Andie lets hair down in "Crush"
Jaime Jeske
Sunday, April 14, 2002
Andie lets her hair down
In 'Crush,' actress MacDowell doffs wholesome image -- and panties
Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Writer
In most of her movies, Andie MacDowell is so sweet and innocuous she
might as well be peddling Girl Scout cookies. It's a problem, she
realizes, and one that she may have contributed to.
"People have such a strong mind-set of me," MacDowell says. "Plus, I've
talked about my reservations about (screen) nudity (to the press), which
is unfortunate and probably my mistake. As soon as you say that it's the
big headline because it captures people's attention. I mean, what do
people want to read?"
Although she refused nudity for a long time -- "I don't have a huge
problem with it; it's just that quite often there's no need for it" --
MacDowell realized her embargo was limiting her to the nice-girl parts
she played in "sex, lies, and videotape," "Green Card" and "Groundhog
Day."
In "Crush," a romantic comedy that opens Friday, MacDowell gets a chance
to shaft her dipped-in-honey image. Cast as Kate, the 40-year-old
American headmistress at a private British school, MacDowell gets her
battery jumped when she takes up with a church organist (Kenny Doughty)
15 years her junior.
Stoked by passion, she hikes up her schoolmarm's linen skirt, unpins the
bun holding up her hair and has it off with her young man -- in the
backseat of a car, also in a church graveyard. In one scene a
fully-clothed MacDowell leans back, points her legs in the air and slips
off a pair of cotton panties. Director John McKay plays it mostly for
laughs, and the camera frames it tastefully, but the suggestion of
middle-aged lust is intact.
"It was my idea to do the whole legs-up thing," says MacDowell, 43,
during a San Francisco stopover. "Everybody says to me, 'We were
surprised, all that sex,' but I did nothing to compromise myself. And
yet it was sexy."
For another scene, when Kate sits on a bed and speaks on the phone,
MacDowell suggested she appear nude from behind with her face reflected
in a mirror. "I found this postcard of a Renaissance painting -- the
same type of (image) -- and I told John, 'I'd love to be shot like that.
It's just so pretty.' "
The alternative, she says, would be the cliche shot of the actress flat
on her back with sheets pulled tightly over her chest. "I hate those
scenes. It's stupid. There's no freedom there, and it doesn't feel
real."
MacDowell also had the burden of putting Doughty, her much-younger
co-star, at ease. A week of rehearsal helped, and MacDowell broke the
ice further by teaching Doughty a Southern dance called the shag. Still,
Doughty says, "When it actually came to the day (of the first sex
scene), we were both terrified and nervous.
"But Andie's very pretty, very protective and knows what she's doing. .
. . We had a good sense of humor, and once you get the first one out of
the way you're all right. You're kind of rockin'."
Unlike her character, who outrages her best friends (Imelda Staunton and
Anna Chancellor) with her impulsive romance, MacDowell says she could
never date a much younger man. "I can look at someone 15 years younger
than me and go, 'Oh my God, look at him, he is beautiful,' but I could
never be compelled to actually have a physical relationship with them.
"I might be a mentor -- nurture them, encourage them -- but not be
attracted to them in that way." When women have those relationships, she
says, it's because "they've lost something. They feel so dead, without
hope. And to actually have someone that amazingly beautiful be attracted
to them, it wakes them up."
MacDowell had an awakening of another kind last year, when she
reconnected with an old high school classmate and married him after a
seven-month courtship. A businessman from Atlanta, Rhett Hartzog was a
year behind MacDowell at Gaffney Senior High in Gaffney, S.C.
McDowell, divorced in 2000 from her husband of 13 years, former model
Paul Qualley, says she was "not miserable or anything like that" after
the split. "But I just had loads of friends who were married, and I was
kind of the fifth wheel always.
"Eventually I was thinking it would be nice to have someone to take
along. So I knew Rhett wasn't married" -- their families are close --
"and I always thought he was just the nicest person, really handsome and
really nice."
MacDowell hadn't seen Hartzog in 17 years but let it be known through
mutual friends that she'd like to hear from him. He called, she asked
him to lunch and three months later they were engaged. The couple live
in MacDowell's Asheville, N.C., home with her son, Justin, 15, and
daughters Rainey, 12, and Sarah Margaret, 7.
"It's a remarkable story," she acknowledges. "And I still wake up every
day and go, 'I can't believe this.' "
In Asheville, MacDowell pulls the plug on Hollywood as best she can,
"especially right after a movie. I shut down." She rarely calls or
e-mails her agent, but instead spends time with her kids and rides
horses with her women friends ("That's my therapy").
