By PABLO A. TARIMAN
LIKE everyone in that late afternoon Sunday presscon, beauty queen turned movie star Alice Dixson is aghast over the fate of the typhoon victims who she said don’t deserve that fate.
She is no stranger to natural calamities in the country. She was around during the big quake that leveled Baguio City and Central Luzon; she used to live in Taytay (Rizal) where it got flooded during monsoon rains and she recalls commuting in flooded Marcos Highway.
Dixson is baffled that some people interpret calamities as form of punishment or some kind of lesson from heaven. “If those calamities were lessons to be learned, I don’t know what lesson that would be,” she points out. “Some people don’t deserve to be part of the thousands dead or missing. Even Marikina who bore the brunt of Typhoon Ondoy wasn’t deserving of that.”
Outside of that notion, she believes the country should do the basic ones. “I do believe infrastructure here in the Philippines needed to be improved. Funds should be allotted to cleaning the sewage system. The government can indeed improve the quality of our lives if they can reduce damage in floods or typhoons for that matter.”
Born in Pasig near the church but can still recall early summers in a coastal town in Quezon, Dixson has gone full circle with a life seen on both sides.
To be sure, she is 44 but she looks half her age.
It is when she reviews 44 years of that life that she is transformed into a woman of this world who has seen it all.
She started working in a noontime show when she was 17, turned beauty queen a year later and then turned to the movies. The first ten years of showbiz saw her doing another remake of “Dyesebel,” “OK Ka Fairy Ko” and then transformed from Regal baby to Viva hot property.
Dixson rues: “The first ten years were really my formative years in the business. Without those early opportunities, I wouldn’t be where I am today. Those were the years I realized I have to lose my privacy and just enjoy my work.”
Years later, she was married and a few years after, she realized she values her independence more than ever.
“I don’t like dwelling on the past,” she says. “I’ve always been independent so that I don’t have to rely on anybody.”
Thus she is fair game when offered a film role that shows a slice of her past love life. She is portraying the unhappy wife of Gabby Concepcion in “When The Love Is Gone” opening on November 27.
Concepcion’s other woman in the movie is the younger Cristine Reyes with whom he does sizzling love scenes never before seen in the local screen.
“When I was told about the story of the film, I knew instantly that it was a role I wanted to do,” Dixson said over a plate of kare-kare. “I guess you do better as an actor when the story has happened to you. Yes, I can relate to it very much. I’ve loved and lost and that’s what the story is all about.”
She defines the givens on love and marriage and how best to cope when they are gone. “For me, love isn’t just a feeling. It is also a commitment. When you are together that long, feelings for each other can change but if you have commitment, you can still have a good relationship. But when this too is gone and deteriorates, you can’t revive it. It is best to accept it is gone and start moving on.”
The former beauty queen admits it is easier to do a scene when you have gone through it in real life. Many years back, she did a role in Maryo V. de los Reyes’s “The Other Woman.”
She was all of 18 then and totally inexperienced. She was still on television then and still undergoing training from the director. “It was later that I realize experience helps a lot: I had scenes in that film that needed depth which I didn’t have and it required me to show a kind of personal loss. I didn’t know then where to get that feeling.”
Having logged 27 years in showbiz with a 6-year hiatus, Dixson avers acting is really about experimenting. “Sometimes I can use a personal experience and it works. If you didn’t’ have that experience, then you just have to pretend you know that character in real life. When I go to the set, I don’t really memorize my lines; because I learned that lines are not important. It’s the feeling that counts.”
