Alicia Silverstone
Alex Sizov
ALICIA SILVERSTONE - SHE'S CLUED IN!
from Star!
Full Text COPYRIGHT Star!. 1995
Woo-hoo! When STAR! caught up with golden Betty Alicia Silverstone in
Sydney, we found her to be totally un-clueless. She filled us in on the real
Alicia...
"Thats is just ridiculous! It's absurd!" Alicia Silverstone is spewing.
Since superstardom claimed the Clueless mega-minxtrel as one of its own,
rumour mongers have linked Alicia romantically with nearly every up-and-
coming boy star.
"First there was Leonardo DiCaprio," sighs Alicia. "It was so far fetched. I
do know him, he was my friend Caitlin's ex-boyfriend - but we don't talk on
the phone and I don't ever see him! "Then I heard that I was going out with
Chris O'Donnel!" she shrieks. "I've only ever met him once and I can tell
you now - there is nothing going on there!"
Fact: In real life, Alicia Silverstone is very small. Fact: In real life,
Alicia dresses unlike her try-hard Clueless character in snazzy snoot Armani
fashion gear supplied by Mr Armarni himself, no less. Fact: She is nothing,
in fact, like Cher from Clueless.
"I'm a totally different person to her," she agrees. "Her whole way of
being, her morals, are all way different from me. I do know a lot of girls
who are like her - materialistic and shallow. At school I had a hard time
fiting in with people because I was nothing like the other girls. Boys,
music, and make-up were the most important things and I always thought I was
stupid because I didn't know anything about that stuff!"
The more you talk to Alicia the more she comes across as someone infinitely
cluey. She doesn't find movie stardom glamorous, her role model is Jodie
Foster ("She's intelligent and very sweet," says Alicia), and instead of
blowing her big bucks on stupid stuff like, er, well, stuff, she's started
her own movie production company and wants to make movies not just act in
them. "River Phoenix would have been perfect for the movies I want to make,"
she reckons. "He was a really, really, good guy."
And while she's planning to become a full-on mover-and-shaker in the
business end of Hollywood as well as topping STAR!'s fave actress chart,
she's also got her feet firmly on the ground.
"It sickens me how important things like the fashion world are for some
people," she says. "It can be exiting but it's also very damaging. So many
people are sooo shallow and robotic. I just hope people realise that it's
not important how you look on the outside. It's more important what's on the
inside."
С уважением, Alex
[Team Alicia Silverstone] [Team LETI] [Team Laure Guibert]
[Team Chris De Burgh] [Team Kate Bush]
Alex Sizov
This was taken from the August 1995 issue of Premiere Magazine
Copyright 1995, Premiere Publishing Company, LCC
Love Me So Naughty
*Do they ever - but wholesome naif Alicia Silverstone is getting out of
jailbait with 'Clueless'.
Alicia Silverstone is cooing: "Baby, where are you going?"
On a crisp weekday morning in the winding Hollywood foothills above the
famed Chateau Marmont, Silverstone half trots alongside her companion of
nearly a year. They met in East L.A., where she discovered him, cut and
bleeding, while shooting the as-yet-unreleased indie detective thriller
"True Crime". Silverstone, then just 17, took him home, nursed him back to
health, and the two have been inseparable ever since. She even scored him a
cameo in "Clueless", a chaste teen comedy in which Silverstone headlines as
a spoiled, matchmaking Beverly Hills mall rat. But none of that togetherness
can keep Silverstone's favorite male from dashing off to explore an unruly
hedge that juts out over the narrow road. He is Silverstone's dog, Samson -
the first of many dogs the actress hopes to rescue by forming a foundation
to protect and limit the canine population vie sterilization. Planning her
first foundation at an age when most young women are applying theirs -
stardom does have its upside, though Silverstone's success doesn't seem to
be the product of ambition. "I'm not driven," insists the girl who, between
the ages of four and six, secretly believed her mother was a pop queen
Olivia Newton-John and once danced to "Physical" atop her family's coffee
table. "I didn't want to be a star, ever."
That assertion was blown to hell the instant Silverstone Rollerbladed
into a screeching close-up as Darian, the jailbait from hell in "The Crush",
a low-budget, Lolita-ish thriller that landed her a starring, albeit
wordless, gig in a trilogy of sultry Aerosmith music videos. Heavy rotation
fanned the heat, burning the image of Silverstone - suspended by a bungee
cord from a freeway overpass, triumphantly flipping her digitally obscured
middle finger at her no-good boyfriend - into the brains of every
red-blooded American with basic cable. A supporting turn in the throwaway
thriller "Hideaway" didn't hurt her career, but it did little to dispel the
notion of Silverstone-as-sexpot.
"I truly appreciate the response I've gotten, because in my heart I
know that it hasn't come from me exuding [sex]," Silverstone says. "I never
once, in any of my work, never am I trying to be sexy. It's just being."
