Steenburgen's Fancy Footwork

Mary Steenburgen was a last-minute addition to "Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School," also starring Donnie Wahlberg. (Samuel Goldwyn Films)

Her new movie requires her to participate in only three or four dances, but it has been a while since Mary Steenburgen has done as much on-screen hoofing as she does in "Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School" (see review on Page 35), a gentle romantic comedy in which she plays the prim proprietor of the titular small-town dance academy and its founder's daughter, Marienne Hotchkiss. In fact, she hasn't danced quite this prominently, or as poignantly, since her memorable tap dance number in 1980's "Melvin and Howard," in a performance that brought the actress a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

For that film, which is still one of Steenburgen's all-time favorites -- despite its leading to being typecast in quirky, Jean Arthur-style roles that the actress is still trying to live down -- the dance was intentionally rendered "rather badly." It required little more than a refresher course to brush up the childhood skills honed in tap classes growing up in North Little Rock, Ark. If only she'd had as much background preparation for "Hotchkiss."

"Unfortunately," Steenburgen says, "I was one of the last people cast for that movie." Between that and other scheduling conflicts, the actress says she ended up stuck in Arkansas (where she had a prior commitment) with little less than a week to get up to speed. It took an intense crash course with dance instructor and former competitive ballroom dancer Mary Murphy, whose husband meanwhile was off coaching Steenburgen's co-star Donnie Wahlberg, but finally Steenburgen was ready to hit the floor.

"A few days later when we got back to L.A. and we danced together for the first time, everybody held their breath, because we were shooting it just a few days later and we'd never actually danced together," she recalls. "But it ended up being pretty good."

Thankfully, as in "Melvin and Howard," Steenburgen's character doesn't have to be a dancing machine. "I wasn't the teacher in some big, sophisticated New York City ballroom dance studio or something," she says. Rather, Marienne is what Steenburgen calls an "estranged, lost, Miss Lonelyhearts character" inhabiting "this strange little world that isn't supposed to be extraordinary in terms of its technical dancing abilities."

The lack of emphasis on slick production numbers, in Steenburgen's opinion, makes "Hotchkiss" -- whose central character, played by Robert Carlyle, is the member of a widower's bereavement group who meets another lost soul (Marisa Tomei) at dance class -- something other than a stereotypical "dance movie."

"If I'm honest about what it is," she says, "it's kind of hard because I wouldn't want to alienate somebody by saying it, but it's about . . . all those things we lose: the big things and the small things as we go along. The girl you loved in first grade, the dog that you adored, your wife, your sense of, like, oh, you're going to be somebody someday, or all those tiny things, and big things."

"Life is about surviving loss," she continues, "and the dance is that you either die or you get back into the dance of life. And so that swirling little world represents life, and that's why it's kind of wonderful that it is messy, and that it's not perfection, because that isn't what life is."

Steenburgen believes that ballroom dancing is a perfect metaphor to express the film's themes of yearning for a lost past, but she insists that the medium is far from a dying art. "I would have said that a couple of years ago," she says. Now, thanks to the popularity of "Dancing With the Stars" and other television shows, Steenburgen thinks it's never been bigger. "It's actually -- as opposed to, say 10 years ago -- I would say that there are actually more people right now interested in it than ever, just because of the power of TV."

Even she found herself getting caught up in that series, moved especially by professional football player Jerry Rice's unexpected success.

"He subjected himself to that show, and he was one of the final three people on it, and I think that one of the reasons that people made a point of calling up and voting for him -- besides the fact that he did amazingly well, you know, for somebody who'd never really been a dancer at all -- was that so many people secretly longed to do what he did, which is to have someone show you how to do it, and then to try to do it."

Steenburgen hopes the universality of the film's themes will touch those outside its core chick-flick constituency. "I think this might be one of those films -- I think the danger is that a lot of guys are going to see the word 'ballroom' and think that they might not like it, whereas, in fact, a lot of my guy friends that have seen it, and loved it, and were surprised, and have said, 'All of us have lost something, and you do have to make a conscious decision to pick yourself up and take a chance again.' "