thu 28/03/2024

Daryl Hannah | reviews, news & interviews

Daryl Hannah

Daryl Hannah


Daryl Hannah’s played sexy, sassy, funny and dangerous, from   the   naive mermaid in Splash, to the vicious one eyed assassin in director Quentin Tarantino’s ultra violent Kill Bill films. Her leading men are among the all-time greats: Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, Robert Redford in Legal Eagles, Michael Douglas in Wall St and Steve Martin in Roxanne.  And it would appear that real life has been just thrilling for the alluring actress. She started acting at 11 and was a bona fide     movie star by the time she was 23.
Her boyfriends would be on many women’s fantasy lists:  the late John F Kennedy Jr, rock star Jackson Browne, movie star Val Kilmer and magician David Blaine and to top it all off, at 46, she still looks like a goddess. When she ambles into the Santa Monica restaurant where we are meeting for lunch, no one, male or female, can keep their eyes off her. Tall   and willowy in a herringbone tweed coat over a low cut clingy blue dress, blonde hair loose over her shoulders and not a scrap of makeup, she has a natural beauty that doesn’t seem to have faded at all.

Yet all of it – looks, career, relationships and money take a backseat in Daryl Hannah’s life. While other actresses dream of Oscars, she has a different kind of goal. “I know it sounds   idealistic, but I’ve always wanted to save the planet. Since I was kid, living in harmony on the land with other creatures has always felt natural to me, common sense.”  says Hannah. And if that brings to mind the bland syrupy sentiments of the typical Toyota Prius driving star, it quickly becomes apparent that there is nothing wishy washy about this eco warrior. Ostensibly a glamorous and sophisticated celebrity, she has little in common with her   so-called green colleagues, who live in manicured Beverly Hills mansions. Hannah is a tough Amazonian woman living alone on her ranch in a solar powered house that she built entirely out of recycled stone and wood, in a remote corner of the Rockies. She grows her own organic fruit and vegetables (doing most of the farming herself) and spends her free time taking care of her four horses, two dogs and two cats that she rescued. She’s an authentic pioneer, who often risks life and limb in order to experience her natural lifestyle to the full.

My goal is to be totally self sufficient,” says Hannah, who has chosen to meet at one her favourite restaurants, Real Food Daily in Santa Monica. Actually it’s more of a trendy but unpretentious vegan café, where movie producers huddle over rice and beans at crowded tables. “I like it here,” says Hannah, a vegetarian since childhood, ordering a vegetable wrap with brown rice, a soymilk herbal tea version of a latte and a large beetroot, carrot and apple juice.  What makes her lifestyle fascinating is that Hannah grew up amidst wealth and privilege. Her step father Jerrold Wexler (whom she’s always regarded as her father).  was a Chicago property developer and philanthropist. Her natural father walked out when she was 7 and Wexler was her biggest inspiration growing up.


How  did your father influence you?
“ My dad was very wealthy but he wasn’t at all like a Donald Trump character, he never boasted, he was a wonderful, generous man and we were never encouraged to be gross about the money.   I’ve always made    my own money and supported myself completely.”

What kind of upbringing did you have?
We used to spend every summer at an intense survival course, Camp Cheley in Colorado,  between the ages of 7 and 17.  It was wonderful, we lived in covered wagons for two months, with no electricity. You go horse riding and back packing, you learn how   pitch a tent, tie up your belongings to keep them away from bears and how to groom horses, We swam, hiked and learned archery.   I think my dad sent us there   for character building and it really had a profound impact on us. My dad went himself when he was young.”

