Patricia Clarkson says director Brian De Palma was a 'saving grace' for getting her extra pay on 'The Untouchables'

• Patricia Clarkson made her screen debut in the hit 1987 movie "The Untouchables."
• Director Brian De Palma decided to extend Clarkson's role, which meant she got paid more.
• "That extra month helped me out," Clarkson said. "I mean, I had student loans to pay."

Brian De Palma knew Patricia Clarkson had potential — and one small decision he made ended up being "a godsend" to her in her early career.

As a recent graduate of Yale School of Drama with just one Broadway credit to her name, Clarkson came to De Palma's hit 1987 crime thriller "The Untouchables" with little experience but a lot of potential. So De Palma decided to extend Clarkson's small role playing Catherine Ness, the wife of Kevin Costner's character Eliot Ness, to add a shot of her character to the film's climactic courtroom scene.

"I was set to be done, and Brian decided that I had to be in the courtroom scene," Clarkson told BI. "So he told Paramount, 'Look, I guess we'll have to hold Patti for a month because we're not shooting the courtroom for another month.'"

At the time, Clarkson was making scale — the minimum rate a union actor can be paid on a set (she said the rate at the time was "maybe $1,000"). Even so, De Palma extending her work ended up being "a godsend."

"That extra month helped me out," Clarkson said. "I mean, I had student loans to pay, I was living in New York. It was a saving grace, and it was all because of Brian De Palma."

Clarkson would find acclaim in the decades that followed, earning two Emmy wins playing Sarah O'Connor on the HBO series "Six Feet Under," receiving an Oscar nomination for "Pieces of April," and starring in a slew of memorable movies ranging from "Shutter Island" to "Easy A." Her new movie, "Lilly," a biopic about the activist Lilly Ledbetter, is in theaters now.