INDIE APPEAL
THE ACTRESS ON WORK, LOVE AND LIFE AT THE AGE OF 60
Andie’s naked truths
Andie MacDowell turned 60 in April. When you are a woman and still working in Hollywood, an anniversary like that is more than a personal milestone − it’s a cinematic miracle, particularly when you are stretching out in toothsome, age-appropriate roles.
Andie will appear in a small independent film called Love After Love, playing a middle-aged woman finding her way after the death of her spouse. It may be her finest performance since she played a sexually dormant housewife in Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Steven Soderbergh’s weirdly prescient 1989 film about a man (played by James Spader) who could only be intimate through the lens of a video camera.
This early examination of digitally mediated relationships is worth a revisit.
The sex in that film was suggested. But in Love After Love, which entranced reviewers during an early theatrical release, Andie has the first nude scene of her long career.
“Everybody made such a big deal of the nudity,” she says, “and it was embarrassing that everyone made such a big deal. I wish I’d done it sooner. But no, I had to wait until I had an older body. I wish I’d done it when I had a gorgeous and young body, but I had a lot of fear when I was younger.”
The critical praise, some of it very much backhanded − “Andie MacDowell can act!” − reminded the actress of when she turned 40 and colleagues asked her, as she recalled recently, how it felt to have hit an age where she would never work again.
This is worth a hearty chuckle. With projects including playing a madcap American in the fifth season of Cuckoo, a British farce out later this year, and a bohemian hippie sidekick to Richard Dreyfuss and Chevy Chase in The Last Laugh, set for release in early 2019 (both on Netflix), Andie can afford to relax this summer.
If only she could.
It’s teatime in late July and Andie is sitting on a well-worn sofa upholstered in a faded cabbage rose print in the living room of her modest ranch house, mildly exasperated by her inability to recall the names of two current movie stars.
A wheezy, nervous, rescued Chihuahua-Boston terrier mix named Ava Gardner clings to her lap as the actress, whose beauty still startles, explains how the 2016 film Certain Women was an exemplar of the kind of work she would like to be doing. Though, she can’t actually remember the title.
“It’s a terrific movie,” Andie says. “Laura Dern is in it and that girl from the vampire movies, what’s her name?
And that actress from Montana. Names! [And] What the hell is that all about?”
(Why not Google? Because at a certain age, there is honour in eschewing that mnemonic short cut.) “Michelle Williams!” she eventually says triumphantly, referring to one of the stars of Certain Women.
Andie herself has passed in and out of stardom, as a model turned actress who never quite got her due, especially for her calm comic presence (she was marvellous in Groundhog Day).
Often she was cast as the elusive but well-scrubbed ideal (as in Four Weddings and a Funeral and St Elmo’s Fire, in which she somehow made a fisherman’s sweater seem sexier than a bikini).
As has been the case for many beautiful women, Andie’s extraordinary face has sometimes confused those seeking to employ her as an actress. Born in Gaffney, South Carolina, she came up as a model in the late 1970s, her rosy cheeks and untamed hair a welcome alternative to the sleek blondes who had dominated that decade.
Andie’s Twitter bio quotes the Emily Dickinson poem
I’m Nobody! Who are you?.
She posts photos of her dogs, inspirational quotes from authors (Anne Lamott is a favorite) and selfies of her shadow. “I figured it out,”
she tells. “I’m the kind person on Twitter.”
Yet in 2016, she was slammed as an elitist when she posted a selfie from an American Airlines flight that carried this caption: “HELP, I paid for first-class and they put me in tourist because of my dog that I pre-booked and paid for.”
She was carrying Ava Gardner, whom she had just rescued, from Los Angeles to Charleston, South Carolina, and a steward bumped her to coach, saying there wasn’t room in first class. Twitterers did not like the word “tourist”, nor did they like a complainer, they complained.
Andie’s gracious response, offering to donate her refund to charity and noting how she had let the flight attendant’s rudeness rub off on her, may serve as a primer for more impulsive celebrities.
She is lately more sanguine about the trolls. “People tell me I’m not relevant anymore, blah, blah,” she says. “But who wants to be relevant? It’s a lot of work, to stay in that place forever. I’ve never wanted to sell myself.
All I ever wanted was for someone to take me seriously.”
The experiences of her character in Love After Love − her sexual explorations, her sometimes hapless dating encounters and adult sons − dovetail somewhat with her own. Her son, Justin Qualley, who works in real estate in Montana, is 32; her daughters, Rainey Qualley, a pop singer, and Margaret Qualley, an actress, are 28 and 23. Their father is Paul Qualley, a former model and contractor from whom Andie has been divorced for nearly two decades. She was married to Rhett Hartzog, a businessman, but they divorced in 2004. Having raised her children first in Montana and then in Asheville, North Carolina, where she was known as Rose Qualley, she is a newly empty nester and experimenting with life in Los Angeles, her first true immersion in that company town.
“You know what’s great?” she asks. “I’m a nobody there. Nobody cares that I’m a movie star, whatever that is. Because everyone else is too.”
Regarding solitude, she says, “I do know from experience what it’s like to be alone, but I am good at it. And I do know sadness. You can’t get to my age without having felt some kind of intense pain.”
At 23, Andie was working as a model in Paris when her mother died of heart failure. She was just 53 and had been a severe alcoholic. Andie, the youngest of four daughters, had been her mother’s caretaker − plucking the smouldering cigarettes from her fingers when she passed out on the floor.
When Andie was 16, she staged an intervention, which failed, and when her mother was fired from her job at the McDonald’s where they both worked, it was Andie who drove her to work on that last day, because her mother had lost her driver’s licence.
She had been a music teacher until the drinking took over, Andie says. “I thought she was sober enough to work that day, but I misjudged. Because I never saw her sober, I never knew what was sober enough.
“Interestingly enough,” she goes on, “we had a good relationship. I had a lot of empathy for her. I was the last one home, and I didn’t want to leave her like that.”
A few months before she died, Andie’s mother wrote her a letter. “She told me she quit drinking,” she says, “and that she was very proud of me and that I deserved to have a mother who was sober. I was supposed to go home for Thanksgiving, but I did not. I really regret that.
“I’m always trying to grab hold of my children and spend time with them. I have to remember it’s natural at that age to want to experience the world on your own.”