She's the brave beauty Daniel Day-Lewis was willing to die for in The Last of the Mohicans. In real life, though, Madeleine Stowe is a little more timid. And much more mysterious.
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"Who?" everyone keeps asking. "Madeleine Stowe," I tell them. "You know, she was in The Last of the Mohicans." The light dawns in their eyes. "Oh, the beautiful one with the dark hair? She was great." Talk about understatements: Stowe is probably the most exquisite woman in the movies these days. She's like a '40s actress come to life in the '90s. A woman with grace and style. A woman who, even when she's the lead, lets you care about everyone else in the film. A woman who seems equally at home in the Wild West or in the wildest pool hall in the big city. A woman who could probably uncross her legs on-screen, and you'd still be staring at her face!
This is how great Madeleine Stowe is: In Stakeout, she made Richard Dreyfuss seem sexy. Really sexy. It was nothing short of a miracle.
This is how great Madeleine Stowe is: In the mess that was The Two Jakes, she possessed such an uncanny charm that even the most irate critics didn't take shots at her.
This is how great Madeleine Stowe is: In The Last of the Mohicans, she held her own with Daniel Day-Lewis. Held her own? Hell, she nearly stole the film.
This is how great Madeleine Stowe is: She wants to do this interview while we're hiking or horseback riding. But I want to do it by the pool at the Mondrian (I'll buy lunch). So we compromise--she invites me to take a ride to her ranch outside Santa Barbara so she can check on the horses. And she'll even do the driving. I love her already.
When I get to Stowe's house, her husband meets me at the door. (You know him--he's Brian Benben, the star of HBO's "Dream On.") "Come on in," he says, so I do. The house looks like he and Madeleine just got there--boxes on the dining room table, sheets thrown over the couches, nothing on the walls. Before I can ask about this state of disarray, Madeleine is standing in front of us...with that long hair cascading down her back, no makeup, wearing a hat, a denim shirt, jeans and hiking boots, and looking drop-dead gorgeous. We shake hands, and then she sort of pushes me out the door, even though what I really want to do is look around in there. Brian walks us to the car, he and Madeleine get the two dogs settled in the back, and then he pulls her to him, puts one hand deep into her hair, massages her neck, and kisses her good-bye. I could watch this for hours.
"Did you just move in?" I ask as we start the drive.
Madeleine turns red. "Please don't be appalled by our home," she says. "It's just the way we live."
"What? I wasn't appalled. I just meant that you don't seem to have unpacked..."
"Well, that's it exactly. We've lived there for years now, but we don't really have things. And the ranch, we've had that for about a year and a half and, you'll see, it still has the same awful carpet and three pieces of furniture that don't even belong there. It's just a wreck. There's this Wild West poster that Brian insisted on putting there...it looks ridiculous on the wall, but I guess he just wanted something to hang up."
"Is it because you're both busy?" I ask.
"Oh, it's that and more. I think I could be happy living in hotels for the rest of my life. It's partially that I don't like to invite people into my life. Should I talk about this?"
"Definitely," I say, in that voice your psychiatrist uses when you have asked that question.
"It has something to do with from when I was a kid," she continues. "My dad was sick from the time I was six, he had MS, and it was uncomfortable for me to bring other kids into the house because of what was going on. And now, if Brian wants to have things on the wall, he has to do it himself, because I won't."
"Hmmm," I say, "it's an odd way to live, isn't it?"
"Yes, it's a very strange way. I want to get more settled, though. I dream about it, about how the house would be, about how we'd have people over..."
"You'd freak out if you saw my house," I say, thinking of the friends who come in and out, the moat of books around the bed, the collections of crap that line every available space.
"Oh," she says, "your house would be perfect."
"How do you know?"
"Because that's the way it's supposed to be. I can tell that you're very grounded. And what I do is deliberately to keep people away. It's a really horrible thing. I mean, it's like I figure that one of these days, I'll have time to sit back and enjoy it. In my fantasies, I'm having friends and people over. But I truly feel like something is squeezing right here in my chest at the idea of somebody coming over to my house. This is the only big hurdle I feel I've got in my life right now to get over. I'm embarrassed about it. And I can't believe I'm telling you..."
