John Waters and Mink Stole at the after-party opening the Film Society's retrospective. Photo by Julie Cunnah.

Actress Mink Stole has the distinguished mantra of having appeared in nearly every John Waters movie. Like Waters, Mink Stole, born Nancy Stoll, hails from Baltimore though she actually met John Waters in the mid-'60s on Cape Cod. Her first foray onto the filmmaker's movies was Roman Candles (1966) and though it may not have seemed like it at the time, life took a most interesting turn as she would become an integral member of Waters's Dreamlanders ensemble of regulars. She has graced the set through Waters' '70s classics Pink Flamingos and Female Troubles, through the '80s and '90s in Polyester and Hairspray as well as Serial Mom and Pecker, playing villain, eccentric, child, and filthy. And in this millennium she has continued to be a stalwart in Waters's five decades of filmmaking with Cecil B. Demented and A Dirty Shame.

Beyond Waters she has appeared in both film and television in the likes of David Lynch's Lost Highway, Jamie Babbit's But I'm a Cheerleader, and TV's Spyder Games. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2010 Boston Underground Film Festival. following a screening of  her feature Stuck!.

[Related: John Waters Looks Back and Forward Prior to His Film Society Retrospective]

But Mink Stole will be forever associated with John Waters, who bequeathed the actress her nom de guerre decades ago and the catchy name has stuck. Mink Stole appeared at the Film Society of Lincoln Center for the opening of the retrospective Fifty Years of John Waters: How Much Can You Take? when it opened this past Friday. FilmLinc spoke with her about working with Waters and her fellow Dreamlanders, her band, setting the record straight on “drag queen” status, and why she was so worried about Waters on one of his most recent projects.

FilmLinc: Let's go back to the beginning. How did you and John meet? Was it in Baltimore?

Mink Stole: We actually met in Provincetown, MA. I was visiting my sister and she knew John and we ran into him on the street. She knew him slightly in Baltimore. It was the beginning of summer [in 1966]. I ended up staying in Provincetown that summer and by the end, my sister, John and I, and about half a dozen other people were all sharing a place.

FL: How long were you all roommates?

MS: In that particular place, just for the last few weeks of the summer. I’ve been roommates with John a couple of times. Not in a long time though.

FL: So Roman Candles was the first film you worked on?

MS: That was the first film I worked on, he had made one before that, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket.

FL: So after you all were together that summer, how long until the segue to Roman Candles?

MS: At the end of the summer, John and I moved to New York. We had an apartment on Hudson Street. We didn’t last there very long. John wanted to move back to Baltimore and New York actually terrified me. I come from Baltimore, which is not that tiny of a town but I was a small-town girl. I kept getting lost in the Village. When John decided to move back to Baltimore, I said, “Well, I’m going too.” So we both moved back in with our parents for a while, and then he called me one day and said, “I’m filming this scene. Do you want to do it?” And I was like, “Sure.” It was impossible to know then that it was ever going to do anything or mean anything. It seemed like fun and it was.

FL: Tell me about your experience on the Roman Candles set…

MS: Well Roman Candles isn’t the story. John was very influenced by Warhol and, in particular, Chelsea Girls. Roman Candles is a series of triple-projected vignettes. I was involved in two of them and in one, I was wearing a striped dress and carrying some paper flowers and weeping and wailing on a tombstone. It was silent. There was no dialogue and he just said, “Be upset”—I forget his exact words—and of course, I overdid it. I was very dramatic.

FL: Were you interested in acting prior to this?

MS: In a small way, but I hadn’t been pursuing it. When the chance came to do it, it wasn’t like, “Oh, I can never do that.” It was, “Yes, I would like to do that.” And there was another scene I was in with Pat Moran [in which] she spanks me. This movie completely freaked my mom out because there was one scene where a woman is dressed as a nun and a man dressed as a priest, but the nun is in full makeup, smoking cigarettes, drinking, and making out. When my mother came and saw this, she was so horrified that she wouldn’t see another movie until Polyester. I think it was just as well…

FL: When were you christened Mink Stole?

MS: For that film—for Roman Candles. John would introduce me to people as Mink. It was the era of the superstar. It didn’t seem as odd back then. Also back then, people didn’t assume it was a drag name. But they [did later], even now.

FL: Do people mistake you for some kind of drag queen?

MS: Not when they meet me. But yes, they do. I would prefer it not be. I mean I’ve been naked on film.

FL: John came up with Divine’s name as well, is that correct?

MS: It was originally “Lady Divine.” I was originally “Mink Stole the Precious Jewel.” That was in Roman Candles only, and that was too much. My real name is Nancy Stoll, so it was a natural nickname to come up with. In my day, Nancy was a very popular name. There was always another Nancy in the room, so it was nice to have a name that was unique.


John Waters at opening night of the Film Society series: Fifty Years of John Waters How Much Can You Take? 
Photo by Julie Cunnah.

FL: What was your relationship like with the other Dreamlanders? You've been in almost all of his films so I'd imagine you all were very familiar with each other.

MS: I’ve been in all his features. I’m not in the shorts. I’m not in The Diane Linkletter Story or Eat Your Makeup. We spent time together. We hung out and we were friends. Of the whole group of them, I was probably best friends with David Lochary. We all liked each other and it seemed like family. You know, as we continue to work together that sense of family became more and more solidified.

FL: Have you seen the 2013 doc I Am Divine? I'm curious what you think of it. I know you were interviewed for it…

MS: Oh, yes, I think it’s fabulous. I learned things. There were parts of Divine’s life I did not know about. When he was in Europe, I wasn’t there, so there was a big chunk of time between Polyester and Hairspray when I never saw him, when he was off doing other things and had left Baltimore. Actually I had left Baltimore, too, but I was in New York and he had left the country and he was doing a lot of stuff in Europe.

