Melissa Leo steps off the train at Penn Station. Talking on her cellphone, she says she'll have to call back because of the crush of paparazzi.
She laughs. The truth is, she's losing the signal and will call back when she gets out on the street. The truth is, she says, strangers seldom recognize her.
"And when they do," she says, "it's like maybe they went to school with me. 'Excuse me, but did you go to high school in Michigan?' Noooooooo."
Despite 25 years of acting on television and in films, and despite her Academy Award nomination for best actress in "Frozen River," Leo can stroll anonymously through Penn Station and along the streets of New York City. She's taken the train from her home in Stone Ridge in Ulster County to meet up with a buddy just arrived from California.
That belies the fact that she's in greater demand than ever from filmmakers. She's appearing in four movies due for release by the end of the year. One is "Welcome to the Rileys," making its East Coast premiere Oct. 2 and 3 at the Woodstock Film Festival.
Leo plays Lois Riley, married to Doug Riley (James Gandolfini). Eight years before the film begins, they lost their only child, a teenaged girl, in a car accident. They haven't grieved. Their relationship is troubled.
In New Orleans for a plumbing convention, Doug telephones Lois and tells her he's not coming home. Lois, who hasn't been out of the house, literally, for eight years, drives to New Orleans and finds him shacked up with a teenaged stripper played by Kristen Stewart.
"The most wonderful thing about the film is it does not go in the direction that would seem quite obvious in the world of movies," Leo says. "It is, in fact, a love story about Lois and Doug rediscovering what they once shared. It's a very beautiful film."
Leo recently completed filming an HBO miniseries with Kate Winslet. And in November, she will return to New Orleans to shoot the second season of "Treme," the HBO series by the same folks who produced "Homicide: Life on the Street," the NBC series in which Leo starred as Detective Kay Howard.
"I'm as busy as I can be," she says. "I like it that way. I've always liked it that way, whether I'm able to be earning money while I'm so busy or not. Just a few years ago, when students came to me with student films they wanted to make, I made 85 to 90 percent of them.
"My time is a little harder to get now, because I get paid sometimes to work. And that's kind of thrilling, and I'm lapping that up while I can."
She laughs again.
"Frozen River" had a lot to do that. She played Ray Eddy, a Dollar-store employee in northern New York whose husband ran off with the money and car a couple of days before Christmas, leaving her to raise two sons. To make ends meet, she became involved in a dangerous human-smuggling operation.
The movie came out in 2008, and the next year at the Academy Awards, Leo joined Anne Hathaway, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep and Winslet in competition for best actress in a leading role. Winslet won for her performance in "The Reader."
Leo says that even before "Frozen River" her acting opportunities were increasing.
"I witnessed it that way, because it sort of comforts me," she says. "It's not as if one thing pushed me over the top. That would be so shameful to the rest of my career.
"It really was my career that got me to a place where I knew how to make 'Frozen River' -- and put everything I had into it. I had such a wonderful vehicle to do that with. And yes, I have definitely gotten an enormous boost from that."
After earning an Emmy nomination in 1985 for playing Linda Warner on the soap opera "All My Children" -- her first major role -- Leo has appeared in about 90 TV shows and movies. Her string of current films began with "The Dry Land," in which she has a small role as the mother of a troubled soldier (Ryan O'Nan), who returns to his wife (America Ferrera) and Texas home after serving in Iraq.
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