Should Vera Farmiga win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar tonight, don’t be surprised if she thanks her goats.
And that’s not some disparaging code word for her lawyers. She’ll mean actual livestock.
While other big Hollywood stars shuttle between their mansions in the Hills and the South of France, Farmiga shuns the cushy life to live two hours north of New York City on an Ulster County goat farm. There, she and her husband, musician Renn Hawkey, split firewood, go on hikes and raise Angora and Nubian goats. The animals are sheared for their wool, which Farmiga spins into yarn and then knits into clothing during downtime on the set. Sometime in the future, she also hopes to sell cheese and goat’s milk soap.
No word on whether that will be more thrilling to her than being nominated for an Academy Award. But the 36-year-old — who earned her Academy nod for playing a frequent flier in “Up in the Air” — has never been a conventional star. Early in her life, she insisted to anyone who would listen that she planned to become an optometrist. An honorable profession, yes, but not one likely to include making out with George Clooney.
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To hear others tell it though, New Jersey-born Farmiga was never destined for anything short of becoming an above-the-title name.
“She’s one of those people you meet and sort of earmark as ‘future movie stars of America,’ ” says Kathleen Chopin, a casting director who gave Farmiga her first major studio role in 1998’s “Return to Paradise.”
“You never forget the kids that you know could make it if luck is on their side,” says Reva Kazman, Farmiga’s drama teacher at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, NJ.
Farmiga grew up in large Ukrainian family, one of seven siblings. “Each child got to choose a pet and a sheep,” she told the Star-Ledger. “I bottled fed it and it ran around our backyard. I think maybe I was a shepherdess in a past life.”
She reportedly did not speak English until age 6, but was popular in high school and played soccer. When she couldn’t play her junior year, she sought another outlet: drama. She won her first role in the school’s production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” That’s when the acting bug bit her.
“She came to me at one point her senior year,” says Harry Kazman, Reva’s husband and also a drama teacher at the school. “She was looking at colleges and said that she was torn. She loved acting, but this was a change from her original professional goal [of optometry].”
She wound up in Syracuse’s drama department, a shy, intense young woman still years away from gaining the confidence her character displayed in “Up in the Air.”
“I had instituted a practice of videotaping students on their first day here,” says Syracuse drama professor Gerardine Clark. “I remember her video, because she was a tiny little thing wearing pop-eye glasses, and she had her arms wrapped around herself protectively. I remember thinking, ‘Ooo, how did she get in?’ She didn’t look like a drama girl at all.”
By her senior year, Farmiga had transformed. She won the part of Nina in “The Seagull,” an “impossible” role that Clark says even seasoned actors have a difficulty with. Farmiga, who still spoke with a hint of a Ukrainian accent, played the character astonishingly well for someone so young. The production won the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, a competition involving more than 600 schools.
“We’d never have won had [Farmiga] not nailed the fourth act. A number of the judges told me that,” Clark says.
By the time she graduated, Farmiga had signed with an agent — something that only about three or four students manage each year. (Other alums who accomplished that feat include Taye Diggs and Tom Everett Scott.)
Out of college, she did some theater, including a production of “The Tempest.” She also served as an understudy in the 1996 Broadway play “Taking Sides.” Her talent was evident.
“We used to sit in this tiny dressing room and run lines together during the show,” says Mark La Mura, another show stand-by. “Vera was very much about her work, but she had this special quality. She’s only one of two actors I’ve ever met where it seems like this person is just thinking of these words right off the top of her head. The other was Cynthia Nixon.”
She was seemingly on her way — only she wasn’t. At least not in the conventional movie-star sense. She wouldn’t achieve anything approaching household-name status until her turn as a police psychiatrist in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 film “The Departed.”
One of the reasons Farmiga’s career was slow to take off was because she generally chose smaller, riskier projects. She won a Sundance award for 2004’s “Down to the Bone,” but the film failed to secure a wide release. The Post’s Lou Lumenick wrote that 2008’s “Quid Pro Quo” was worth seeing for “Farmiga’s stunning performance,” but the movie earned just $11,864 at the box office.
“She’s someone who likes to be challenged, so she chooses things that are going to be fulfilling,” Chopin says. “That’s not the same as choosing the film that’s going to end up with the biggest box office or land you on TMZ.”
“If you were going to make ‘Sophie’s Choice’ now, you’d get Vera. If you make ‘27 Dresses,’ you can’t really make that with her,” says “Up in the Air” producer Jeffrey Clifford. “Her integrity makes her attractive to directors like Scorsese and Jason Reitman, but she’s not ‘Pretty Woman.’ She could be a star, but she’s not plastic.”
Farmiga’s profile is certainly rising, but friends say she stays grounded through her family. She fell in love with her husband, former keyboardist for industrial rockers Deadsy, “at first sight” on the set of a TV show. They married in a traditional Ukrainian ceremony complete with folk dancing.
The couple has a 1-year-old son, Fynn. (Farmiga also has a disabled sister whom she cares for.)
“She’s very un-Hollywood,” says Carly Hugo, who will produce Farmiga’s upcoming directorial debut, “This Dark World.” “Three hours after the Oscar nominations were announced, she sent me a two-page e-mail with script notes.”
Here’s hoping she lets her hair down a little after tonight’s ceremony. She and her “Up in the Air” castmates can raise a toast — of goat’s milk.