‘He’d get sick with nerves before the first day’s shoot – even after making 120 films’
Francis Lawrence, director ofThe Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015)
24 June 2024
I first met Donald in 2012, when I’d signed on to direct the second Hunger Games film. He wanted to meet on 4 July – a public holiday in the US, which I thought was strange. He chose a steakhouse at 9am, which I thought was stranger. I was intimidated because he had such gravitas. I remember he came into the Pacific Dining Car restaurant, sat down and instantly became conspiratorial: if I ever met his wife, he said, I was not to tell her we’d had giant New York steaks for breakfast, because he wasn’t supposed to eat them any more. That totally disarmed me and I instantly fell in love with him.
Rita Moreno, SAG Life Achievement Award Winner, Talks Brando, Elvis And West Side Story
Ahead of her lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild this Saturday, Rita Moreno dishes on “West Side Story,” dating Marlon Brando and Elvis, and why she’s hit her prime at 82.
Moreno was stunned. “I just slammed on the brakes and damn near had an accident,” says the legendary singer, dancer and actress. She quickly pulled off the road and called SAG back to make sure she had heard the news correctly.
Welcome to Life Lessons. This week, an all-to-brief teaser for the upcoming Netflix comedy Don’t Look Up has us falling in love with Leonardo DiCaprio all over again. To cool off, we’re taking you back to 1994 with some words of wisdom from our cover interview with the then 20-year-old actor. Sit down, grab a pen—you just might learn a thing or two.
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“I could never focus on things I didn’t want to learn. Math is just the worst.”
Continuing our series revisiting childhood movie passions, we look at a romance that could’ve been schlock, if not for Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling’s chemistry
F
lash back to the summer of 2007: Spider-Man 3 was in theatres. Two of the top five most viewed YouTube videos were by the band My Chemical Romance. And The Notebook, a movie starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling as star-crossed teenage lovers who reconnect as adults, was three years old. The famous re-enactment of the film’s climactic lift-and-kiss at the MTV movie awards by its stars, then a real-life couple, was two years old. I was 13 years old and, true to sheltered oldest child form, didn’t know about any of this. And so one sleepover night in my friend’s basement, I faced at least three aghast faces: “You haven’t seen The Notebook?!?”
The Notebook probably has fans outside my demographic – it’s an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks romance novel, a book/author/genre marketed to middle-aged women – but for girls in middle school (or, at least, my middle school in suburban Ohio) between 2004 and 2008 or so, it was a foundational text. It was the romantic movie of choice, a portal into couple-shipping YouTube and, later, Tumblr holes, a benchmark for years of unrealistic dating expectations. You wanted to know what sex was “supposed” to look and sound like AND tell everyone you bawled at the profound idea of love transcending old age? You watched The Notebook.
For those who haven’t seen it, The Notebook follows 17-year-old Allie (McAdams) as she moves to a small South Carolina town for the summer and meets Noah (Gosling), a construction worker fond of Walt Whitman and bold gestures, such as threatening to jump off a ferris wheel to get Allie to go out with him. They fall in love, then break up (she’s rich, he’s not; her parents disapprove) and, separately, serve in the second world war . He pines for her; she gets engaged to handsome, preternaturally forgiving solider played by James Marsden. They reconnect, and things are complicated. The story is narrated by the older Noah, who reads from a notebook composed by Allie as a totem to bring her back from the dementia eclipsing her memories.
This twist – Noah and Allie have together composed an epic love story that she mostly can’t remember – landed like a gut punch for us as emotionally chaotic seventh-graders who had imagined our sunset years approximately zero times. All of us watching that summer night ended the movie in tears, which was a cathartic bonding experience on its own. But at 13, on the cusp of high school but seemingly, for me, light-years away from sneaking out with a boy, the main draw was the heat between McAdams and Gosling. Their chemistry was palpable and hungry with a sharp, heady sting. (It is transparent they were falling in love off-screen.) These two were brain-meltingly hot, an unknowing factory of aspirational summer love gifs. Importantly for me then, the film hinges on one pivotal, rain-soaked scene in which Allie asks Noah why he never wrote her when they broke up. (Actually, he wrote her 365 letters! He wrote her every day for a year!). He proclaims, famously: “It wasn’t over … it STILL isn’t over.” At the time, I had no older friends or siblings, no health class, just the steamy handprint from Titanic, so I was thrilled when they kiss, and he pushes her against a wall, and carries her up the stairs, and strips off her soaked clothes … and the camera keeps rolling. As far as movies go, The Notebook has a rather tame sex scene – all soft lighting, swelling music, delicate shots that don’t reveal much, nudity-wise. The camera mostly lingers on McAdams’ face as she has a transcendent time (again, disappointingly high expectations were set by this movie). The whole scene is only about 4.5 minutes long, but at 13 this felt like an eternity, and a guidebook. Oh, adulthood has this? You lose your senses and can’t take your hands off someone? Good to know!