When you were diagnosed   as  borderline autistic at seven, what impact did that have on you?
I lived in a fantasy world for years, playing with  trolls and  my pet birds, I  was literally in a constant daydream and in fact I got kicked out of school.  The doctors recommended medication but my mom (Sue) just decided to treat me a different way, she took me out of school completely for a while and let me run wild in my imagination. “

You  attended private school what was that like?
“I hated school, it was distressing. I was really shy, I was an outsider and I had a hard time. One guy used to punch me every day in the stomach, the girls were all mean, they’d act like they wanted to be my friend and say ‘we’re going to play ‘koochie poochie’ and you have to shut your eyes and we’re going to rub each others faces’ and they would put blue paint on my face. I was the one really skinny child in the class, so skinny that they laughed at me; my legs were like a Biafran child.” Meanwhile at home, there were problems for Hannah and her siblings, stemming from her father’s wealth.    “People were threatening to kidnap the children of world’s leading businessmen like my dad and   we had   to be escorted to school by bodyguards, but we didn’t mind because they were like extended members of the family. It was more frightening for my parents than for us.” 

As you became famous, how did you deal with the attention?
“I got really scared and didn’t deal with fame well at all, I got more introverted and self conscious. When people looked at me, I thought they were making fun of me because that’s the only time people paid attention to me at school, so I didn’t get a lot of positive gratification.  But I deal with it better now.”


“I’ve broken my back twice very badly,” she says. “I had been doing a movie in Bulgaria and I was depressed while I was there because there are so many orphans and   stray dogs starving in the streets.  When I got home, I was so excited; I kissed the ground, then jumped on my horse Zanzibar and went galloping through the forest.  I saw a huge oak tree that had fallen and   went flying over it,” smiles the star reliving the experience with relish, almost as though she’d be quite happy doing the same thing again, “I literally felt ‘I can fly’ and then realized I don’t know really know how to jump   and I shouldn’t be jumping anyway because I always ride bareback.” The actress bursts out laughing. “Half way through the jump I knew it was a bad idea. I fell and really thought that was it for a minute. When you can’t breathe, you can’t move, you’re frozen and   nothing works, that’s a pretty good sign something’s broken.

At the time there were the obvious fears about serious injury: (the late Christopher Reeve, paralyzed in a horse riding accident, was a friend of hers). But thankfully, although she had   broken her sacrum at the base of her spine (the largest bone in the spinal column), she didn’t need surgery, just intense physiotherapy and sessions with her chiropractor. ” I’m laughing because I’m so lucky. As soon as I could get up and walk I knew how stupid I’d been. It made me count my blessings.’  She was recovering well until a few months ago, when incredibly; she broke her back again, playing a corrupt cop in her latest movie Vice, with tough guy actor, Michael Madsen. “Oh it was just a stunt gone awry,” she says with a shrug and another grin. “ I got shot three times; I had to fall and landed in the wrong place.”

The actress stresses that she’s not fearless, but will admit to possessing an overdeveloped sense of adventure, “I’m a bit of a daredevil,” says Hannah who goes scuba diving in Micronesia and helicopter snowboarding in the Canadian Rockies. “Up 20 thousand feet   it’s scary because I have vertigo. And sometimes you are on a really narrow precipice, but once you get out of the helicopter   it’s like floating or flying, like surfing on snow, you’re board rides up above the powder and you can make the most graceful line, it’s a beautiful feeling. It is true I do always push it a little too far though,” laughs the star who ended up with severe haemotomas, (internal bleeding) as a result of intensive martial arts training for Kill Bill. She learned pole dancing for her role as a stripper in Dancing At the Blue Iguana, by working at a seedy LA strip club for six months. “It was very dark and very painful, I was black and blue most of the time.”

Given her predilection for physical activity, it’s not surprising to discover that she also has a passion for fast cars. These days however, the only cars she’ll drive are her own   eco friendly trucks – her favourite is a black    1983 El Camino Chevrolet that   runs on biodiesel.“ It’s   great,” she says. “The back looks like a truck and the front looks like a car. The 1983 engine   was apparently one of the worst GM ever made, but diesel engines have a very long life span, a lot longer than a regular gas burning engine, they last for hundreds of thousands of miles. And the good thing   is that it’s lightweight and the biodesiel actually makes the engine more efficient and cleaner. I have one other car that I use, a green Volkswagen   four wheel drive truck for pulling my horses in the trailer when there’s heavy snow.”