"Don't worry," I say, holding up the tape recorder, "it's just a little secret we'll share with all of Movieline's readers. They're a very sympathetic bunch."
Madeleine lets out a raucous laugh. "I'm going to sound like a total nut job."
"That's why they sent me. I always sound crazier than the people I interview."
"I want to have a baby soon," she continues, being an interviewer's dream. "And I wonder about if I want the baby because I think that will make my life more normal."
"Uh, I haven't noticed that having babies makes your life anything like normal," I tell her.
"Well, that's what I mean. Having a baby will mean that I'm gonna have to move into our house finally. Really move into it, and make it settled. Aside from our musical instruments, and our animals, we're really not tied to anything that we own too much."
"I know you play the piano," I say, trying to move us to safe ground.
"The violin, too. I just learned to play for Blink." she says, referring to the thriller she recently made with Aidan Quinn and director Michael Apted. "When I was in Chicago I bought two old Italian violins from the 1700s. I went crazy."
"Your house is a shithole and you bought two violins from the 1700s?" I ask.
We both dissolve into hysterics.
"I told you it sounds crazy," she says.
"No, no, not at all," I tell her, and roll my eyes. Again I try to get us back on level ground.
"When you worked with Jack Nicholson on The Two Jakes --"
"I love Jack," she shrieks. "I loved working with him. He was so generous, and he let me explore all the options in that character. I didn't know what she was going to be like and I was so nervous, but Jack would try anything, he was fearless, and that made me feel so much better. What were you going to ask?"
"Who the hell knows? How about Richard Dreyfuss?"
"Oh, that was a hoot. Stakeout was my first Hollywood movie, and he was a real pro. We had fun." (Stowe appeared uncredited in the sequel Another Stakeout as a favor to director John Badham, who'd given her first role.)
"How about Kevin Costner?"
"Is this on the record or off?" she asks.
"On," I say, hoping it won't make a difference to her.
"Kevin was okay. He was very aware of his power. Revenge was not a good experience for me, because it was not the picture I envisioned it to be. Or what Tony [Scott, the director] thought it would be. The woman in that story was very strong, but because she does this thing, and gets punished for it, they had to make her weak and whiny. Which was not the way she was written, and not the way she ought to have been. But..."
"Okay," I say, "it's off the record." She starts to laugh. So excuse us while we have a little chat here about Kevin.
It's about a half an hour later now. Time to talk about Madeleine's part in Robert Altman's new film Short Cuts. Or better, time to find out how Madeleine ever got to the point of being in hits like Stakeout and The Last of the Mohicans, and bombs like The Two Jakes and Revenge.
"My notes say you got started in theater..." I begin.
"I was seen in a theater," Madeleine says.
"Right. And then..."
"No," she says, "listen to what I'm saying. I was in the theater, but I wasn't acting. That was bullshit. I lied. I got approached by an agent when I was at the theater--painting sets and stuff. When I wanted to get acting work, I had to lie about my credits, and for some reason, that lie has stayed with me. Every story they print talks about those theater experiences."
"Let's put an end to that story right now," I tell her.
"Okay. It was a total lie, because nobody would take me seriously."
"Good. Now, for the first time, let's have the real story of Madeleine Stowe."
"All right. I wanted to go to USC cinema school and also study journalism. I went there and took a little acting so I'd know more about how everything worked, and I did two scenes. That was the extent of it. I was so bad. And I was more interested in just hanging out with these actors, because they were incredibly exotic to me. So I would just do all the stuff that needed to be done, like scraping paint off the walls and handing out programs.