Rewatching The Notebook for the first time in years, it’s clear, of course, how silly it was to base my idea of maturity on this movie, and also how stellar McAdams and Gosling’s performances remain. The Notebook could have been a solid B-movie romance (see: every other Nicholas Sparks adaptation), but the lead performances power it far higher than its melodramatic parts. It is almost thrilling – and the main draw for me now – to watch two ascendant, now-acclaimed actors make the hairpin turns of its dialogue somewhat convincing. The idea of actually fighting this way? Laughable. But that look Noah gives Allie when he asks: “Goddammit, what do you WANT?” Yeah, that still hits.
A couple of weeks ago, before this series assignment, I rewatched The Notebook on instinct. It felt good during, you know, ALL THIS, to return to an old favourite, to slip along the slick grooves of worn emotions. To retrace the lines of this familiar ride, even if I now find many of them horribly cheesy, and my feelings cringingly earnest. How to think of it now? I defer to Gosling, who said in that fateful year, 2007: “God bless The Notebook. It introduced me to one of the great loves of my life.” I would not classify The Notebook as one of my great loves, but still: god bless this movie, flawed textbook that it was, for introducing me to a new vision of the adult future, and for saying: Hang on. It’s a bumpy ride of feelings ahead but one day, you’ll appreciate them.
Rutger Hauer: an icily elegant presence with a touch of self-aware drollery
Hauer became a hall-of-famer with his ‘tears in rain’ monologue in Blade Runner, but there was much more to this talented, stylish actor Peter Bradshaw Wed 24 July 2014
‘Q
uite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” So begins the icily elegant final speech in Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner. It is famously delivered by the Dutch star Rutger Hauer, playing Roy, the charismatic replicant rebel with the mysterious moral sense who rescues Harrison Ford’s cop Deckard from falling at the very last. And as the rain streams down his face, Roy pronounces: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
C-beams evidently means the “caesium beams” used in space combat and the Tannhäuser Gate apparently an interstellar portal. The speech was semi-improvised, the “tears in rain” line being Hauer’s own idea. Did he, at some unconscious level, access a memory of the Everly Brothers’ Crying in the Rain? Either way, he gave this devastatingly bleak and opaque aria a touch of what later generations might call relatability; he sold it to movie audiences around the world who might otherwise at that late stage be too punch-drunk with postmodern sci-fi action to pay attention to a tricky closing speech. It conferred on Hauer himself real hall-of-famer status. His enigmatic combination of despair, forgiveness, and passionate connoisseurship of what it is to be alive – which as a replicant, he can hardly know as much as real humans – supplies a satisfying ending to the film, an ending that wouldn’t otherwise be there.
Hauer had a fierce blond handsomeness as a young man which was to crag up in early middle age into something meaner and starker: perhaps a little like Max Von Sydow, but without the gravitas. In the 1980s, when he became famous internationally, it was Hauer’s destiny to be cast as the the bad guy when Reagan-era action movies in Hollywood needed a mannered stylish villain or Nordic nasty to play opposite the all-American hero: people such as Dolph Lundgren or indeed our own Alan Rickman as the German terrorist in Die Hard.
In Nighthawks (1981), Hauer played a fanatic terrorist, opposite the more wholesomely conceived cop, played by Sylvester Stallone. He was slightly more demandingly cast by Nicolas Roeg in Eureka (1983) as the ambitious and grasping social climber who is to become the highly unreliable son-in-law of Gene Hackman’s retired plutocrat. But again it was his foreignness, his Europeanness, which was brought into play as the symbol of something sinister and cynical – and Hauer brought to this, as so many other roles, a theatrical touch of self-aware drollery.
