Ann-Margret is still going in style
WHAT
do Elvis Presley, Jack Nicholson, John Forsythe, Gene Hackman, Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon have in common? Ann-Margret. The Swedish-American actress, with a film career spanning more than five decades, boasts an illustrious dance card, having played opposite some of Hollywood’s most handsome leading men.
“You’ve noticed!” AnnMargret, 75, tells The Post.
With “Going in Style,” she now adds Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine to her résumé.
“I had met Michael in the ’60s in London because he had a wonderful restaurant there. Morgan, I hadn’t met. I did a film with Alan [Arkin] before this a few years ago, so we were friends,” she recalls. “The three of them together, you can’t get a word in edgewise.”
“I thought about ‘ Grumpy Old Men’ so much during filming — Jack and Walter, and how Walter used to always want to shock me,” she says.
Now the role of Ann- Margret’s resident joker belongs to Arkin, her love interest in the new comedy. She plays a grocery-store clerk, and many of her scenes take place among the food aisles. During filming, the actress discovered a strange vegetable that was totally alien to her.
“[Alan] could not believe that I didn’t know what an eggplant was,” she says. “I mean, I’ve eaten them — but it’s like mush, it’s like brown. And here was this beautiful plant, purple and shiny. It’s gorgeous!”
Some of Ann-Margret’s most famous early roles were in “Viva Las Vegas,” with Presley, and the musical movie “Bye Bye Birdie.” She began her career as a singer in the early ’60s. “Going in Style” harks back to those days with a karaoke scene featuring Arkin.
“I love music. Since I was 4 years old in Sweden in this little village of 98 people, I would sing songs and harmonize with my mother,” she says. “That’s always been with me.”
Ann-Margret says she also loved her blouse in the film, suddenly becoming Hollywood’s most attractive grocery-store clerk ever. How does she stay so beautiful and energetic, year after year?
“Sexiness is in the eye of the beholder,” she says. “Vitality, my goodness, if I didn’t love what I do, I’d have to leave. As quickly as I came in, I’d have to leave.”
And what does she think makes Arkin, Caine and Freeman such hot stuff?
“Oh, you’re gonna get me with this,” she says.
“Ask their wives!”