Victoria Wyndham, it seems, never met an artistic Milieu she didn't like. In addition to Another World's Rachel Cory, her resume includes accomplishments in a panoply of endeavors so diverse as to defy credibility were it attributed to a fictional character. Besides acting, she sings well enough to do cabaret, Broadway and maybe, opera; has written a ballet libretto, directed a music video and managed a rock band; she has done stand-up comedy and is an accomplished horsewoman. It is reported that when Harding Lemay, then AW's head writer, was looking for a hobby for Rachel, Wyndham suggested that her character sculpt, and proceeded to do the pieces herself (as well as those of Rachel's teacher, since the actor playing the role didn't have a clue what to do with a piece of clay), an impromptu bit of business that led to another career for her. Oh yes - she has also raised two sons. "People say, 'Oh you do so many things,' but I don't really," the Renaissance woman begs to differ. "It's all the same thing; it's just different expressions of ideas I have. Sometimes these ideas have to be worked out in clay, sometimes in paint, sometimes in writing, sometimes by directing or producing. I think one of the reasons any of us are artist is because we are easily bored. Creativity is one way to stave off boredom."
The versatile and clearly indefatigable Wyndham, who has played Rachel for the last 24 years - presumably without getting bored - is so identified with the role as to have inspired the incautious uninformed to actually claim in print she created the role (she didn't).
She has just returned from Gladstone, N.J., where she did the dressage exhibition in a celebrity riding event organized to raise funds for the United States Equestrian Team. Barefoot, casually dressed and relaxed, Wyndham is ready to talk about just about anything, but especially horses.
So just what is dressage, anyway? "A short history of Dressage!" she responds with enthusiasm, launching into a brief tutorial. "It was started by Xenophon, the great Greek horse trainer for the military, to develop highly trained, top physical specimens which were extraordinarily obedient, in order to keep the rider alive in battle." She skillfully delivers a discourse on this discrete discipline, which is clear and fascinating. "The horse is moving in prescribed figures, in different gaits," she explains. "It's like dancing on horseback. You have to move 2,000 pounds (a horse) around without anyone seeing what you are doing, so it's about as exciting as watching grass grow unless you know what you're looking at. It is the highest level of riding you can learn."
Wyndham's love affair with horses began when she was about 5. "My folks had a horse, and I got dumped off every time I rode it," she says. "One wonders what we were all thinking. [When I was] around 7, my parents sold our horse. I was still crazy about horses and very much wanted one of my own, but that was just not going to happen. So they took me over to a riding academy, where I started lessons in earnest. I spent every summer until college riding there, training horses and teaching. Two constants in my life have been the love of learning and love of training animals. There's a great similarity between raising children and training animals. Children are just real intelligent little animals, and raising children is an art form, that's for sure. I've always loved little things I could take care of. When you train any little living thing they give you back so much. When my friends were playing with dolls, I was playing with horses, dogs and cats - anything. I guess it must have been in grammar school that I spent weeks and weeks getting a chipmunk to eat a peanut out of my hand." Not content with the plethora of enterprises she's already embraced and mastered, she speculates on those even she knows she hasn't time for. "I would have been a biologist, or a zoologist, if I had followed that route," she ruminates. "And it would have been neat to see if I could have been a good enough opera singer. I knew I had acting down, and it would have been fun to know all those languages and get really good at music. But when I was young and callow, I couldn't feature spending that kind of time learning five languages and staying indoors doing that much practicing."
Wyndham exhibits a sophisticated speech and manner often found in New Englanders. She did grow up in Westport Conn., but was actually born in Chicago, the second child of Rafael Jaime Camargo, an actor and radio announcer of Mexican heritage whose own diverse list of credits was noting to sneeze at, then or now. His wife, Florence Skeels, was also an actress, and, the two of them actually starred together on the radio version of The Guiding Light, which later became the first television soap Wyndham ever did. The Camargo's daughters, Felice and Victoria, were in the business themselves until Mom and Pop pulled the plug. "We did a little bit when we were very young," Wyndham recounts, "but by the time I was 7, they insisted I stop doing it. I was furious. I don't think I spoke to them for months. But they wanted us to have normal childhoods. From ages 7 to 14 I didn't act. Then I was 14 and went away to school, I was doing every play they had for me to do." Notwithstanding her proclaimed love affair with learning, the single-minded Miss Camargo blew her chance to go to Sarah Lawrence, her first and only collegiate choice, by informing them that she probably wouldn't stay the full four years.
She settled on Bennett Junior College in Millbrook, N.Y., because it was close to New York City and she could complete a degree in two years, making it possible to satisfy her obsession with getting to New York as soon as she could and becoming a professional actress. "That was the bargain I made with my acting teacher when I was 14," she explains. "He insisted I go to college, and my parents were saying the same thing. He said, 'Whatever plans you want to do, you can do.' But I wasn't there to do the plays, and I made that very clear to them. I was there to do four years of [academic] courses in two and get out. I did realize how much fun learning can be, but I also felt you didn't give up your youth in this business. If you were a woman, you couldn't be sanguine about having a long career unless you started early enough, and I understood that. There have been exceptions that have disproved the rule, like Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver, the ones who wanted to be classically trained, but I didn't feel I had the time to do that. I felt the train was going out of the station already. Only slowly and extremely reluctantly is America getting over its fascination with youth." Felice Camargo, Wyndham's older sister, preceded her to Broadway, and shortly thereafter, according to Victoria, the exchange among casting directors became: "What about the Camargo girl?" "Which one?" "My Sister is also dark-haired, and we sound exactly alike on the telephone," says Wyndham. "It got confusing. So there was a big family powwow, and since she got there first I had to change my name. That was very annoying to me, because I had always wanted to make my Dad's name famous." So she took the name Wyndham (a maternal name deprived from one Lt. Wyndham, as in Wyndham Conn., who had come over on the Mayflower), and made that famous. When confronted with the suggestion that the name (Victoria Wyndham) sounds like the heroine of a classic gothic novel, she sighs, "Unfortunately." In a twist of irony, Felice is no longer in show business, and now manages Wyndham's production company. "So my name is different," Victoria says, still a bit peeved, it would seem, "but that's life." There's a "sweet part" to that story, as she puts it, and further irony. Wyndham's son Christian Camargo, an actor and graduate of Juilliard School of Drama, took his grandfather's name and received rave reviews from the New York Times this summer for his first professional role, as a French courtier in Henry V. He made his Broadway debut (with billing) last September in Skylight, a three-character play by British playwright David Hare, which is the critical hit of the current season.
What does it matter which individual makes the name famous?