Then in 1986, he achieved the second pillar of his celebrity status with the gruesome horror thriller The Hitcher, playing the hitch-hiker who terrorises and butchers those rash enough to pick him up. This movie hardly had the challenge of dark poetry or subtlety that Roeg and Scott had given him, and The Hitcher was little loved critically or indeed by theatre audiences who mostly stayed away. But it had a long afterlife on VHS leading to cult status, and one of Rutger Hauer’s less glorious achievements was said to be that he single-handedly ended hitch-hiking as a commonplace travel option for young people in the United States.
Rutger Hauer (right) at a 2007 reunion of Blade Runner stars (left) Edward James Olmos and Daryl Hannah, and the film's director Sir Ridley Scott.
Hauer so often played the amoral monster: very memorably portraying the corrupt and homicidal Cardinal Roark in Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005). But in fact he won his single substantial award, a best supporting actor Golden Globe, for his much-admired performance in the TV drama Escape From Sobibor (1987), the story of the 1943 uprising at the Nazis’ death camp. He played Sacha Perchersky, the tough Russian Jewish inmate who enthusiastically takes up the mutiny plan and in fact lives to rejoin his Red Army unit. Perhaps Hauer got typecast as the quasi-Nazi bad guy a lot of the time, but his dynamic, charismatic Perchersky showed the different career he might have had, were he not imprisoned by a certain type of frosty or black comic look and sound – which incidentally gave him a lot of lucrative voiceover work.
Hauer was a stylish, talented man who will have a place in the heart of all of us who saw Blade Runner and found ourselves watching it again and again, and found ourselves blindsided afresh by that speech of Hauer’s: a speech about tears in the rain delivered by someone who is tragically, mournfully dry-eyed.
Jessica Langespoke about her longtime partnerSam Shepardand their children, Hannah and Samuel, in an interview published just hours before the news of his death.
“I wouldn’t call Sammy easygoing and funny, but everybody has their dark side, and he always does it with a sense of humor,” the Feud: Bette and Joan actress, 68, told AARP The MagazineOpens a New Window. of the famed playwright, whom she dated from 1982 to 2009.
In many ways, Robin Williams is just a big kid. Watch him play with eight-year-old son Zachary. Williams is positioned in front of the laptop computer, joystick in hand, as planes fly at him on the screen. He pops them off with childlike enthusiasm. “This is great!” he says, racking up kills. “Spielberg loves these, too, you know.” Williams is just back from his day on the set of Hook, in which he plays, appropriately, Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn’t grow up. And what about Zachary, Williams’ son and playmate? He stands by quietly as dad downs more planes, patiently waiting his turn. In other ways, Williams has grown up quite nicely. The stand-up comedian with the quicksilver mind who became an overnight sensation in Mork & Mindy has matured into something of a rarity-a true genius in the world of stand-up comedy, as well as one of the country’s most respected dramatic actors. Many comics have had success in the movies, but few have enjoyed the esteem that Williams does (or the two Oscar nominations). Nor have many overcome the personal demons Williams faced early in stardom when drugs and alcohol threatened to destroy his career, if not his life. Now 40, married for a second time and the father of three children, Williams is at his peak. He appears in movies of substance, not mindless comedies, and he has created a family life in Northern California far from the temptations of the Hollywood fast lane. When Playboy first interviewed Williams in 1982, his career was at a crossroads. Mork & Mindy had nose-dived in the ratings and was canceled after a four-year run. His first movie, Popeye, had been a bomb, and his second, The World According to Garp, earned few rave reviews. But his stand-up comedy routines were legendary, racing from a sometimes simple premise-with mimicry, one-liners, characters and anything else he could think of-to cover an encyclopedia of subjects, leaving his audience breathless. The New York Times described them as having a “perfervid pace and wild, associative leaps,” and worried that his “improvisational method seemed tinged with madness.” Much has happened to Williams in the ten years since that first interview. After the death of acquaintance John Belushi, he stopped using drugs. His first marriage fell apart in a very public manner, and he’s still angry about the way the press covered his divorce and marriage to the woman who had been his son’s nanny; his father, a Detroit