In Los Angeles, she says, "If you don't have a film coming out people
are like, 'Oooo, she's not working.' That pressure would be horrible, to
always have people questioning are you good enough, are you doing
enough.
"Where I live there's nobody there to remind me I'm not working."
"Crush"
The movie opens Friday at Bay Area theaters.
E-mail Edward Guthmann at egut...@sfchronicle.com.
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved. Page 29
"San Francisco Examiner"
Wednesday, April 17, 2002
We've got a 'Crush' on Andie
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
Of The Examiner Staff
In person, Andie MacDowell sometimes seems like a favorite aunt or a
next-door neighbor who has a gift for friendly chat. Then, suddenly,
she'll look right at you and smile and the room lights up with an
otherworldly beauty.
Director Peter Weir, who worked with MacDowell in "Green Card" (1990),
said that she has a "natural mystery," that you don't know everything
about her the moment she appears onscreen, which makes her all the more
alluring.
That's all true.
MacDowell visited San Francisco recently to promote her newest movie,
the half-comedy, half-weepie "Crush," which opens in Bay Area theaters
on Friday. Our talk begins in the late afternoon, and as it wears on,
she becomes tired and slightly giddy
-- suddenly pondering an odd painting in her hotel room ("What is that?"
she asks in her lovely Southern lilt), or going off on how dangerous it
was on the set of "Harrison's Flowers" ("Guns everywhere!").
Her affability, it seems, is the key to MacDowell's success.
"I've always liked everyone I've worked with," she says. "I just don't
let things bother me. If people are willing to get along with me, I'm
willing to get along with them. If they're not willing to get along with
me, I'm still willing to get along with them." She even lets her date --
currently her new husband Rhett -- choose which movie they'll see to
avoid a potential fight.
Though the general perception ranks MacDowell not quite at the top of
the A-list, just a brief look at her resume proves her bankability:
"sex, lies and videotape," "Green Card," "Groundhog Day," "Short Cuts,"
"Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Unstrung Heroes," "The End of Violence"
and "The Muse." She excels at both comedy and drama, and in her new film
"Crush," written and directed by John McKay, she gets to do both.
In the first scene, we learn that MacDowell plays Kate, a headmistress
at a strict girls' school in England. She scolds one student for smoking
and takes away the cigarettes. She waits for the student to leave and
immediately lights up one for herself.
"I like the diversity of the character," MacDowell says. "I like the
fact that she's really sexy and surprises people -- that she comes
across as headmistress and underneath it all she's really hot!"
Later in the film, Kate falls in love with a younger man, a church organ
player played by Kenny Doughty, and has sex with him in the backseat of
her car. MacDowell proudly boasts that she wore white cotton panties for
the scene to fit the character's lifestyle.
"Those are the kinds of things I like to come up with, more so than
messing with the lines, especially if it's a writer I have a lot of
respect for, like John McKay or Steven Soderbergh," she says.
But tragedy strikes, and the second half of the film turns into a
four-hankie weepie. MacDowell says that for scenes as good as these, she
can conjure up real tears, rather than using drops.
"I've done both," she says. "I prefer to really cry, because I have high
expectations of being real. It's not easy. I think about pain. All of us
are walking around with enormous amounts of pain, for whatever reason.
And you can just go right there and feel your pain right now. You don't
have to think of anything specific."
Like her character in "sex, lies & videotape," MacDowell can't stand
waste. She praises McKay for keeping the $6 million budget film on
track, and notes the contrast from the experience of working on last
year's expensive flop "Town and Country."
"They had this huge set, and you've got Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn and
Jenna Elfman and myself and Warren Beatty and Charlton Heston -- who
came in with this big rifle -- and hordes of extras. And it's like a
cabaret or a musical scene, with all these people. And I looked at the
producer and said, 'This is horrible! What is this?' And he said, 'This
may not even be in the movie.'
"You just don't do that when you've got 6 million dollars and no more
coming in. You know what you're going to do and you do it."
As a first timer, McKay kept all his ducks in a row and communicated
constantly with his cast, according to MacDowell. Other directors are
less gregarious, she says.
"I like them both, though. With Robert Altman (on 'Short Cuts'), he
would ask after three takes, 'Are you happy?' I said, 'I'm happy if
you're happy.' And we moved on."
E-mail Jeffrey M. Anderson at jand...@sfexaminer.com.
© 2002 The San Francisco Examiner ExIn, LLC. All rights reserved.
PR contact info for Andie MacDowell:
Karen Samfilippo
Stan Rosenfield & Associates Ltd.
2029 Century Park East, Suite 1190
Los Angeles CA 90067
(phone) 310/286-7474
(fax) 310/286-2255
Jaime