• July 30, 1990
• Vol. 34
• No. 4

Harley Jane Kozak Makes Her Creepy Crawl to the Top in Arachnophobia

When a spider creeps into Harley Jane Kozak's life these days, the calm mom of Arachnophobia (see review, page 11) scoops it up and sets it free on the front porch of her Hollywood Hills home. After getting intimate with 250 of the creepy crawlers while shooting the summer's sleeper creature feature, she learned to love her eight-legged co-stars. And since they included two palm-size, bird-eating Amazonian tarantulas and legions of exotic New Zealand spiders called delenas, the idea of squashing the domestic variety "would be like thinking, 'Okay, I'll kill [the film's director] Frank Marshall,' " Kozak says. "It would be appalling."

Granted, she didn't develop the kiss of a spider woman overnight. It took three months of working without her eyeglasses so that she would view the arachnids in easy-to-take soft focus. But her bravery impressed her co-workers. "She was unflappable," says Jeff Daniels, who plays her husband, a country doctor in a town infested with killer spiders. "There was nothing that could throw Harley off."

Actually, Kozak is accustomed to playing the damsel in distress. In her 1983 film debut, The House on Sorority Row, she was slain by a slasher who crashed through the roof of her van. Then came soap parts in The Guiding Light, where she tangled in a tunnel with rats, and in Santa Barbara, where her character was felled by the letter C from the Capwell Hotel. Since then, the fresh-faced 33-year-old has specialized in domestic roles, such as Billy Crystal's ex-wife in When Harry Met Sally...and Rick Moranis's spouse in Parenthood. "I guess I just have one of those faces," Kozak says. "I just look like your perfect mom."

She is not a real-life mom, however. Divorced from actor Van Santvoord in 1983 after an 18-month marriage, Kozak satisfies her maternal urges by visits with the 14 nieces and nephews her four brothers and two of her three sisters have produced. Born Susan Jane Kozak, she was raised in Lincoln, Nebr., where her mother, Dorothy, who was widowed when Harley was a year old, taught music at the state university. Kozak's change of name came a decade ago, inspired by the bike that Santvoord parked in their Manhattan loft. "I saw the motorcycle, and it was like, 'Harley. That's a nice name,' " she says.

Now she's getting a reputation for having the kind of guts that go with a name like Harley. "I'll work with snakes and rats and spiders," says Kozak, who admits to one fear. "Man, I hate to be cold," she shudders. Not to worry. During the summer of Arachnophobia, the heat is on her.