Don't you just hate Daryl?

10 April 2012

Daryl Hannah wishes it to be known that she is not about to be, nor has she ever been, the next Marilyn Monroe.

Despite making her stage debut in George Axelrod's play The Seven Year Itch, the film that starred Marilyn in Hollywood Icon Mode, Hannah is doing her darnedest to avoid comparisons. There will be no mischievously draughty grating, no billowing white dress but probably a lot more sex.

'I haven't seen the film since I was young,' she says at the end of a long day of rehearsals. 'And I didn't want to see it again because I thought I'd end up doing a shabby impersonation of Marilyn. Even if I managed to create my own version of the character, her image would have been in the back of my mind.'

The choice of the play for a screen actress who has never acted on stage is perhaps less surprising than her decision to make her debut in London under the guidance of a British film director. For Michael Radford, the production marks a similar baptism of fire as it will be the first time he has ever directed a play for the theatre. Hannah's trust in him must perforce be extraordinary. And so it is. Having worked with him on his last film, Dancing at the Blue Iguana, Hannah cannot speak too highly of him; nor he of her.

'Michael first asked me to do a play. It was either this or The Philadelphia Story. I left the choice to him. I'd never done a play so I trusted his judgement. But I was relieved when he chose The Seven Year Itch because it meant less pressure on me. During the first scenes you only hear my voice. It's a nice entrance; it's playful and you can have fun with it. It's a bit like slipping into a warm bath as an introduction to me being on stage.'

All well and good. But why London? The novelty value of seeing American actresses on the London stage, whether they take off their clothes or not, is surely beginning to pall. 'I'm doing it in London because Michael asked me to,' she replies with unaffected candour. 'I would be doing it in a farmhouse in the country if he had asked me to.'

At this stage I feel compelled to disavow those emotional accountants totting up the figures of any inappropriate speculation. The relationship between Radford and Hannah is strictly professional. They are friends, for certain, but there is nothing more to it than that. Indeed, Hannah has a very nice boyfriend back in New York who, as we film critics say, is 'in the biz'. Clearly, their working relationship is fruitful. Radford has admitted that working on Dancing at the Blue Iguana was such a radical experience that he may never work any other way. Which means, basically, without a script.

In the latest tradition of British directors stretching out into experimental areas, Radford started his film with a bunch of hand-picked actors and a location. Not only was there no script, but he had not the slightest idea of story or character trajectory; he simply worked with the actors in improvisation until they made up their own characters. Hannah decided to be a stripper. 'I paid dancers to teach me how to dance,' she says. 'Then I danced undercover. I talked to managers and they allowed me to work at their clubs for a couple of months. I hung around with the girls. Nobody recognised me. But then I was dressed like Betty Page.'

The thought of Hannah in a black dominatrix wig, stilettos, garters, stockings and the rest of it is enough to cause a coronary. Occasionally, she would overhear someone point her out as bearing an uncanny resemblance to 'that girl from Splash' but she managed to remain incognito among the punters. 'I did come across a couple of guys I knew in one club,' she laughs. 'But they were just looking at my ass or legs. They never looked at my face so they didn't recognise me.' She refuses to embarrass the said felons by revealing their names because they are 'quite well-known actors'.

Even at 39, Hannah would make a terrific stripper frame. Her legendary 44in legs - reputedly Hollywood's longest - are topped by a slim, athletic body, an ageless, striking face and THAT hair; blonde on blonde and long enough to whip you into submission.

Even after an arduous day of rehearsals - with a little help from Mr Make-Up - she could stop traffic. She is wearing leather laced trousers that make her look as if she's been dipped up to her bikini line in browned butter. Together with the lacy blouse, the ensemble is a Rodeo Drive Western Hippie thing and it works like voodoo.

She is working 12-hour days - more if you count the meetings she sometimes has to attend before rehearsals start at 10am and after they end at 10pm. She hardly has time to eat, which is why she tucks into chips, salad and a vegeburger as we talk. She offers to share her supper with me. I venture a chip or two.

I've heard tales about Hannah, read the interviews, done the background stuff; and still she is not quite what I'd expected. This is a girl/woman who insists she dislikes interviews, loathes publicity and yet has blazed in the Hollywood firmament as a putative star before stepping into the altogether harsher glare of more penetrative publicity due to her romantic associations - first with rock star Jackson Browne and then with the late John F Kennedy Jr. This is a vegetarian who hates vegetables, one of seven siblings who claims she was brought up as an 'only child', a tall Nordic-style natural blonde who thinks of herself as a small, elfin pixie type. This is a woman whose stepfather Jerrold Wexler was worth a billion dollars and who went to work at the age of 11 in case she needed to feed her family; an all-American belle who became, briefly, the 'face' of British Home Stores. You want contradictory elements, you got 'em by the truckload in Daryl Hannah.

One might be forgiven for thinking that she is just another poor little rich girl boohooing into her arugula over her wretched schooldays when she was considered an outsider because of her height and her straggly hair; a child who was tested for autism as a result of her introverted behaviour and failure to communicate. Few of her classmates would have had the opportunity (or the money) to escape. 'My mother's answer was to whisk me away to the Caribbean for a couple of years to let me run free and then gradually integrate me back into society. And you know what?' she says, leaning towards me. 'IT DIDN'T WORK.' Just in case it doesn't come across in cold print, she is joking. Sort of.

