Long before Cynthia Nixon wore a pantsuit on Sex and the City and shyly asserted her authority as a downtrodden sister on The Gilded Age, she was a nervous German maid willing to do anything for a bite of good pastry. You may not immediately remember her presence, but when Nixon was 16, she had a crucial role in the 1984 film Amadeus playing Lorl, a young woman whom F. Murray Abraham’s Salieri hires to spy upon his bitter rival, Mozart. In exchange for food and money, Lorl passes along information about Mozart and is frightened by his descent into mania, but in a touching moment at the end of the film, she still shows up at his funeral.
The role wasn’t Nixon’s first film performance. As a teen actor, she had appeared in the summer-camp movie Little Darlings, and she worked on Broadway in plays such as The Philadelphia Story. (She’ll be back there again later this fall in Marjorie Prime.) But Amadeus — based on a play that was a hit on the West End and Broadway and adapted by the Czech director Miloš Forman — was a major event, and Nixon knew it would be big as she went through several auditions for her role. Yet she still had the gumption to insist that, if she were offered the part, the producers would fly her back and forth between Prague, where Amadeus filmed, and New York City, where she attended the competitive Hunter College High School, so she wouldn’t miss too much schoolwork.
Soon, Nixon found herself alone behind the Iron Curtain working with a great director on a project that would go on to win Best Picture. As she describes it in an episode of our series Role Call, she learned an immense amount on the shoot, from both Forman as a director and an entirely different kind of social structure from the one she grew up with. “We knew there were spies from the government all around,” she remembers. “People would come up to you, strike up a conversation at the bar, and go, ‘What do you think of the Czech government?’ I was in tenth or 11th grade. I didn’t think anything about the Czech government!”