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Interview with Mary Stuart Masterson
HBO
Tell us about your character, Dr. Helen Taussig.
MARY STUART MASTERSON
Helen Taussig is just the most inspiring character. Although she isn't the largest role in this movie, and she actually deserves her own movie, she was one of those really amazing trailblazing women who managed somehow with severe dyslexia to get through school at all. And then went through medical school, and even took courses at Harvard when Harvard didn't give degrees in medicine to women.
You could take the classes, but you couldn't get a degree. [LAUGHS] And then she went to Johns Hopkins and managed to work her way up, and ended up running the Harriet Lane Clinic for invalid children at a time when women never ran anything medical. [LAUGHS] If they were even, you know, allowed to play with the boys.
She was an incredible researcher, and came up with all new ways of diagnosing malformations of the heart, congenital malformations, and was really the first person to suggest to Blalock that maybe, since he was a surgeon, and she was not a surgeon, that he take his research in the direction of cardiovascular surgery.
Because her feeling was that these babies that were coming into her clinic dying with a hundred percent mortality rate, certain death, were dying because of a defect that could maybe be fixed. A basic plumbing problem, the way she saw it. And although she couldn't cut anybody open, she was looking for the one man who might be brave enough to give it a try. And he did.
HBO
What's it like playing a historical character?
MARY STUART MASTERSON
You know, in playing a role like this, you really want to get it right, because this is a person who was revered by so many doctors, women doctors especially. And who shaped the course of cardiology. She's pretty much the one who made everybody wake up and sounded the alarm early on.
So playing a role like this, you feel a responsibility to really get it right. On the other hand, there are only so many people who really knew how she was exactly, like what did her accent sound like, and the fact that she developed profound deafness when she was first running the Harriet Lane. Things like that that you want to get right.
You know she lost her hearing and yet in order to continue her work, she managed to re-sensitize her fingertips, and learn through a sense of touch how to hear a heart in all four chambers, and how they were working in babies. And a little bitty heart is a little bit more difficult to discern.
So she used her fingers to palpate the heart instead of just a stethoscope, because she couldn't really hear through it. She had one invented that, I think, had an amplifier on it, so that she could hear the sounds of the heart that way.
She came up with a whole way of doing fluoroscopy, which is kind of like a live version of X-ray, so that she could see the heart as it worked, not frozen in a picture.
She did all these amazing things that we don't have time to show because it's not about Helen Taussig, but she really was a remarkable, remarkable woman, and the more I read about her, the more amazed I was that I'd never heard of her.
Or Vivian Thomas. I know a lot of people, surgeons that are friends of mine, who of course had heard of Blalock, but hadn't heard of either of either Taussig or Thomas. And I find that to be one of the great reasons to do a movie like this. To immortalize people who are brave enough to take a risk.
HBO
When you told your surgeon friends about Vivien and Helen, what was their reaction?
MARY STUART MASTERSON
Well one friend of mine, he's a surgeon, too. He said, Blalock, yeah I know about him. And I told him the story, and he was sort of staggered that without formal training, that anyone self taught could use their hands and do what Vivien did and invent these instruments, and this respirator, and things that he did that were just unbelievable innovations.
Just the actual physical ability to hold four instruments simultaneously and do some of the things that Vivien was able to do is mind blowing to any surgeon. But then add to that that he never went to medical school and he became one of the great teachers of medicine himself, people are just amazed.
And even regardless of the color of his skin, it's what he was able to do with his own initiative and drive and passion is really the story, I think. The fact that he didn't get credit for a while is more the story of social injustice. But his own spirit wasn't driven by that, and wasn't dependent upon that. He just wished he had the cash to go to medical school. [LAUGHS]
And I'd like to think Helen very much understood what it was to be disadvantaged in the medical field. And that that was something that she never let dictate her choices. She just refused to believe that it was impossible for a woman to do any of these things, and so they happened.
And I think she looked at Vivien the same way. Of course you can. You know. And, and yet with great respect, because she knew how hard it must have been. And that it was even harder for him, of course, than for her.
HBO
Do you approach these kind of roles differently?
MARY STUART MASTERSON
Well, I guess you should approach the roles differently when they're actual people who have been, this is the difference. Getting the accent exact, or the hair exact is less important in a situation like this.
What is more important is finding the soul of the character, and making sure it fits well into this story. And that it be dramatic and interesting and captivating, because these people weren't entertainers, you know. [LAUGHS] So to find a way to elevate it, maybe, from reality, but still keep it true at its core.
HBO
What do you think the audience will get out of this?
MARY STUART MASTERSON
I think there is a lot of different things it touches upon. Certainly it touches upon having passion in your art, whatever that may be. In this case they're doctors. But having passion for your work and to take risks in order to better human kind. That's a pretty big theme. It's pretty inspiring.
And also when people make contributions, regardless of their title, they deserve credit for what they've done. And in the case of Vivien Thomas, he made an enormous contribution to medicine, and he finally gets his due, which is great.
It's really about perseverance over a long period of time, and the fact that despite all the absurd limitations that racism sort of imposed on Vivien and Blalock, and the culture in which they were living, Vivien managed to stay focused on the goal.
And that's what's beautiful to me, is he did not become a victim of it, and he didn't become a statistic, he just kind of kept on marching through, no matter what people threw at him.
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