After RADA, she went into a production of Shakespeare's "As You Like It," playing Rosalind. And it was then that the great turning point in her life came. Word was out in acting circles all over London that John Schlesinger, one of the most important British directors, was casting for a major new film to be named "Yanks."

It was a film of particular importance to Schlesinger because it dealt, in some ways, with his own experiences as a young man. It was about the American soldiers who were sent to England during World War II, about their impact on the British villages where they were stationed… and, of course, about the girls they met there. Schlesinger had already cast Vanessa Redgrave as one of the female leads in his film and Richard Gere as one of the young Yanks. Now he was looking for the other female lead… a young girl… she could be an unknown… she had to be British, of course, since the whole point was that she would be a British girl meeting an American boy.

Even though she was an American, Lisa Eichhorn determined to try out for the role. "I had an agent, who told me I absolutely had to say I was British," she said. "He told me: 'You are British, as far as this audition goes. If you tell him something like, you're American but you can do a British accent, you're lost. He needs a British girl because that's the whole point of the story.'"

So Eichhorn gathered up her courage and walked in to John Schlesinger and… "I've never lied about anything like that. I said I was British, and there was a pause, and then I said, well, half British… my mother was an American or some such thing, so that if he detected a tiny American accent there would be an explanation for it."

She got the role. Schlesinger believed that she was British. And it was only weeks later, on the set of "Yanks," that she discovered that John Schlesinger had been the director of that first film she'd seen all those years ago, that film that struck her like a thunderbolt, "Far from the Madding Crowd." If she'd known that at the time of the audition, she thinks, she might not have been able to go through with it. "Yanks" was a great success for Eichhorn, if less of a success in the marketplace. And Schlesinger was not proved wrong in casting her as a British girl: None of the British critics faulted her accent. She was a star, according to some of the articles that began to be written about her. She was nominated for a Golden Globe award, and at last she came back home to America and (the dream almost must end this way) to Hollywood and to this cold, damp, dark Hollywood sound stage on a dreary winter day, where she sat in an old cane chair by the table for the coffee machine. There is this bittersweet quality about show business, that it's always shabby behind the footlights. The glitter is for the audience, and the actors live in rundown backstage romanticism.

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