After being lost almost three decades, it's no wonder "Teardrop" faced additional hurdles before it could reach the screen, even with a champion like Markell, a busy actress for almost three decades in movies, on TV and, especially, onstage.

Securing the rights from the Williams estate took many years. Markell's status as a first-time feature-film director meant the movie would be modestly budgeted, which is why it was shot in Louisiana (a state with extremely generous financial incentives for filmmakers) instead of Memphis, even though locations in the script include Beale Street and The Peabody.

Lindsay Lohan originally was cast as Fisher Willow, until the actress' offscreen troubles put a temporary halt to her career.

But once Brad Michael Gilbert's Constellation Entertainment company secured funding and Markell was on set in the fall of 2007, "I felt like I was in my element," she said. "I loved working on location in the South. That made my heart sing. I loved being in the world we were creating."

Shot in 28 days, the movie made its debut last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, at a time when "the market crashed completely, the stock market and the movie market." The film is now being distributed theatrically by Paladin, a new company specializing in independent cinema.

"Teardrop Diamond" opened Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles, and expands Friday to Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Nashville, Memphis and six other cities.

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