On a rainy Friday afternoon in August, the Harlem home of acclaimed actress Marcia Gay Harden and her husband Thaddaeus Scheel is pleasantly chaotic. Harden’s twin 3-year-olds, Julitta and Hudson, demonstrate their somersaults and jumping skills with relish while Harden finishes some movie-related business in her office upstairs. As soon as she appears, the duo takes a break from tumbling to attack mom with hugs and kisses, and big sister Eulala (almost 9)—an actress in her own right— decides to go over her school supply list from the comfortable perch of Harden’s lap. All this while two others in the family entourage, Harden’s personal assistant and the twins’ nanny, navigate several waves of phone calls, e-mails, coloring book requests and dinner preparation. Alhough Harden clearly enjoys being at the center of the affectionate fray, she’s soon off to her peaceful office, where she can better reflect on what she has created in life and on the screen. And she doesn’t once mention the Oscar for “Pollack” that is perched unostentatiously on a side shelf.

Do you do a lot of theatrical things with your children?

They’re all naturally theatrical and like performing. We’ve always had fun doing made-up plays and talent shows in our home upstate, and we also like going to shows like the kids’ version of “The Nutcracker.” Last December they were performing the Nutcracker suite as the mouse, Clara and the Nutcracker prince all the time. They really put themselves into it. It’s a natural function for children to identify with things they see.

How did you react when you knew you were about to have twins?

I was absolutely thrilled. We had been working on having children, so it wasn’t a surprise. I wanted more children for the family, more for Eulala, and then to have both sexes was such a blessing.

And how is having had two at once turning out?

It’s exhausting. It’s joyful. There’s a lesson a day, but definitely the hands are full. I’m working quite a bit, so it’s a juggling act with two children who need you in the same or very similar ways at the same stages, but who also are very different people. They both dearly miss one-on-one time with mom. When each is alone, their behavior transforms.

I’ll bet that the twins—Hudson and Julitta—feel lucky to have an older, wiser sister. What are some of the pleasures and difficulties of raising a 9-year old?

The joys are many: Eulala and I have a very close mother-daughter relationship. She’s very verbal, very reasonable. She’s creative and has a real sense of play. Upstate, we have a tree house. She picked out colors to paint the inside, and she likes to play there wearing an old-fashioned dress. She really wants it to feel colonial. She has a grasp of what that is and allows for the simplicity of it. With a 9-year-old, one of the greatest challenges for the parent is to allow the child to become who she is, not who TV and commercials want her to be. We really have to monitor that—these media absolutely tell her this is who to be, this is how to dress.

How does Eulala get along with her siblings?

Their levels of ability and activities naturally are different than hers. But there are things they all do together—they have easels, for example, and if Eulala is on hers, the twins will be on theirs. The noise level is different; sometimes they’re all quite loud. But sometimes the twins get louder—they’re competing for attention—and then Eulala is competing too. The noise level gets to me. Eulala is very empathetic. When the babies cry, she doesn’t like seeing how it can put me on edge. I find that very sweet.

Your older daughter acted with you in the movie “Felicity: An American Girl Adventure.” What’s it like being in films together?

I’d taken Eulala to see the “Samantha” movie, and I said, “That was brilliant; I want Eulala to do one; I want to do one.” The producer called and said, “Are you serious?” The role was just little enough that she could do it. And it was set in the colonial era so she learned a huge amount. She was totally comfortable on camera, she loved it, and she also has a wicked comic sense. Casting directors know about her, and she has turned down a Disney movie. The whole family discussed it and agreed that was the best choice.

Were you concerned about the unhealthy climate facing young actresses?

I’m not pushing her to be an actress. I want her to be a healthy, smart, studious person. There are so few role models among young actresses who have weathered that crazy age in your late teens. During that time, you’re going to be experimenting anyway, but to do it in the public eye, and with money…I cannot imagine wanting her to go through that. I look at other examples of girls going through tawdry public awakenings and I wonder, Where are their parents?

Is that one of the reasons you chose to live in NY and not LA?

