Salome Jens has spent sixty years being cast as the woman who knows something the others do not, on stage, in Seconds and on a space station. The screen rarely gave her enough to do with it; the calm she brought was hers.
Fi1m perspective
Halfway through Seconds (1966), Rock Hudson's remade banker is standing on a California beach when a woman walks up and talks to him as if they had arranged to meet. That is Salome Jens as Nora Marcus, and she takes him into the hills to a grape harvest where dozens of naked people stamp fruit and shout about freedom. We said the California hour drifts and that Nora is a way of getting Wilson to the party rather than a woman in her own right. She is also the one still person in that sequence, and we found her calm faintly alarming while the scene ran on. Frankenheimer is said to have chosen her for an essence of doom, and whatever the script gave her, she brought that.
The stillness has a source. Jens trained in dance with Martha Graham before she trained as an actor, and has been a member of the Actors Studio since 1962. Her reputation was made on stage: the New York premiere of Genet's The Balcony around 1961, and Josie Hogan in a Circle in the Square revival of O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten that drew the notices actors wait a career for. Her film debut was a title role, the faith healer in the Southern gothic Angel Baby (1961), and the film was delayed and then buried under a competing release. Then Seconds, and then television.
A great deal of television. Six years on the soap Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (1967–1973), Mae Olinski on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976–77), Martha Kent on Superboy (1988–92), Joan Campbell on Melrose Place, and the part most people know, the Female Changeling on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1994–1999), leader of the Dominion over five seasons. We have not reviewed it, but it is the role that finally handed her what Seconds only hinted at: the most powerful person on the station, and the least readable.
The type is consistent. Casting directors have looked at Jens and seen the off-beat, the enigmatic, the woman in authority, and she has said, "I was never an ingenue. I've always been fortunate to be somebody who could never be pigeonholed. I was able to do a lot of different things." The caveat is that the cinema did not do a lot of different things with her. The stage acclaim never carried her into the front rank of American screen actresses, and the one film we can send you to is a fine one in which she is given not quite enough.
See Seconds for Frankenheimer and James Wong Howe, and watch what Jens does with the little she has. A strange career for a dancer: the screen kept asking her to stand still, and she turned out to be better at it than almost anyone.
Biography
Salome Jens is an American actress and dancer. Born on 8 May 1935 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she studied briefly at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Northwestern University before moving to New York, where she worked as a secretary and trained in dance with Martha Graham and acting at HB Studio and the Actors Studio.
She began her career on stage, appearing in the New York premiere of Jean Genet's The Balcony and earning strong reviews as Josie in a late-1960s Circle in the Square production of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten. Her film roles include the title part in Angel Baby (1961) and Nora Marcus in John Frankenheimer's Seconds (1966).
On television she is known for playing the Female Changeling in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1994–1999) and the ancient humanoid in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase". She was previously married to actors Ralph Meeker and Lee Leonard.