One of the first real theater productions I worked on was The Tenth Man, which Richard Dreyfuss starred in. I loved watching him, he was really kind of at one of the peaks of his career. This is around the time of Close Encounters. I'd gotten fired from the job I was working on--I was a hostess in a restaurant--because they told me I was too spaced out and that I didn't know what I was doing. Which was totally true. So I had more time to go to the theater, because I had nothing else to do. One day, Dreyfuss's agent, his name was Mishkin, he saw me walking down the aisle of the theater. We were introduced, and he asked me if I would come in and meet him. He was kind of a legendary old guy. And then I started working as an actress, and I made up these lies about the plays. I even made up the titles. One of them was Speaking Of."
"I know," I say. "I saw that title and thought it sounded great and I was wondering why I never heard of the play."
"Now you know," she says, the giggles building again.
"Thank God you got that off your mind," I tell her. "Now maybe you can concentrate on getting your life settled."
"Nah, I'm about to do another movie, a Western called Bad Girls, with Mary Stuart Masterson, Andie MacDowell and Drew Barrymore. The deal is that we're women prostitutes in the Wild West. Very respectable women turned to prostitution back then because their husbands would die and there was no way of earning money and they were stranded out in the West. My character, Cyclone, is a woman who came from a very respectable family and just completely rebelled against it and took off and started running with a gang of real outlaws. She ends up running this brothel. It's a great story."
When we get to the ranch, Madeleine stops to introduce me to the horses. A new one has just been delivered, and she warns me that he probably won't be friendly. But she talks to all of them in this hypnotic tone that puts them, and me, into a trance. The new horse is nuzzling my neck within 15 minutes.
"Would you like me to get you some water?" Madeleine asks as we walk back to the house.
"Wait a minute," I say, coming awake. "You're not going to ask me to go into the house?"
Madeleine looks like a bird ready to take flight.
"Listen to me," I say, "I'm going inside. We just drove two hours and I am definitely going into the house. Don't worry, I won't peek in the drawers or the medicine cabinet."
She starts to laugh. "There is no medicine cabinet."
She ain't kidding. The bedroom has a bed and a lamp. Period. The bathroom not only doesn't have a medicine cabinet, it has no mirror.
"Jesus," I say, wandering around the partially furnished living room. "You guys are like some weird Buddhist sect...don't leave your mark on anything."
"I told you," she laughs. "But c'mon, I'll show you the upstairs." Two bedrooms, two beds, that's it.
We eat lunch at a little Mexican place where they make their own tortillas, and then head back to L.A. "Let me ask you something," I say as we cruise along. "In almost every movie I've seen of yours, there's always a scene where the director just has to get you naked. Sometimes they just linger there by your butt. It's almost funny."
"I've given a lot of thought to that lately," she says. "I never used to feel particularly nervous about love scenes. As I get older, I feel a lot more vulnerable about the whole situation, and it's very, very difficult for me to get in bed with another man. One of the things I liked in Mohicans was that there wasn't that kind of love scene, yet there was a lot of emotional intimacy between the characters. I think the reason I get a bit upset is that in the editing of love scenes, so much of the substance of the character goes, and the body is left there. When I talked to Bob Altman about Short Cuts, he wanted me for the role that Julianne Moore did. But I did not want to do that bottomless scene. I'm no longer much of a willing participant in that. Bob is great. He's not vicious. He has this way of getting these really personal things out of people, but I don't feel a maliciousness behind what he's doing. He's cynical, yet he has a lot of compassion. So when I told him I couldn't do that, he said, 'Okay, fine, let me think about this.' And he came back to me with this other part."
"I loved your character. She's totally politically incorrect. Her husband's cheating on her and she still wants to stay with him."
"Bob said, 'The main thing about her is, I don't really think she's got much of an attitude about it. She's just accepted it, it's just the way her life is. What would you like to do with it?' And I thought about it and came back to him and said, 'How about if her husband is a compulsive liar and makes these outrageous, outlandish stories up, and she's totally into it? She's the kind of woman who watches "Hard Copy," and reads the National Enquirer, and she can't wait to see what kind of ridiculous story he's gonna come up with, so she sets him up every time.'"