automobile industry executive, died. Despite the personal upheaval, his professional life started to jell. His stand-up routines became, in the words of The New York Times, “sharper and less frenetic.” His successful concerts, albums, video tapes and cable specials put him in the top rank of comedians. In 1986, he joined Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal to found Comic Relief, a yearly benefit for the homeless that appears on HBO. So far, it has raised more than $18,000,000. He also makes appearances in support of literacy and is an advocate of women’s rights. But it was his development as an actor that surprised many. Not all of his film roles were memorable, especially at first, but as his list of credits began to build, so did his reputation. He followed Popeye and Garp with The Survivors (which also starred Walter Matthau), Moscow on the Hudson, Club Paradise and Cadillac Man. His performance in Good Morning, Vietnam earned his first chance at an Academy Award; his second came with Dead Poets Society. He followed that by co-starring in Awakenings with Robert De Niro, and with a tasty, morbid cameo as a “defrocked” psychiatrist in Dead Again. His performance in The Fisher King has received excellent reviews. And, of course, he’s headlining one of the most anticipated Christmas films-Hook, in which he co-stars with Dustin Hoffman (who plays Hook), Julia Roberts (Tinkerbell), Maggie Smith (Wendy) and Bob Hoskins (the pirate Smee). Director Terry Gilliam has worked with Williams twice, most recently in The Fisher King and earlier in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, in which Williams appeared as a giant-headed man in the moon. “The thing with Robin is, he has the ability to go from manic to mad to tender and vulnerable,” says Gilliam, who was a founding member of Monty Python. “He’s the most unique mind on the planet. There’s nobody like him out there.” To catch up with one of our national treasures, we sent Contributing Editor Lawrence Grobel (whose previous interviews include Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro) to spend three weekends with the Pan Man. Grobel’s report: “Since Robin was smack in the middle of making Hook, I was aware he was giving up precious family time to do the interview. Yet, once we started talking, I knew it couldn’t be rushed. Williams is a stream-of-consciousness talker, and ideas bounce off him like atoms in a blender. Give him a topic-any topic-and he can do five minutes. “When he was on a roll, he would often lean toward the tape recorder to make sure nothing was garbled or lost. But he can also be quiet and serious, concerned about social issues and politics. And sometimes, when his pregnant wife, Marsha, would enter the room, he would simply become very loving, almost apologizing for spending this time away from her. “Throughout our time together, Williams was open and friendly, often more concerned about my welfare than he was about his own. When my car failed to start after one of our sessions, I called my wife to come get me and Robin volunteered himself, his publicist and his gardener to push the car out of the way until a tow truck arrived. The thought of these three men struggling with a car up a steep hill-and the ensuing chiropractic bills-worried me enough that I tried to start it one more time. This time it worked. ‘It’s OK. I yelled. I’m outa here.’ “‘Wait!’ Robin yelled. ‘You better call your wife.’ “How can you not like a guy who’s willing to risk his back pushing your car and then reminds you to call your wife.”
* * *
PLAYBOY: This is our second time with you. How did the first interview affect you?
WILLIAMS: To tell you the truth. I can’t remember it.
ROBIN WILLIAMS: OK, Larry, we’ve got — we’ve got a shot of you with Colin Powell. It’s a nice shot. OK. Do we have any shots of Larry’s colon?
(LAUGHTER)
WILLIAMS: Anything?
KING: Tonight, a primetime exclusive with Robin Williams.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) WILLIAMS: Good morning, Vietnam!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) Nixon (INAUDIBLE).
Robin Williams
WILLIAMS: Because she was a stunner. Oy. But you’re still going to help me, Jack. Coveting thy neighbor’s wife. That’s why god invented the cold shower. Show me company!
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: His remarkable career, the close friendship with the late Chris Reeve, his return to rehab after 20 years of sobriety. We’ll cover it all with the one and only Robin Williams. And then another exclusive with another Robin — Robin Quivers. How has she lasted 26 years as Howard Stern’s on air sidekick — longer than any woman in Howard’s life, except maybe his mother? And how she dropped 21 pounds in 21 days. Robin Williams, Robin Quivers, an exclusive hour next on LARRY KING LIVE.
