Study Lit in College...Find Success in Films

Jun 29, 2011
John Willingham

Owen Wilson - Dreamstime

English majors, including Sigourney Weaver, Owen Wilson, and John Krasinksi, have striking success in films as a direct result of their college experience.

STUDY LIT IN COLLEGE... FIND SUCCESS IN FILM

English majors might not get the best job offers at graduation time, but It is striking how many prominent film stars majored in English during their college years, or combined the study of literature with another liberal arts field.

A partial list includes Emma Thompson at Cambridge and Tommy Lee Jones at Harvard, along with James Franco (UCLA), Renee Zellwegger (Texas), and Catherine Keener (Wheaton College, Mass.). The more you look, the more you find.

Sigourney Weaver and the Passion for Literature

When Sigourney Weaver transferred to Stanford as a sophomore back in 1969, she had “no firm plan,” according to an in-depth Stanford magazine article by Kevin Cool, published in 2007. “If she imagined herself as anything,” Cool wrote, “it was as a writer or teacher, not an actor. She was passionate about literature.”

It is the rare girl of 14 who would feel so strongly about literature that she would change her given name from Susan to Sigourney, after a character in The Great Gatsby.

Once at Stanford, Weaver did not study easy texts, or even limit herself to modern fiction. Instead, as she told Cool, she began “immersing [herself] in Chaucer and Shakespeare. It was incredibly nourishing.”

“I felt very empowered by the passion and excellence around me,” Weaver said. “It was the best possible preparation for a career in my industry.”

Owen Wilson and Literary Serendipity

If there is anybody whose college career demonstrates the importance of being in the right place at the right time, it is Owen Wilson.

Wilson had the wonderful good fortune to be a student at the University of Texas at Austin along with Wes Anderson, with whom he would make the film Bottle Rocket soon after graduating in 1991. The two went on to co-write Rushmore and the The Royal Tennenbaums.

What is not so well-known is that Wilson and Anderson both published short fiction in the UT literary magazine, Analecta. Another young writer from Ireland was also at UT at the time: Colum McCann, winner of the prestigious National Book Award for fiction in 2009. Anderson and McCann both published short fiction in Analecta in the very same issue; Wilson had his own story published in the previous issue.

Also an English major at UT, McCann said that “A brand new life waited for me there… And I was older, it was 1990, so I was 25, and I really got a kick out of university... I was endlessly curious. And that was a great time for me.”

John Krasinksi and the Writer Who Led Him to Sundance

During a series of interviews profiling actors and directors with screenings at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, Brown University English grad John Krasinksi made it clear how much he owed to the late novelist David Foster Wallace, whose 1999 short story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, was the subject of a film that Krasinski not only acted in, but also wrote and directed.

“I have wanted to adapt this book into a film ever since I first heard it out loud,” Krasinski said. “In college, I was asked to be a part of a staged reading of the interviews. I can honestly say that, until that moment, I hadn’t really even thought about being an actor outside of school.”

Although Krasinski has enjoyed his role in The Office and has shared a wonderful relationship with the cast, it was his college encounter with “one of the greatest writers we’ve ever had” that moved the actor to undertake the challenging project of doing Brief Interviews.

The work paid off. Writing for MTV, reviewer Larry Carroll wrote that “the charismatic actor has no problem casting himself as the king of the scumbags. All we can do is admire Krasinski's skill with the complicated monologue,[and] marvel over his impressive filmmaking debut…”

Yet another triumph for the English lit grads.