Most screen actresses have difficulty getting roles after the age of 40. But Lynn Cohen – Mags in The Hunger Games to most people or maybe Magda in the Sex and the City movies – is 83 and busier than ever. Now she is featured in The Pickle Recipe, first seen locally in this year’s Palm Beach International Film Festival and now back for a commercial run in several area theaters.
She laughs ruefully at the subject of ageism in the film industry. “When women hit 40, they think all their sexuality goes away.” That is a quality she intends to retain, Cohen says, “until the day I die. But you really have to fight for it, because I do not want to do an old woman dying in a nursing home of Alzheimer’s.”
Yes, she confirms, dementia roles are offered to her with alarming regularity.
“And unless they come with a jillion dollars, I just don’t take them. And if you do take one for a jillion dollars, it’s so you can do two for very little.”
The Pickle Recipe is one of those low-budget films that Cohen agreed to do because the screenplay amused her and she liked the part of feisty Grandma Rose, who runs a Detroit delicatessen famous for its sour dill pickles. When her grandson Joey, a cash-strapped bar mitzvah emcee is approached by unscrupulous Uncle Morty (David Paymer), he goes to work at Rose’s deli in order to steal her secret, yup, pickle recipe.
Rose, she emphasizes, “is crazy like a fox, and I don’t take nonsense from anybody. I have the one son who’s a mess – that’s David Paymer – and then comes my grandson, who’s also a mess. So my character has to straighten them all out. We do it in a very amusing way, but I don’t take anything from anybody.
“I was interested in how smart this character was, how strong she was and how she was going to live until the day she dies. And when she loved, she loved profoundly,” says Cohen. “It’s about not allowing people to be put into clichés. Rose is not a cliché.”
With her take-charge, urban manner, most people assume that Cohen is a native New Yorker. In fact, “I was raised in Kansas City, Missouri,” which she pronounces “Missourah,” “where there were three Jews in my grade school. They sold bagels once a week at the one delicatessen in the entire city. Only once a week, on Sundays.”
Home now is the upper west side of New York, where she is convenient to her two favorite delis, Zabar’s and Barney Greengrass.
The Pickle Recipe’s tour de force scene is when Grandma Rose has to taste every pickle in stock to verify the authenticity of her recipe. “And it wasn’t scripted, it just said ‘She tries a lot of pickles.’ We just improvised the whole thing. You know how many pickles I had to go through?,” Cohen asks rhetorically. “I told them I had to have a wastepaper basket by my side so I could spit them out instead of swallowing.”
Cohen enjoys improvisation, when it is appropriate. “I’ve done Chekhov and Shakespeare. There you stick to what’s written. When you’re doing Tony Kushner, you don’t improvise. During ‘Munich,’” in which she played Golda Meir, “ not one word was ever changed.
“When you’re filming ‘The Pickle Recipe,’ you improvise.”
THE PICKLE RECIPE. At Living Room Theaters, Boca Raton; Movies of Delray; Movies of Lake Worth and others.