You could say it's a dog's life: Eight performances a week, 50 weeks a year, drawing on whiskers, putting on a tail, and skulking around a junkyard set. Singing the same songs, though never the show-stopping "Memory," and suffering a hernia, torn cartilage, broken toe, bone spurs, and water on the knee.
With the Broadway show Cats scheduled to close this month, you might think that Marléne Danielle- who has been with the show for its entire 18-year run- would be relieved. You would be wrong.
"I was never bored," Danielle insists. "I was always discovering something new." A native New Yorker with a 25-year-old son (and Cats colleagues who are even younger), Danielle is not saying how old she is. Nor will she reveal how much money she has earned- only that Cats has been very good to her, helping her buy a brownstone in Jersey City and a home on 80 acres in Pennsylvania.
This prosperity is a far cry from Danielle's childhood. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother- who dreamed of a career in opera- ended up working in a factory. Money was tight: Danielle recalls burning furniture to heat the house. When a water main broke, her mother dug the ditch for the new pipes herself.
"A friend came by when she was out there and said, 'You need to get up off your knees, dust that dirt off, paint your nails, and find yourself a life,'" Danielle recalls. Shortly thereafter, "my mother sold the house and moved my sister and me to this tiny railroad flat in Greenwich Village that rented for $35 a month. We shared a triple bunk bed in a tiny bedroom."
Danielle studied dance, married a painter after high school, and moved with him to France, where their son was born. In 1974, they returned to New York, where Danielle landed roles in Little Shop of Horrors and West Side Story. In 1982, when she was cast in Cats, she had just signed what would be her unemployment check.
After Cats, the actress, now divorced, is looking forward to spending more time with her boyfriend and her family. (Mom lives in the country house, where she looks after Danielle's five kitty cats.) As for work, Danielle has written TV pilot set in a Broadway dressing room. But what she'd really like, she confides, is to be a "female action hero in the movies." After all, "people have been commenting on my stamina and my strength for years, so who knows." -Joyce Wadler