"Did you improvise that one great line?"
"We would improvise things in rehearsals. One day Tim [Robbins] made some kind of remark like, 'How can you bother me about this, I've been out all night with the crack kids and saving people's lives.' And I turned to him and said, 'Whose crack are we talking about?' It was just totally thrown in. It's weird, because she happens to like this unhealthy relationship. It gives her something to do. And I think it's a very honest thing for Altman to go for, because I think there are quite a few women who need that in their lives. So, anyway, I got to do a Bob Altman movie, but I didn't have to walk around naked."
"Wait a minute," I say. "Don't you play a scene where you're modeling for your sister and you don't have anything on?"
"Yes," she says with a laugh. "I didn't think you'd remember. It wasn't that big a deal, and it felt totally fine to me. In Blink, I had it in my contract that I would absolutely not be forced to do any nudity, and what I did choose to do would be of my own choosing at that particular moment, and I had the right to go over it with the director, and anything I didn't like would be destroyed. But there's this love scene between me and Aidan [Quinn]. We had very carefully discussed this a couple of days ahead of time. We're lying on our sides and Aidan is basically entering me from behind. You don't see anything, you only see my breasts for a flash, and my character is talking about how she could be with a man, any man, they're all interchangeable to her because she's blind. Aidan's character is totally incapable of being in any kind of relationship. Anyway, you see what's happening to these two people. It'll be interesting to see what the ratings are, because, even though you don't see anything at all, there is something about it that shocks a person. We're not accustomed to seeing people like that."
"Is that a big no-no, getting it from behind?"
"Well, yeah, I think so. I mean, it's not anal intercourse, but it's like somehow, in their head, they think that you're buttfucking."
We laugh so hard we have to pull over to the side of the road.
"You can maim and slaughter," I say, "but no buttfucking."
"Yeah. It's so crazy. When you shoot love scenes, the emphasis is almost always on the female, because the director would rather look at the woman than at the man. When we were shooting the sequence to Blink, it was really, really important to me that they got Aidan's story in that love scene. To the point where we went back and picked up something, a bit where I'm sound asleep and you see what's happening to him. I don't want to sit there and look at me, I don't want to sit there and look at the woman, I want to see the two people together. But it's like the director wants to be that man.
"When I did Unlawful Entry, it had this scene where Ray Liotta beats up the guy who broke into Kurt Russell's and my house. They originally had a much more severe beating scene that evoked horrible feelings."
"Yeah, it was right after the Rodney King thing..."
"Yes. And Jonathan Kaplan did it to really mess with people's feelings about this black guy entering the white person's home. You were supposed to feel anger toward him, then turn around and see him become victimized. Jonathan really wanted to toy with people. I thought it was an interesting thing for him to attempt to do. But they had to cut that out, because people couldn't take it. They would rather see someone get shot in this totally unrealistic fashion at the end of the movie."
"I'm glad you brought that up," I say. "I wanted to ask you...what were you doing at the end of the movie? Wasn't your husband about to get killed and you were having a yogurt or something? What the fuck was going on there?"
Stowe laughs her full-throated whoop. "All of a sudden, I was told to crouch down, on the floor in the bathroom, freaking out. I mean, I had no idea what was going on, it made no sense. All they knew is they wanted to kill Ray over and over and over again. It was a thriller, y'know? Most of them don't work too well."
"They've gotta be killed twice in a thriller now."
"Three times," she says. "And for some reason it's okay."
"There was this amazing scene in Mohicans," I say, "when you and Daniel are hiding from the Huron war party and you tell him how surprised you are by America and he says he's sorry you're disappointed."
"And I say, 'On the contrary, it's more deeply stirring to my blood than any imagining could possibly have been...'"
"When I heard that line, I almost died. I loved it. There aren't too many actresses that could get away with that line."
"Let me tell you, we had lines in that movie that had me rolling on the floor. But Michael [Mann, the director] pulled it off. He really did. I love him, because he had this great vision and he kept to it. He knew from the beginning exactly what he wanted, and that's what he got."