I enjoyed being in California, but I feel more alive in New York. I love the culture here. I love the diversity in New York. The races and classes, all mixed up. Eulala yearns to go back to California for the beach, the warmth. But I think it’s a tough place for a girl to grow up. There’s an emphasis on beauty, because it’s the film and television world, and the emphasis on “making it” or “being famous,” and that translates into an emphasis on having the right purse at $1,000. While she’s certainly exposed to some of that with me being an actor, as a parent your value system has to be shared at an early age, and I felt I had a better ability to share it and be truer to myself living here.

How would you describe your family life in NYC?

I feel like there’s so much access to theater, museums. People go to museums as a playdate! They hook up at these really great cultural places in the city: the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, The American Museum of Natural History, the Met. You feel the pace—it’s a caffeine espresso energy. You’re racing, meeting appointments, scheduling people who help you with your kids. I like that engagement with the city. I like walking on the street, and I like taking the subway. It’s why we live here and what we love, but it can also be stressful. So we added the house upstate to that—the Catskills are very raw and unrefined, and we have our property without any people around.

How does your time upstate differ from time in the city? Is it more low key?

We do a lot of domestic things, like picking blueberries, having a garden, making zucchini bread, and then hikes and swimming. And the nice thing is that the kids perceive all those things as fun. If I’m going out to the blackberries and raspberries, they know they have to put on the long sleeves. I love that because they’re learning about domestic activity, and they’re doing things that involve their hands, things that are not all about being in front of a computer or television. In the city, those things come more into play. Plus, there’s the challenge of getting kids to one class and then to another. In the morning, Thad and I do everything, then we go off to meetings, and we take over again at bedtime and bath time. I join the kids whenever I can.

Sounds like you’ve managed to balance things pretty well—what advice do you have for working moms who are still figuring out the juggling act?

The first thing I would say is to get help. That is the only way that I could do what I do. I have a terrific, terrific nanny. She doesn’t live with us; I want to be a mom. But you have to be willing to be exhausted, willing to be tired. My husband is also hands-on, and each spouse has to define his or her own help needs. You can’t just say, “The woman does this, the man does that.”

You’ve chosen to raise your family in a brownstone in  Morningside Heights/Harlem. How did that come about?

We looked at a lot of these places. We could afford the size of this place, as opposed to the same size south of 96th Street, and we thought we’d be comfortable. It was a neighborhood in transition. We had two concerns: the first was that the neighborhood suffered from the crack epidemic in the 1980s, so there were and are vestiges of that dissipation. Point two was that we wanted to be sure that we wouldn’t be a part of turning the area into a place with an all-white Baby Gap on every corner.

You are obviously satisfied on that point. So can gentrification be good? Or do you still worry about it?

When we first looked here, we saw that the services were not great, that this part of the city had been shunned. It’s nice that it is more diverse economically and racially now. There’s more of a flow. The key is that it maintains the cultural heritage of Harlem. I think the people who are here are glad to see the drugs go, to see the burned-out buildings go, to see 125th street thriving. There’s a goodness here, and it’s more than just Columbia housing coming in. Plus, we love the home, we love the brownstone; it’s a wide brownstone. Maya Angelou lives down the street, we’ve met so many nice neighbors, and we have a real good feeling about living here.

You also do work with Hale House, which is a Harlem institution.

I work with a lot of different charities, but Hale House is an especially interesting one because it’s in the neighborhood. They were a great cause, they lost footing a few years ago, and they’ve been re-founded. They offer fantastic services for children, like preschool and sanctioned foster care, and they help people working through drug issues. With Hale House around, parents don’t lose their kids forever; the kids don’t just get sent off and given over to the government to handle. So it’s an interesting and worthy cause.

How do you get your kids involved with charitable causes?

Eulala went with me to the Ronald McDonald House for kids with cancer. Some of the girls were going into surgery, and we brought caps for them, and we brought the Felicity movie and signed it. It really pops that bubble of “hanging out with the unfortunate,” and I do say that dripping with quotation marks, because those girls were not to be pitied, even though the condition is to be pitied. The girls we met were heroes, so strong, so incredible and so full of life, handling fear with aplomb and grace. So for Eulala it wasn’t, “There but for the grace of God go I.” It was, “Oh my gosh, I want to be like these girls.”