Rami Malek lined up as Bond 25 villain after Oscars win
The Bohemian Rhapsody star and best actor winner is set to join the much-delayed new 007 film, which is due to start shooting in April ANDREW PULVER Thu 28 Feb 2019
Fresh from his Academy Award win for Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek is set to sign up as the lead villain in Bond 25, the much-delayed new 007 film that is due to be Daniel Craig’s last outing in the role.
Collider reports that Malek is in final negotiations for the part, with his newly enhanced status as an Oscar-winner a factor. Malek had been under consideration for some time, but Variety had reported in December that his work schedule on the final season of Mr Robot, the TV series in which he plays a computer hacker with an anxiety disorder, meant he was unable to do both. Now, however, it appears he will be accommodated.
Sean Young: ‘Why are the dudes that run Hollywood incapable of honouring the women any more?’ Photograph: Scott McDermott/Corbis Outline
Interview
Blade Runner’s Sean Young: ‘If I were a man I’d have been treated better’
The star famous for playing the femme fatale Rachael in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic has had many ‘troubled moments’ since – including lawsuits, booze addiction and some unpleasant co-stars. So what is it like to be on the outside of Hollywood looking in? DANNY LEIGH THU 26 MAR 2016
“Please don’t write shit about me, OK?” This is how the last email that I get from Sean Young ends, the one where she says she regrets ever writing to me.
The actor emailed for the first time the week before, responding to a request for an interview. It had taken some nudging to elicit a reply. She was, she said, busy with a play, but email was doable. “Try to be brief because I get way too many emails in general LOL,” she wrote, “[but] I can try and help you out.”
I wanted to write about Young for all sorts of reasons, but the most pressing was the re-release of Blade Runner. Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi opus has had no end of breathless words spent on it down the years, but Young – who stars as the beautiful “replicant” Rachael – has never claimed many of them. Which is strange: the movie wouldn’t be the same without her.
Rachael will for ever be her defining role, but she had, for a time, a full career beyond it. For much of the 80s, Young was a bona fide movie star, a poised brunette with a fragile edge. Though her films weren’t always great, she was never less than interesting in them. She was hired by directors including David Lynch, Oliver Stone and Gus Van Sant as well as, on different occasions, both halves of the Merchant-Ivory partnership. It was a life lived at Cannes, the Oscars, in front of flashbulbs.
She is now 55. Though she works regularly, her films rarely involve red carpets. In the past decade only one of her films has had a US cinema release: a low-budget rustic horror called Jug Face. Otherwise, the answer to the question of “where is she now?” is a rented apartment in Astoria, Queens. The play is a six-week run of the comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike being staged in a town called Northport, an hour’s drive from New York, population 7,401.
I send back eight questions, trying to meet her request for brevity. I ask if there are current film-makers she admires, her view on the proposed Blade Runner sequel. Near the end, I mention the “troubled moments” of her life. Her reply arrives almost instantly. She promises to think about my questions, but she has a query first. “There have been a few,” she writes, “so I’m just curious which ones you are interested in hearing from me about?” Which ones is underlined.
It would be hard to write about Young without getting here eventually. The reason people’s eyes widen when I tell them I’m in touch with her is not Blade Runner, but this stuff. Principally, there was the legal conflict with actor James Woods, who in 1988 accused her of exotic harassments including leaving a disfigured doll outside his home in Beverly Hills. But there have been, as she says, other calamities – messy run-ins with co-stars and directors, public unravellings. In the online age you can watch her release from a Hollywood police station on Oscar night 2012, dressed in a floor-length black gown. She had slapped a security guard who was removing her from the official after-party when she was found without a ticket. I try to be specific without being cruel. But I tell her I want to know about it all – because it all became, in the customary telling, the Sean Young story.
Sean Young as Rachael in Blade Runner (1982). Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros/Sportsphoto Ltd
Silence descends. While I wait to find out if the interview is over, I watch Blade Runner properly for the first time in years. Young was 22 when she starred in it. Rachael was only her third acting job. She enters as a pristine gleam of black hair and ruby lipstick. In a film that relocates noir to a dank future LA, she is a bio-engineered femme fatale, a sci-fi dame in 40s shoulder pads.
