Amazing Grace

Grace Jones is on the prowl again, raising hackles, eyebrows and a lot of hell along the way. No one else assaults the senses as Grace does. One moment aggressively feminine, the next curiously masculine, she transcends gender. There's a hint of menace, the vague possibility of violence in her demeanor. She is alien, the embodiment of the unknown. And she draws you to her as a flame draws a child.

Dolph Lundgren can afford to be soft-spoken. He is a champion kick boxer, solid muscle and bigger than you and any friends you might bring along. He doesn't eat: He "carbs up." Dolph will be Sylvester Stallone's opponent in Rocky IV. One night in Australia, Grace and he met: the Sphinx meeting the Colossus of Rhodes. The synergy was sufficiently awesome to make the alliance permanent.

Now they live together, the strong man and the strong woman, the soft-spoken and the outspoken, the Swede and the Jamaican. Their careers have come together in a house in a canyon above Los Angeles. There they'll make their stand: he in acting, she in acting and singing, both already winners on their own. Who knows what can be accomplished by (concluded on page 202)Amazing Grace(continued from page 86) the power of Dolph and the grace of Grace? Neither one started out to be in show business. Dolph, born in Stockholm, has a degree in chemical engineering and knows six languages well enough to get by. While still attending school, he became European kick-boxing champion in 1980 and 1981 and Australian champion in 1982 before drifting first into modeling and then into acting.

Grace was born in Jamaica and spent her childhood there, attending parochial school, chafing under a rather strict upbringing and using track as a release for her pent-up energies. Her ambition then was to be a Spanish professor. (She, too, is fluent in several languages.)

It was not until her family moved to Upstate New York that Grace began to explode into something entirely different. She began her career on the stage in summer stock, then hit the runway as a model. There, her approach often tested the limits of conservative advertisers.

"My image was always too strong for them. And that's when I went to Europe. There I found a completely different attitude. Europeans want you to be strong."

With that license, Grace quickly evolved, experimenting with various personae, combining her singing and acting talents in stage performances that stunned audiences with bizarre images and frightened them with the newness of it all. It was hard at times to see just where she was coming from. The conflicting sexual identities, for instance, the seeming antipathy toward men:

"I'm antimale ego, let's say, not antimale. I've always been drawn to sensitive men--men who have an ego but not to the extreme that the woman becomes a silent partner. I have found many times that if I do become a silent partner, it eats me up inside. Sometimes it's smarter to play dumb. But I'm silent for only so long, and then it comes out anyway."

Grace's latest creation, the role of villainess May Day in the James Bond adventure film A View to a Kill, will give us yet another image of her.

"I get to be more frilly, I think, as May Day. She dresses elegantly, takes time for make-up and manicures, all those things."

But don't expect a radical change in Grace because of a movie role. There are still plenty of icons that need busting and shirts that need unstuffing.

"I like conflicts. I love competition. I like discovering things for myself. It's a childlike characteristic, actually. But that gives you a certain amount of power, and people are intimidated by that. They are even afraid to approach me. Once they do, they see it's OK. I'm not going to chew their heads off or become violent if they say the wrong thing. It's a role. I'm acting, but they take it all so seriously."