And then there’s your day job. You have five films coming out. Let’s start with “Into The Wild,” which is now being advertised on billboards. It’s a Sean Penn-directed film based on the Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name [about an interesting and promising young guy who ventures off into the Alaska wilderness alone].

It’s so poetic—a journey about people shunning corporate advertising and downsizing and coming into a real contact and understanding of the human soul; the independent spirit of being alone in nature, not in the city, not even in middle America. It’s about being in the elements with only what you need to survive, and Sean did a brilliant job directing it.

What else is on deck for this year and next?

“Canvas” is touring festivals. I play a paranoid schizophrenic against the brilliant Joe Pantoliano. It’s won like every audience award at the festivals. In “Rails and Ties,” I play a woman who is dying of cancer. Kevin Bacon plays my husband, who has been in a terrible accident. It’s dark and sad, but the director doesn’t pepper you with music. And “A Christmas Cottage” is a Thomas Kinkade story. We wanted to make sure it wasn’t sappy but was still idealistic. I had the  most wonderful time doing it and spent an extraordinary three days with Peter O’Toole. He had the curiosity and delight of a boy on the set.

And you’re in a Stephen King adaptation too?

“The Mist” is like a “Lord of the Flies” situation. I play a religious paranoid woman with apocalyptic visions. As the bugs come in, she finds her power. It was a blast to do—trying to do a minute human story in the midst of giant bugs!

Like a lot of your films, these sound pretty intense. Have you decided how old your kids will be before you let them watch your films?

There’s no set date. I’ll let them see films when it’s appropriate. Eulala’s seen maybe two. I let her see “The Bad News Bears.” There was a lot of cursing, but it was okay, because I happen to curse. Frankly, it’s not so much about her being scared at certain movies. It’s more that she would be bored or wouldn’t get it. Half of raising a kid is common sense. You can’t think, “What do other people do?” You have to listen to your heart, listen to yourself.

Photography by Thaddeus Harden.
This interview was originally published in the September 2007 issue of New York Family.

House with a Heart

If you ask the staff at Hale House the key to its success, they’ll tell you it’s love—of the work they do and the children they work with. “Our kids are special. If you were to meet some of them, they are the most outgoing, happy, well-adjusted children,” says Executive Director Randy McLaughlin.

A Harlem institution since 1969, Hale House, is best known for providing housing to children between the ages of birth and 5 years—many of whom have mothers who are ill, incarcerated or addicted to drugs. But Hale House has also spawned two new programs recently: a supportive transitional housing program that helps families move from shelters to permanent homes; and the Mother Hale Learning Center, which provides low-fee and free early childhood education.

Its mission and impressive track record have attracted the support of many luminaries, including Harlem resident Marcia Gay Harden. All of the kids in the children’s residence, for example, are placed in a permanent home by the time they’re 5—either back with their mother (the ideal scenario), a relative or an adoptive family. The housing program finds homes for families within a year (and in the meantime provides a temporary residence equipped with everything from lace curtains to pots and pans). The education program is so successful it has a waiting list of 150.

Hale House prides itself on the one-on-one attention it provides. The children’s residence houses 10 kids, the transitional housing facility holds 19 families, and the child care center accommodates 38 students. “We didn’t want to be a large institution,” McLaughlin says.

McLaughlin, who joined Hale House in 2004, said Hale House is long past the controversy it faced in 2001, when then-President Lorraine Hale was convicted of embezzling funds from the organization. “I think we have grown from it and built a stronger and better organization,” he says. Among other steps, the process involved restructuring the organization from the top down, doing an internal investigation, hiring outside auditors and making annual reports to the attorney general.

The biggest challenge Hale House faces today is fundraising, of course. Hale House operates outside the traditional child welfare system (aside from the transitional housing program) and is funded by individuals, corporations and foundations.

To find out more about Hale House, call 212-663-0700 or visit www.halehouse.org.

—Leah Black