A Spiritually-Based Talk Show With Nan O'Brien
Celebrity Straight Talk with Susan Morse
ACTRESS AND AUTHOR SUSAN MORSE
"Highly opinionated, stubborn, and eccentric"—those are the words Susan Morse uses to describe her elderly mother. Several years ago Morse's mother, a woman who "changed religions six times" before finally deciding to become a nun, was diagnosed with cancer. When Morse stepped in to take care of her ailing mother, the two women began repairing their strained relationship slowly. In her interview on “Looking at Life – Celebrity Straight Talk,” Susan talks with Nan about the reconciliation process, which became the subject of her memoir, The Habit.
Listen here to Nan’s interview with actress and author, Susan Morse, and tune in live at LookingAtLifeRadio.com for more great interviews every Sunday at 8:30 p.m. EDT (7:30 p.m. CDT, 6:30 p.m. MDT, 5:30 p.m. PDT).
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Meet Susan Morse
Susan Morse and her children
Click above to learn more about Susan Morse's book
I majored in theatre and French at Williams College and then moved to New York, planning to become a wildly sought-after actress specializing in the classics. This got me as far as an off-off-off theatre in the Bowery, where I played Lady Macbeth for six heady weekends. (Most nights our cast outnumbered the audience, which worked well because it made my sleepwalking scene particularly spooky.)
I met my husband David in 1981 across the bar I was tending near his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. It may have been foolish, but I agreed to go on a date almost immediately, which, due to conflicting schedules, meant I had to see him in a play (this turned out to be sort of convenient, as it gave me a chance to figure out his last name by checking the playbill). Not long after his first entrance, I decided it would be best to marry him as quickly as possible.
I studied Meisner technique at the William Esper Studio, and we then moved to Los Angeles for David’s work. Over a six-year period I managed to build up a bit of a resume – small movies, television, and plays. I was George C. Scott’s daughter on Mr. President, Colleen Dewhurst and Candice Bergen’s sparring partner on Murphy Brown, Peter Riegert’s one-night stand on The Twilight Zone, and somebody’s dead lesbian lover in an episode of Hotel.
I ran a program on the side teaching horseback riding to disadvantaged kids, and I became a member of a theatre company, Circle Rep West. After we had our daughter and twin sons, things got complicated: Roused in the night by the Northridge earthquake in 1994, we found we had to leave our ruined house for good. So, within weeks, we landed back East in Philadelphia. Because I had always loved to read, I stopped acting and began editing books, freelance.
A few years ago my elderly mother got sick and we had some outrageous adventures trying to get her stabilized. It was stressful. I emailed nightly update rants to my siblings, and it turned out they were entertaining in a warped sort of way. A sister told me I had a book, and so I began to collect notes in earnest, becoming more and more amazed at the classic arc that unfolded.
It wasn’t just that my mother decided to drop everything at one point and become an Orthodox Christian nun. We had a damsel in distress (actually two, if you count me), a villain, a chivalrous knight, a whole background cast of those bumbling peripheral characters you get in Shakespeare and Chekhov, and even a stunning deus ex machina twist at the end.
All I had to do was carry around a notebook, convince my mother her rectal cancer nightmare was worth sharing with the masses, and try to come up with a catchy title: The Habit.