STEEL MAGNOLIAS
OF THE BELOVED SOUTHERN-SET DRAMA, THEIR FEMALE BONDING WASN’T AN ACT
It’s been 30 years since Julia Roberts, Sally Field and Dolly Parton lit up the big screen together. Closer looks back with secrets from the set.
“I relate with women well. I love men, but they cause me more trouble than women.”
— Dolly Parton
Meg Ryan was almost a Steel Magnolia. The Top Gun vet was offered the role as Sally Field’s daughter in the 1989 comedydrama. But that same day, she was cast in When Harry Met Sally. “She came to us and said, ‘This is a wonderful ensemble, but I get to be the leading lady’” opposite Billy Crystal in the rom-com, Steel Magnolias screenwriter Robert Harling recalls. “We said, ‘Absolutely, you must do this,’ so the role was open again.”
As fate would have it, the delay allowed another rising star to step into the part. “The casting director said, ‘There’s this girl. She hasn’t been able to audition because she’s been off making some movie about a pizza,’” Harling says. That movie was Mystic Pizza, and that girl was Julia Roberts. “The moment Julia walked into the reading, I thought, This woman is going to be a star,” co-star Shirley MacLaine remembers.
That premonition proved to be true, but it wasn’t an easy shoot, as Harling and the actresses who played the film’s Southern belles reveal 30 years after its release. Director Herbert Ross “went after Julia with a vengeance,” says Sally, who played her mother. The 21-year-old actress “would come to my house every night and say, ‘I think I’m terrible. What am I doing?’ and she was really in tears,” Shirley reports.
Julia wasn’t the only target of Ross’ ire. He also berated Dolly Parton, asking her at one point if she could act. Her reply: “No, but it’s your job to make me look like I can!”
Shirley, who had worked with Ross on 1977’s ballet drama The Turning Point, explains, “Herbert Ross was basically a choreographer. That means he could sometimes be very stern and very harsh.”
Still, the conflict drew the members of the ensemble closer. “My deepest memories of the film were how we bonded together after he told one or all of us that we couldn’t
act,” Shirley says. “And we stayed friends after the movie. We never went to the director’s funeral, but….”
FAMILY ATMOSPHERE
The film was shot in Natchitoches, La., in the sweltering summer of 1988. “Dolly was the only one who didn’t sweat,” says Shirley. “She never complained about anything. Never. The rest of us were always complaining.” As Dolly saw it, “When I was young and I had nothing, I wanted to be rich and famous,” she told her co-stars. “So I’m not going to complain about anything.”
The setting was key, since the film was based on the life of Harling, who was born and raised in Natchitoches. “It’s really what happened,” he tells Closer of the tear-jerking storyline. “My sister was a diabetic, my mother gave her a kidney, she had a baby and my sister died.”
The movie was a box-office hit, earning $95.9 million worldwide — and garnering Julia her first Oscar nod. That wasn’t a surprise. “On set they were talking about how she was going to get nominated,” co-star Janine Turner tells Closer.
Steel Magnolias also snagged Julia a fiancé — Dylan McDermott, who played her husband. They broke off their engagement in 1990 after she fell for another leading man, Flatliners’ Kiefer Sutherland.
Their romance didn’t last, either, but Steel Magnolias’ legacy has endured (it was remade by Lifetime in 2012). So have the connections made on set. “It really was a case of life imitating art,” says Harling. “These women became bonded very tightly with each other.” — Bruce Fretts,
with reporting by Katie Bruno