Apparently, "just being" is enough. Consider Silverstone's burgeoning
on-line fan club - of which she's also only peripherally aware - where net
surfing devotees of Aliciamania trade dish and doctored naked GIFs of their
favorite actress. Her reputation has even reached her hometown temple in San
Francisco, where Silverstone attends services when visiting her grandfather.
"I thought the holiest place could not change, but it can," Silverstone
says, a bit bewildered. "The way people respond to you, they all become" -
she strikes a cooler-than-thou pose - "different."
With her hair pulled back in a ponytail, sans makeup and sporting her
de rigueur uniform of gray sweatpants, worn running shoes, and a faded
Georgetown University sweatshirt, Silverstone doesn't look much like a
starlet brimming with boy-toy brio. Add to that thte twitch in her right eye
(she's supposed to wear glasses, but doesn't), and she comes off as plain
and awkward as Sandy, the terminally wholesome character portrayed by
childhood idol Newton-John in "Grease", one of Silverstone's favorite films.
Were it not for the occasional flashes of her lopsided, Meg-Ryan-ish grin,
one would barely recognize the Silverstone whose Darian downshifted from
cunning to coy on a dime.
"There's such a happy-little-girl quality to her," says director Amy
Heckerling, who spotted her in Aerosmith's "Cryin'" video while writing
"Clueless" and immediately arranged a meeting. "We were sitting in a
restaurant and she was drinking soda out of a straw. Here we were talking
deals and careers and she's drinking like my nine-year-old daughter does.
You just see her and go, 'Aw, she's so sweet.'"
"She's sophisticated and unsophisticated at the same time," adds Raquel
Welch, who played Silverstone's mother in the TV movie "Torch Song". "You
want to be nurturing and protective of her. At the same time, I don't think
she's anybody's fool. She's a real smart girl. I know a little bit about
being a sex queen, so it's kind of amusing."
Like Darian, Silverstone is skating on that delicate edge between
girlhood and womanhood, as eager to let fly around the rink as she is
reluctant to let got of the side. "I'm only eighteen," Silverstone says, "so
no matter how sophisticated or centered I am, I'm still a little girl and I
haven't had a lot of experience in anything, really."
At an age when plenty of her peers are reveling in club hopping, pill
popping, and all-night keggers, Silverstone's don't drink-swear-rat-my-hair
approach stands out. "I have no interest in doing [drugs]," she says. "When
I want to relax and have a goot time, I go be with my dog or go eat, because
to me that's being bad."
"She's not a promiscuous girl," says Judi O'Neil, Silverstone's acting
mentor. "She's not a wild girl. She's not a free spirit."
Yeah, but even Sandy ditched the ponytail and got a perm. Doesn't
Silverstone ever want to be bad? She shakes her head, shrinking back from
the thought. "I'm so sensitive and emotional that if I give myself five
minutes, heaven forbid, and I turn off my phone, I feel, like, Oh my God,
what if my parents are trying to reach me? That's my badness."
"I was very upset," says Didi Silverstone, recalling the day her
legally emancipated, fifteen-year-old daughter left home - alone - to shoot
"The Crush" in Vancouver. "It was the beginning of her journey, this
journey. But life's never been quite the same. My little girl is a woman
now, and I'm the little girl. The roles are reversed."
Caretaking comes naturally to the daughter of Didi, a retired flight
attendant, and Monty Silverstone, a real estate financier. At fourteen,
Alicia used to climb behind the wheel when her senior classmates got too
drunk to drive home from their high school parties. Raised with an older
brother in Hillsborough, an affluent Bay Area suburb twenty minutes south of
San Francisco, Silverstone was a perceptive, if not carefree, child. With
free air travel earned from Didi's stewardess satus, the Silverstones
summered in their native England, where they made frequent trips to the
theater with their stagestruck daughter. "I was fascinated," says
Silverstone, certainly not the first child to throw up while en route to see
"Cats". "I knew I wanted to be an actress, but I didn't know what that
meant."
Fortunately, Daddy did. Around the time Alicia picked up the fourth-
place prize at a county fair for performing a routine to the theme song of
"Flashdance", Monty Silverstone landed his daughter a print agent in San
Francisco. But Alicia detested modeling and signed up for an intensive
acting workshop run by Judi O'Neil. "I thought she was a very sweet girl,"
O'Neil says. "She wasn't a hey-look-at-me or aren't-I-special. Alicia's
modest."
"I was awful," Silverstone admits. "I would get bright red and be so
shy, but I enjoyed [the classes] so much. Your heart is constantly pulsing,
pumping, feeling everybody's mind ticking. That energy was just so
attractive."
Meanwhile, Silverstone auditioned for plays at her high school.
Described by her peers as talkative and popular, Silverstone can recall no
adolescent exploit wilder than, on one Halloween, dressing up as Debbie
Gibson. By her sophomore year, she landed an agent in Los Angeles, and the
family Silverstone packed up their bags, headed south, and signed their
daughter up for a semester at Beverly Hills High.
By the time she got the "Crush" cattle call, Silverstone was fed up
with auditioning for fea.