‘Everyone should get a medal at some point for surviving’
Stefanie Powers, who returns to the British stage, has taken fame and heartbreak in her stride. meets a born fighter
Stefanie Powers is calmly eating a wrap in a cluttered London basement, during a lunchbreak from rehearsals for her latest role. Not the most elegant surroundings for the Hollywood veteran, who made her name with the global television hit but still, at 73, Powers exudes glamour.
Between bites, she regales me with starry anecdotes, from passing her pilot’s licence to fly with her friend, the late racing driver and Woolworth heir Lance Reventlow, to playing polo with Prince Charles, until he retired 10 years ago at the age of 57.
“We were riding out one day and he said to me, ‘I don’t know if I can be doing this for much longer.’ I said to him, ‘I’m six years older than you – you can’t stop!’ ” she recalls. “I just play for fun now, not competitively.”
Looking slim and upright, she keeps an impressive schedule: along with polo, there’s dance classes three times a week, Pilates and horse-riding, and an inversion table at her LA home that she fits her ankles into in order to hang upside down (good for the spine).
A pretty woman with pale russet hair, a few fine lines and high cheekbones from her Polish ancestry, she admits to cosmetic surgery “a long time ago”. As she tells me, “I had my eyes done. I had what you have – fat pockets underneath them that would show up, so I got them removed.” And here was me deluding myself that my little eyebags, which I’ve had since babyhood, were more Jeanne Moreau than W H Auden.
She is promising casting as the driven, abrasively funny writer Helene Hanff in the play
which she’s hoping will have a life beyond its initial short run in Cambridge. “I’m in the enviable position of being able to accept work I enjoy doing, and I’m very grateful for that – especially a lovely part like Helene. She was an extremely complicated woman with escape mechanisms for protection that helped her to survive.”
Powers has overcome some serious challenges herself, such as the death of her great love, the