Given the 'terribleness' of her childhood, I wonder at what stage she became aware she would never have to lift a finger again or sully her pretty hands with, ugh, work - ever, ever, ever. 'When I first moved into our apartment,' she laughs. 'It was the top two storeys of a building that he [Wexler] owned in downtown Chicago and I had my own wing. I was eight. I thought they'd made a mistake and it should be somebody else's place. Because I had that feeling... I never trusted it. My brother took to it immediately but I never felt comfortable with it. It wasn't long after that I wanted to work in case anything happened and I could feed the family at McDonald's three times a day. I started working as an actress when I was 11.'

Her subsequent career has been erratic, to say the least. The initial impetus of her early appearances as the gymnastic replicant Pris in Blade Runner and the mermaid in Splash faltered with some of the duds that followed. The result is that some of her best work has gone relatively unnoticed. She is terrific as the mousy hairdresser in Steel Magnolias and hideously authentic as the junkie hooker in The Last Days of Frankie the Fly opposite Dennis Hopper - a film that was consigned to the video shelves almost immediately after its release. 'You must be one of two people who have ever told me they have seen the movie,' she says.

Given the fact that she has confessed to considering giving up the movie business - at least the acting side - it is ironic that she should have just engaged in her most creative experience. Having made an award-winning short film, The Last Supper, and just completed a documentary on the strippers she worked with throughout the filming of Iguana, Hannah has been contemplating a career on the other side of the camera.

'It is ironic because it comes at such an auspicious time - when I am entertaining the idea of changing my career imminently. Maybe within two years. It is funny that I get the opportunity that would interest me. Working with Michael was great, it was so liberating. I'm not really so interested in self-promotion. It's more for the flight of fantasy that it takes you on. Usually it's the wife or the girlfriend or the love interest. And it gets worse instead of better. I happen to be one of the people it happens to but I'm not the only one.'

So here is the 'difficult', mercurial, cosseted Daryl Hannah, talking fairly freely, not too flaky, looking gorgeous, ethereal even, as she's forking in damp chips and greenery. Not too much sign of the troubled creature of yore who only a couple of years ago said to an interviewer: 'Life is a continual process of crisis.'


'Are you sure?' she says, a forkful of food hovering halfway between plate and its divine destination. 'That doesn't sound like me. I think that was around the time my dad died. I was confronted with one sad thing after another. My father died, my grandfather died, my dogs died, my boyfriend's mother died; I was hypersensitive to all the crises in the world. It's like you're suddenly aware that everything you ever loved is going to die.'

The 'boyfriend's mother' was Jacqueline Onassis. The 'dad' to whom she refers was Wexler, who stepped into the breach left by the departure of her natural father from the family when Hannah was seven. She has never attempted to contact him since and refuses even to discuss him. Wexler, from that day on, became her father. Such was her devotion to him that when he was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1990, Hannah took two years off to be with him. When he was hospitalised she virtually moved in to attend him for the last four months of his life. She was present in the room when he died in 1992 - it was clearly a very tough time.

'I still miss my father every single day. Cleo Rocos [the play's executive producer] told me that you never get over it, you just get used to it. I think that's sort of true. Either you survive or you suffer to death. I don't have an answer as to how to get free of depression. I always put salt on my wounds.'

She refuses to expand on that last comment but I hazard a guess she's referring in part to the time when her four-year relationship with John Kennedy Jr imploded. He went off and married Carolyn Bessette and Hannah turned for solace to her ex-boyfriend, Jackson Browne. The salted wounds being almost literal as it was Browne who, at the end of their 14-year-relationship, beat her up for hanging out with Kennedy.

If she is, as she has constantly claimed, shy of the public gaze, why has she chosen such high-profile boyfriends? It's a preposterous question, of course, and it gets the reply it deserves. She was, after all, only 17 when Browne pulled her onstage at a concert for an embrace, having sent her a message that his eye was on her.

'I met my first boyfriend when I was at high school and you don't think things through at that age. I've never been high profile about them. I've never discussed them. And with my first boyfriend I didn't parade myself around at public events. As for my career, I just accepted that as a side-effect of my job. I'm not bitter, but it was not what I wanted. Both guys I met when I was very young and neither of the relationships were glamour relationships.' Glamour relationships? What does she mean? 'I mean I was not entranced by the glamour of it. They were real relationships. They were not like, "Oh, I think that famous person is cute" or "Wouldn't it be nice to be seen on the arm of so and so".'

We are getting into treacherous territory now and she knows it. She has stopped eating and is looking at me more intently. But there is something swirling around and I am trying to catch hold of it to grasp the elusive essence that is Daryl Hannah. Without any real hope of an answer, I ask her if she could tell me her thoughts when she heard about the plane crash that killed Kennedy and the girl who usurped her, Carolyn Bessette.

She freezes. 'I'm not going to discuss that.' I wait.

'I don't want to share those thoughts with the general public.' The room suddenly feels very cold and if our breath had started to become visible I would not have been in the least surprised. But we're in deep now and I take a chance. 'It could have been you.'

We look at each other and I know it's not going to happen. Not for the 'general public' to be oohed and aahed over on Tube journeys home. I can only speculate in the silence that descends as to what is going through her mind. She remains inscrutable and, almost imperceptibly, shakes her head.

'Look at that,' she says suddenly, staring out of the window across the rooftops of Soho. 'It's a full moon. Isn't that beautiful?'

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