The Flint Beneath the Shimmer

"Look, I'm 37, smart and, having been a model, I've been through it, but even I looked at a magazine yesterday and thought: 'I've got to lose 10 pounds.' It's that powerful and insidious. Young girls look at supermodels and think that the druggy anorexic look is something to attain. I was trying to explain to the inter-viewer how hard it was for me to maintain the anorexic body favored in the modeling world. I'm not an anorexic girl, thank God. I told the interviewer I'd done some cocaine just as a way of losing weight, but what we really talked about at length was the dilemma, the pressure fell by women. But what came out of the interview was that I was a cocaine addict. I was mauled by everybody."

"The dreaded "Hard Copy" closed in. "'Hard Copy' called, everybody called, the story even hit my sister's local paper," she says, shaking her head in disbelief. "I tried to tell my sister that it's not going to be the last time I'm misjudged in order to sell an article. I've also been abused for having been open about my mother's alcoholism, when all I wanted to do was to say that it's healthy to talk openly about subjects that were once taboo. Instead, the way it came out in the press. I fell I hurt my mother's family, who come from a great, proud farming family and arc from a generation where even talking about alcoholism is just not acceptable."

MacDowell grew up in a South Carolina mill town, a locale Harold Ramis likens to "Dogpatch." She and her three older sisters were raised by a beloved, troubled mother, an alcoholic, who was divorced from their father, a lumber company owner, when MacDowell was six. When drinking and erratic behavior cost her mother her teaching job, Mac-Dowell flipped burgers at McDonald's right alongside her. Through it all she remained emotionally bond-ed to her father, who, she has said, phoned her nightly and saw her on weekends. Her mother died several years ago; her father is still living. "I'm not angry or bitter at my parents," she says, "I'm only sorry for whatever pain they've ever felt. The things I've gone through have made me strong. That's why I hope any stress or challenge I put on my children will help them deal with other things later."

Having had a brush with notoriety, how did MacDowell react to the arrest of her Four Weddings costar, who was found cavorting in his BMW with a Sunset Boulevard fille de joie? "My immediate feeling was concern that perhaps he was drinking too much and that it had had some kind of negative effect on his life. The headlines haven't really harmed him. In fact, they've made him a bigger celebrity, although I'm sure it's not the way he would have liked to have gone about it. He has his dignity. I really felt sorry for him when the news broke because, boy, in England, they just grab hold of that stuff and that's it. They're terrible."

MacDowell appears energized by the awareness that she may soon be stepping out into a wider movie arena. "It's about growing confidence," she believes, "I'm finally in a place where I feel confident and ready to do something interesting and powerful. I'm looking for material that will show people, which was exactly my intention in doing sex, ties, and videotape. I thought, "I finally have the courage to do some-thing that will show casting directors what I'm capable of.'"

Not having decided yet on her next picture, she talks of yearning to spend more time with her family, who have just flown into Texas to spend a few days with her. "I'm all too good about making constructive use of my lime. If anything, i need to spend more time doing absolutely nothing, especially when we're finished shooting." But with interesting movie offers coming in with more regularity, will she feel all the more acutely the tussle between family and career? MacDowell grows very still and relates this story: "I rented a house at the beach last year and my dad was sleeping in this one room," she says, almost whispering. "After he left the beach house, I went into that room and felt all these emotions, all these confused feelings of love, pain, misunderstanding, fear of losing him, regret for all the time I've already lost with him. Just from going into that room where my father had been, these feelings were swimming around. I want some miraculous script to fall into my lap that lets me play the kind of woman I described to you earlier and that has the complexity of the incident I just described to you."

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Jim Carrey for the June '96 issue of Movieline.

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