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Mary Steenburgen is photographed in Toronto on May 11, 2018.JENNIFER ROBERTS/The Globe and Mail

It was sometimes hard to drag Mary Steenburgen out of the garage that served as a green room on the set of her new comedy Book Club, because she and her three co-stars – Candice Bergen, Jane Fonda and Diane Keaton – were dishing up such riveting dirt. Fonda and Bergen both grew up in Hollywood with world-famous fathers; Frank Sinatra spent time in their childhood living rooms. Fonda used to ride her horse down San Vicente Boulevard to school, “and Diane is this beautiful unicorn,” Steenburgen said in a recent phone interview.

All four women are consummate professionals with lifelong careers, 13 Oscar nominations and four wins among them (Klute, Coming Home, Annie Hall, Melvin and Howard), along with shelves of Emmys, but none had worked together before. “Which felt strange until we realized, nobody offers four women the lead roles in a movie,” Steenburgen continues. “And there I was, from a little tract house in Newport, Arkansas.” She laughs. “Everything left me breathless. Whenever [writer/director Bill Holderman] pulled us away to act, I was still vibrating from whatever the story had been.”

Steenburgen, 65, hasn’t lost the Arkansas in her voice, but she’s sure racked up some stories of her own, from the 1970s, when she co-starred with Malcolm McDowell in Time After Time (they married in 1980, had two children – one is the writer/director Charlie McDowell – and divorced in 1990), to today, where she’s a sexy, playful presence in both film (The Help) and television (30 Rock, Justified, Orange is the New Black, The Last Man on Earth). She and Ted Danson also play versions of themselves on Curb Your Enthusiasm, but even though their meta-marriage on the series ended, their real one is in its 23rd year.

Steenburgen’s breakthrough story starts in 1972, when she moved to New York to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse. A casting director spotted her in a comedy improv show and invited her to read. As Steenburgen was leaving that meeting, she asked what else the casting director was working on. “She said Goin’ South” – Jack Nicholson’s second film as director – “but she didn’t think she could get me seen,” Steenburgen recalls, “because they were going to cast a well-known actor or a beautiful model, and I didn’t fall into either category.”

Steenburgen had never been bold. When she was 8, her father, a freight-train conductor, had the first of a series of heart attacks, and she coped by retreating into books, which she read in the mimosa tree beside her house.

“But for some weird reason,” she says, “I told the casting director that I was just going to sit outside her office until she gave me the script.” She was staring at the floor, regretting that she’d been too pushy, and formulating her apology when two feet walked into her line of vision: Nicholson.

He asked if she was waiting to see him. She said no. He asked, “Why not?” He handed her the script, and told her to come back tomorrow. As they read, he started cancelling appointments. When his pizza arrived, and she rose to go, he said, “Sit down, eat, keep reading.” They read every scene in the film two or three times. A few days later, the production flew her to L.A. for a screen test, “along with a lot of other well-known actresses,” Steenburgen says. “According to Diane [Keaton], she was one of them. Somehow magically, they chose me.”

Steenburgen and her co-stars do what they can to enliven Book Club with their energy and edge – they get off a couple of cracks about sexism and aging that feel like they were uttered spontaneously on set – but overall it’s a twinkly affair. Four friends in Santa Monica find themselves at a crossroads: Vivian (Fonda) is a hotel magnate who loves sex but fears relationships. Diane (Keaton) is a mom whose grown daughters want her to move to Arizona. Sharon (Bergen) is a judge whose sex life is cobwebbed. And Carol’s (Steenburgen) good marriage gets bumpy when retirement makes her husband (Craig T. Nelson) feel unmanned. Reading the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy gooses them into making changes. (It opened in select cities last Friday.)

Obviously, the comic potential of these four powerhouses perusing E.L. James’s spanky novels and biting their lips was impossible to resist, but come on – their characters came of age in the 1970s. The only thing about that trilogy that would shock them is how terribly it’s written.

“I know what you mean,” Steenburgen replies carefully. “I remember saying to Bill, ‘One of us has to say, ‘We’re the last people on Earth to read these.’ Jane and Candice have been married to French men. We all read The Story of O. It’s not like we never would have encountered erotica. But the book serves as a catalyst to remind our characters what they’re missing. It’s a device to get us to the subject, which is about living while you’re alive, and not slowly closing every door that you have available to you.”

Steenburgen believes doors are for opening. She began writing music at 54, and playing the accordion at 62. One of the things she finds sexiest about Danson is that “for 30, 35 years, he’s been one of the world’s leading ocean environmentalists,” she says. “He’s not fly-by-night; he’s written a book about it [Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans and What We Can Do to Save Them], a really relevant book scientifically.”

She also finds him deeply funny – “That to me is the No. 1 aphrodisiac in life” – and she cracks him up, too, often by making up songs about their dog, Arthur, which they sing together. “That makes me very happy, because I’ve been in relationships where I laughed a lot at the other person, but that person never gave me their laughter, and laughter is a sign of generosity,” she says. “Plus, he’s not hard to look at.”

Trying to understand what’s inside her, and push the limits of her talent and mind and experience, “has been important to me for a long time,” Steenburgen says. “It’s really not a good idea to agree to a contract where your life is a series of incremental diminishments. Nature does what nature does, but your agreement to have a good time, to be playful, to scare yourself, to explore parts of your brain and your person that surprise you, should never end. We tell young people that they can do anything, but then there’s some unspoken age where no one tells us that any more.

“And we don’t even tell it to ourselves,” she goes on. “It’s become a massive societal subliminal agreement, to only tell stories of the young. That’s a real mistake. It sends the message that there’s a day where you’ll still be alive, but you’ll be insignificant.”

She laughs again, but she’s serious. “It’s like we’re fixated with zombies, people who are just walking around dead,” she says. “I don’t want to be one of them.”

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