In the hands of another actor, she could have just been one more detail in Scott’s design scheme, a clothes horse in a coil of cigarette smoke. But Young makes Rachael breathe. It’s a tricky role: she must seem slickly artificial, while hinting all the time at warm humanity. As Harrison Ford’s jaded ex-cop Deckard falls for her, the whole film hinges on us understanding why. That she pulls it off owes a lot to her raw presence – but presence is the lifeblood of movies.
Eventually, she replies. “My dear Danny,” she begins. “To say that I was unfairly targeted is an understatement. But the more interesting question is why?”
The email runs to 1,693 words. Half of those concern James Woods. They met on a forgotten film called The Boost, playing a cocaine-addicted married couple. At the end of an alleged on-set affair, Woods sued Young for harassment; she still insists there was no affair and no harassment. They eventually settled out-of-court. She was awarded $227,000 to cover her legal costs. But the flamboyant nature of the initial accusations would keep them circulating.
Young was the daughter of two journalists. She grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, then trained as a dancer in New York. Even before Blade Runner, her relationship with Hollywood was uneasy. At the start of her career, she alleges, a mogul behaved “creepily” towards her, then tried to have her blackballed after she rejected him. Later, there was Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Young was cast as the wife of banker Gordon Gekko; after butting heads with Stone and co-star Charlie Sheen, she was removed from the set, and her part cut to almost nothing.
Yet she still had currency enough to win the prize role of Vicki Vale in Tim Burton’s Batman. A week before the shoot, rehearsing a scene on horseback, she fell and broke her shoulder. The part was taken by Kim Basinger. The film was a box-office juggernaut. (In the end, the riding scene was never filmed.) Perhaps understandably, she took aim at a role in the sequel Batman Returns. Her keenness was such that she gatecrashed the Warner Brothers studio lot in a homemade Catwoman costume, demanding to see Burton. After the original stroke of woeful luck, it was a follow-up of haunting misjudgment. The press were not kind. By then, the Woods story was out there too. There was another lost role, when Warren Beatty sacked her from 1990’s Dick Tracy after, she says, she declined his advances (Beatty denied it). The media, naturally, took all that she could give. Her name became a punchline, shorthand for a certain kind of aggravation. The industry began to close doors, and her career went into a death spiral. As the 90s went by and her 20s with them – the age when roles dwindle even for orderly female actors – she “limped” into TV movies and bad horror films. “I did some films I wasn’t particularly pleased about, but I had to earn a living.” By then she had left Los Angeles for Arizona, and had her two children.
In 2008, director Julian Schnabel found himself being heckled while making an acceptance speech at the Director’s Guild of America awards. Footage shows him peering unhappily from the stage. “Have another cocktail,” he scowls when he sees the culprit. Young was, she admits, “pissed (pun intended)”. She doesn’t mention any grudge against Schnabel, just a generalised rage at having been “shelved and discredited by people who didn’t like that I was deeply honest [and] an unavailable prude who, at times, had a big mouth”.
She was also just pissed. Admitting to an alcohol problem, she went into rehab. It didn’t take. Three years later, she appeared on a reality TV show called Celebrity Rehab. It was, she says, her personal low. “Except for the fact that I could retire on the money and I only had to work for 10 days: that part was good.” This is also underlined. (After the Oscar arrest in 2012, she insisted she was sober.)
That was what I meant by the Sean Young story. Actually, she doesn’t agree: “Honestly Danny boy, I’m not sure what you are calling the Sean Young story because if you go ask any normal person walking the street they will most often say: ‘I LOVE her.’” Still. In this one email she is sometimes sad and sometimes dry, but it’s the fury that stands out – the hot memory of having been wronged by people she calls “pigs”.
She has only answered one question. I email back, and ask if she has time, whether she could answer the rest. She asks me to remind her what they were.
That night, I re-watch two of her other films, the ones that don’t get the attention of Blade Runner. In 1987’s No Way Out, she glints brilliantly in a Hitchcocky confection. In The Boost: she’s raw, compelling. Really, these past couple of decades, it’s Hollywood’s loss as well as hers. The play in Northport, I find, has been reviewed in the New York Times. Young, despite minimal stage experience, is said to “acquit herself honorably”.