Once in a while he was here as well but we weren’t hanging out as much. I knew very little about his love life. I’m not really all that interested in people’s love lives. The only love life I find really interesting is my own and I don’t have one. [Laughs] It’s not, “If I can’t have one nobody can.” It’s not that at all. I don’t need to know details. I’m happy when people are happy.

I thought that I Am Divine was a very nice movie, I liked it a lot. I’m in it. [Director] Jeffrey Schwartz is fabulous. I thought it did a nice job of telling the truth without pandering and without going negative—really nicely done.

FL: So going back to John. Female Trouble happens to be one of my favorites and I think I read that it’s one of his favorites. When I asked him about it, he said that he has a special place in his heart for what he called the “troubled children,” meaning those films that didn’t do quite as well in the box office. So I'll pose the question to you: What are a couple of your favorites?

MS: Of the features, I love Pink Flamingos, but Female Trouble has a very special place in my heart. I identified more closely with the role of Taffy than I did with any other role. Not because I dressed like that but I always thought of Taffy as a good kid who was tremendously misunderstood and trying to be happy. I come from a family of 10 but I was still a lonely kid. I just related to Taffy and her trying to relate. That scene with the car accident where she’s really trying to engage her mother in her play and Divine is like, “No way, this isn’t happening. You can’t do this.” I really felt for Taffy. I liked every character I’ve played. Of the later films, I have to say Serial Mom.

FL: I'd imagine the atmosphere on the sets of the '70s films were quite different from his later work and of course John became a veteran filmmaker with his later works in the '80s and '90s. But maybe you can describe his modus operandi on the set since you of all people have seen it all.

MS: John was always fun on the set. He was working, but he was working doing what he loved to do, so it was a happy, even if stressful, working. Our sets were always, at least when I was there, were pleasant places to be. I loved what I did and in the early days, it was John doing just about everything. He had a cameraman for Pink Flamingos, but I can’t remember if he had one earlier than that. I think it was Hairspray when he got his first AD, so when he started being able to delegate, you could engage with him a little more, but he was always fine.

I liked working with him because he knows what he wants when he directs. In the early days we basically had no rehearsal time, or camera rehearsal time, which was unfortunate. We also did everything in master shots, so the big fear was “don’t forget your lines in the middle of the scene,” because he won’t like it. Nobody wanted to irritate him. We were very professional on the sets. We came there to work. We could laugh, but we weren’t taking drugs, we weren’t drinking, we weren’t doing any of those things. When we got to the set and we were working—we all worked. Film was expensive. We were working with very tight budgets and John was kind of a benevolent dictator in that if you were a fuck-up, you weren’t going to work with him again. He didn’t have time to deal with prima donnas. So we weren’t, which was fine. I felt like I was learning a lot, in the way of how to behave on a film set. I get very impatient with people who are not ready when the camera is.

FL: Why do you think that his films, even the earlier ones, are more loved today than ever? The response to the retrospective has been tremendous and of course we’re excited for that.

MS: I’ve thought about it a bit. It’s one of those things, it surprises me that I’m used to it, that it’s my life, that these things I did as a kid were important to people and I think it’s wonderful. John wanted to be famous, there’s no question about it. He was out for fame. I wasn’t particularly, it wasn’t a big goal of mine, but it was a big goal for him and Divine both, which made them such a good team. But it amazes me and it flatters me when young people come up to me and say, “Pink Flamingos changed my life”—it’s usually Pink Flamingos they talk about, and I think it was just that nobody else was doing that sort of thing. Most of the people who say these things are gay—young gay people.

Whatever kinds of lives they’ve had, the fact that there is something they can look at that says, “You can have a good time. You get to be fun. You don’t have to be ashamed. There are other people out there like you. Or there are other people out there who are way beyond you in whatever you think.” I think that’s what it is. They know that they’re funny. I do think that, for me, Female Trouble has a much better storyline than Pink Flamingos does. It’s more linear. I also don’t think Divine has ever been more beautiful. John wrote those movies with particular actors in mind. He had our voices in his head and I think that made a difference.

FL: Beyond his work as a filmmaker, John has other accomplishments under his belt, including as an author. His latest book, Carsick, of course is now out. Has he ever recruited you to hitchhike with him?

MS: No, he didn’t ask me to do it. I don’t really ever remember hitchhiking with John. I certainly did my share of hitchhiking and have my own stories about it, but that was back in the '60s. Actually when John told me he was doing this, I was horrified. I was absolutely horrified. I was so afraid for him, and as it turns out, it was fine. He’s more famous—he’s more recognizable [now]. I was terrified and I was very relieved when he got home safely. When John went out, I was afraid people were going to think he was a crazy old guy, but people recognized him.

FL: You’ve been working as an actress ever since those early days in Roman Candles both for John and others. What do you have coming on the horizon?

MS: Well, I also have a band. My next major thing is that I’m doing my Christmas show here [in NYC] with my band at the Laurie Beechman in December, from the 7th to 14th. I am also going out to California next month, we’re doing a [follow-up to Baby Jane?, Hush Up Sweet Charlotte] with a lot of the same cast and the same director, Billy Clift… I’m really excited about it. It’s been in the works for years and it’s finally gotten the money, and Baby Jane? is great. They did a wonderful job on it, so I’m excited about it.

FL: And should there be another John Waters movie down the road I'm sure you'd be there once again?

MS: Yes, I would be very sad not to be in it. That would make me very sad. I would do it in a heartbeat. I don’t know whether it’s ever going to happen though. Everybody wants their money back right away and John’s movies usually have a long shelf life…