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How Maggie Gyllenhaal prepped for her sleazy role as a prostitute

>When Maggie Gyllenhaal was 7 years old, she rode with her Aunt Frieda and Uncle Maury in a taxi to Times Square. They were going to see a Broadway show and Gyllenhaal remembers them speaking in Yiddish, except for one phrase uttered in English: “ladies of the night.”

>“They were speaking with disdain, and I was so curious,” says Gyllenhaal, 39, an Oscar-nominated actress (“Crazy Heart”) and elder sister to actor Jake Gyllenhaal. “‘Ladies of the night’ sounds so amazing when you’re 7. I asked them what that meant, and they shushed me.”

>As Eileen “Candy” Merrell, a prostitute who’s been leading strangers up the yellowed linoleum stairs of the Lionel Hotel on 42nd Street for more years than she’d care to remember, she is our tour guide through what legendary journalist Gail Sheehy, in her coruscating 1972 New York magazine expose of prostitution, called “Hell’s bedroom.”

>Maggie’s Candy is the lone figure in this crowded canvas who suggests an inner life and the toll the sex trade takes on the human soul. The actress, who lives in Brooklyn with her actor husband Peter Sarsgaard (“The Killing”) and their two daughters, spoke to experts in the field before taking the plunge.