“Tadpole,” director Gary Winick’s tale of a precocious 15-year-old who falls for his stepmother and sleeps with her best friend, also stars Sigourney Weaver and newcomer Aaron Stanford, 23. But it’s Neuwirth’s sly, fearless turn as the cradle-robber that makes it a must-see. She plays Diane, a chiropractor who warms to a teenager with more grace around women than most grown men. Not that Neuwirth, 43, endorses such affairs. “The first thing I asked Gary was how old the actor would be. Because kissing a 15-year-old–that’d be strange.” But 23 was OK? Neuwirth laughs. “Yeah, 23 was just fine.”
With Oscar buzz already mounting, Neuwirth has a shot at a rare acting trifecta: she’s already got two Emmys and two Tonys. Those Emmys are a tricky subject for Neuwirth. It’s not that she regrets playing the frosty psychiatrist Lilith Crane on “Cheers”–in fact, she loved the part and her castmates. It’s simply that Neuwirth trained as a dancer and fell in love with Broadway at 13, when she saw Bob Fosse’s “Pippin.” Her “role of a lifetime” wasn’t Lilith. It was the murderous Velma Kelly in Fosse’s “Chicago,” for which she won her second Tony in 1997. “I played a vaudevillian who kills her sister and her husband. And I danced my ass off,” Neuwirth says. “Then afterward people would come up to me and say, ‘We loved you as Lilith’.” The nerve. But hey, if it’s any consolation, we love you as Diane.