We stop to buy Tootsie Roll Pops and some harsh, lemon-tasting gum that Stowe loves, and you can tell that the checkout guy recognizes her but can't place her.
"Does that happen to you a lot?" I ask.
"More to Brian than to me. Brian thinks it's hilarious. He really, really gets off on all this. He's sweet with people who come over to him. I don't deal with it well. But I don't have the kind of face or personality where people come over to me the way they do to him. I was coming off an airplane after I finished Blink, and Brian came to pick me up, and right away there were like six photographers who leapt in front of us and started taking pictures. I felt really horrible. I mean, my arms were shaking and I kept my head down and I was ill. I understand that you should be thrilled in a sense over that kind of recognition, but I was so upset and shaken by it."
"Now you understand why Sean Penn punches photographers."
"Totally, because something feels really dirty about it, like that they were catching somebody, you know, fucking or something."
"How long have you guys been together?"
"Brian and I? Since 1980."
"That's a long time. In Hollywood years, that's probably a century."
"Yeah. When I was a kid, my biggest crush was on Joel McCrea. And--"
"Your biggest crush was Joel McCrea?"
"Yeah, he's a wonderful actor."
"How old were you?"
"I don't know, but young. When I was a kid I used to watch all his stuff. I still have a huge crush on him. I really wanted to meet him, but I think that maybe he died. But I just love him. You know who he reminds me of? Harrison Ford. So why am I telling you this?"
"Beats me," I say. "How do you and Brian manage when you're apart so much?"
"We talk on the phone, at least twice a day," she says. "It's so important. Do you speak to your boyfriend when you're here?"
"Morning, noon and night. It's what makes me able to stay on the road so long."
"I wonder what it's going to be like when one of us is alone," she says.
"You mean, alone, like not together, or alone, like one of you is dead?"
"When one of us leaves this earth and the other one's left there. I wonder if that's why I want to have a baby, so that when I'm old, I'll have someone to be with if Brian's croaked on me. Do you understand?"
"Perfectly. Sometimes I ride along in my car and I get uncontrollably morose at the thought that Steve has died. I cry and scream and then...I realize he's fine! I get so overwhelmed with happiness."
"Martha," she says, "you really are crazy."
"Told you."
"You're a very social creature though, aren't you? You have a lot of friends, right?"
"Yeah, I do." I say. "How about you?"
"No. I was thinking about it the other day. I have about maybe two good friends."
"Well, you're fucked, Madeleine."
"I am totally fucked. I have one person I call on a day-to-day basis aside from my husband, and other people I feel really, like, you know, great about, and maybe one other person, maybe two, but I really don't have friends. I have some acquaintances. It's starting to take its toll on me. And it's not as if the opportunity is not afforded me. I just...I tend to get on really, really well with people I work with. I feel this affection toward most of them, the people that I really like, and I enjoy seeing them every day. But I don't have the energy or time to go out and socialize because it's about getting up and doing the work and going back to bed and conserving a certain amount of energy. It's turning out to be one of the real regrets in my life. I really have to do something to change that, you know."
"Okay, let's see, the list is...get more settled, make more friends..."
"It's the same thing, Martha. If I fix one, the other will be fixed, too. But it's not all that bad. When we were at the ranch today, I was thinking that I'm about to turn 35. And my dreams for myself were that by the time I got to this age, I'd like to be happy with someone, have a ranch with horses, be doing really well at my work. And I'm doing every single thing I ever said I would do when I was a kid."
"So what's the punch line?"
"I'm totally happy! It just took me by surprise."
When we pull up to Madeleine's house, I gather my things and head for my car. "Don't you want to come in?" she asks.
I feel as if I've been given a gift, and so, for the first time in my life, I don't snoop around, I don't ask a million questions. I just sit and have a glass of juice and watch Madeleine try to act as if this is the kind of thing she does every day.
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Martha Frankel interviewed Jeff Bridges for the cover story in the September Movieline.