Sean Young with Kevin Costner in No Way Out (1987). Photograph: Columbia/Allstar
It’s strange, how the Blade Runner legend now leaves out both Young and her co-star Daryl Hannah, presenting it as the collective triumph of Ford, Rutger Hauer with his “tears in rain” speech, and Ridley Scott orchestrating it all. Then again, that kind of thing often blights actors. Like a lot of what befell Young, it could only have happened to a woman.
The past is unknowable. But the idea that a young female actor new to Hollywood would be directed to the casting couch is hardly outlandish, or that the same actor would face the same demands even as a star. On-set, male actors can scream abuse at underlings and have it passed off as being “driven”; making Wall Street, an unwitting Young had a sign reading “cunt” stuck to her back by Sheen. And when the media reported her trials, they did so with the particular pursed delight that greets a woman’s fall from grace.
As for Hollywood, it often finds it easier to give second acts to men. Young could be excused a smile on noting that the highest paid actor in Hollywood for the past two years has been Robert Downey Jr, whose struggle with drug addiction in the 90s saw him spend time in state prison, as well as mistaking a neighbour’s house for his own and falling asleep in a child’s bedroom.
There are probably too many stories about Young’s “theatricality” for them all to be untrue. In the course of our email exchange, I am not always struck by the urge to get stuck in a lift with her. She admits to a “knack for pissing people off.” It is also rude to heckle someone while he’s collecting an award. But it’s unlikely any of this was helped by how the industry treated her. And she can be funny, and self-aware, and if even half those stories were embellished, and just some of that treatment was down to sheer misogyny – well, that’s quite a bum rap. You’d be angry too.
The next email she sends is shorter, and less sandpapery. She says that she will have no role in the Blade Runner sequel: “I saw Ridley a month ago and not a peep was uttered from his mouth about it and so I left it alone.” Her professional interest in new films is limited – “I had to give up … it just hurt too much to care” – but she says she liked Jennifer Aniston’s Cake.
On the subject of women in Hollywood, her response is pure Sean Young. “Of course if I were a man I’d have been treated better. Duh.” She goes on: “Why are the dudes that run Hollywood incapable of honouring the women any more? Maybe it’s because all these dudes were not the first choice of the women of their youths […] But they can make it in tinseltown and perpetuate the desperate delusion that they are powerful.”
She says she has no real hope of a comeback. “It’s like putting a beautiful racehorse out to pasture before her time and then after 20 years expecting her to be the same horse.” Yet she feels “peaceful” now, “happily avoiding the world’s problems in Astoria with my family and my dog”. She has attached a photo of the dog to her email. It stands cheerfully in the New York snow, a white fluffy thing in a knitted orange dog-jumper. “This should do it, right?”
I email to thank her. I mention the Guardian may be in touch to source a photograph, and I tell her the dog is sweet.
Sean Young with James Woods in The Boost (1988). Photograph: Moviestore Collection/REX
“Oh shit, this is for the Guardian?” This genuinely appears the first time she has realised. There is a note of panic and some recrimination. “You’ll probably be the reason I won’t ever do another one of these again.” And then, to end: “I’m sweeter than my dog.”
I check the first emails I sent her, as well as the ones to her agent. They all make it clear who I’m writing for. Pointing this out doesn’t help. “I was written about by the Guardian in 1993 or thereabouts,” she replies, “and it wasn’t a positive experience.” The phrase “character assassination” is mentioned.
(Intrigued, I search the paper’s archive at the British Library. Every mention through the 80s and 90s seems complimentary. Reviews call her “deft” and “deliciously snotty”, her presence in a film a “recommendation”. Finally, I find what must be it – the last item in a 1991 diary column, half a dozen lines, slyly comparing remarks she made about Sheen and Beatty with theirs about her.)
“I regret writing to you now because it is yet another moment where I open my big mouth and give people the ammunition they need to be harmful. But perhaps you’ll have a heart.” She berates herself for what she calls her insufficient boundaries. “Stupid girl. God, when will I learn?” And then she says goodbye: “Don’t write shit about me, OK?”
Later I watch Blade Runner again. After Rachael exits her first scene, her creator Eldon Tyrell discusses her with Deckard. The room feels oddly empty without her. “More human than human is our motto,” Tyrell says.