“My fuel is used grease from fast food restaurants, The biodiesel producers filter it to take out the French fries and I get it delivered in 55 gallon barrels, which I pump off a regular gas station nozzle that goes into a barrel, and runs off my solar power,” says Hannah who intends to grow her own sunflowers and produce her own biodiesel from the oil.   “I do love the aesthetic of cars,” she says. ‘I still have my old 69 Buick Skylark and I have my Trans AM, that I drove in Kill Bill, it’s fantastic, a very bad ass muscle car basically, like the one Burt Reynolds drove in Smokey and The Bandit.  It’s black with a big golden eagle on the hood.” Until they’re converted however, Hannah resists the temptation to   put them back on the road. “Basically those cars are up on blocks not being used right now.  My intention is to make one an alcohol burner and convert the other into an electric car, “ says Hannah   with an excited expression on her face. “I’d like to be a spokesperson for sustainable transportation.”

She has already become the Hollywood spokesperson for solar power. She constructed her house in The Rockies   from an old salvaged barn   that was being knocked down to build a post office and literally ‘bermed’ or built her new house    into the hillside. “It’s a very effective way of insulating, because the earth helps to heat and cool the house,” she says. “It runs on solar power with a   battery back up system. It’s built in a south westerly facing direction so it can benefit from passive as well as active solar activity, which means in the winter when the sun goes lower it comes in through the windows   and the heat is stored in the floors and in the summer the sun goes higher and actually creates cooling and shade – I have a biodiesel back up generator in case the power goes out or the batteries don’t work. “

The house was designed by architect Jeffrey Cayle, with maple from the old barn. She    used rocks dug out from the mountain for the living room fireplace, decorated her house with non toxic paint and used small stones for a floor mosaic, which she designed and laid out herself.  And   instead of a normal sofa, she has a moss couch.“ It’s made of rocks from the hillside that are covered in moss, with a beautiful cushion on top, made from   harvested rubber and natural fibre, so you’re not actually sitting on the damp moss but you see it on the base.



Nowadays, Hannah has a relatively modest lifestyle. “I don’t like flying so I don’t like private planes any more than commercial ones, I take trains whenever I can. I don’t wear diamonds, I prefer to wear fossils,” she says fingering her long   necklace,”this is just brass not gold,” she laughs, “and I’m allergic to champagne.”  Instead of a mansion, her house has just one bedroom with an open plan kitchen and living room.   “ I’ve never understood why people live in huge houses. When I   first moved to California I would go to Beverly Hills and see the massive houses squashed next to each other and I thought it was the most insane thing I’d ever heard of. Don’t they understand that the real value is having outdoor space and seeing trees and animals?”

You can imagine her in the Wild West,For the two years it took to build her house, Hannah actually lived in a tepee and enjoyed the experience so much; she still camps out every summer, surrounded   by elk, deer, owls, eagles and coyotes – but also dangerous mountain lions and brown bears. “ I did have one scare when I was staying in the tepee with a friend.  She was out in the woods taking a pee and came running back with her pants around her ankles screaming. She had seen my dog Taco chasing a bear, so I raced off into the woods to chase Taco so he wouldn’t get eaten - then I remembered I was chasing a small bear    which could’ve been a baby, I was about 30 feet away from him and if the mother had seen us we would be dead, so I realized it was not a good idea, stopped chasing and went back. “

Does she miss the luxury of five star hotels?  “When I work I stay in nice hotels so I get plenty of luxury, I don’t need   that, my tepee is really an incredible structure, quite lovely,” says the star, adding that there are drawbacks.    “I was away filming in the winter, came back 10 days later and couldn’t find my tepee – I couldn’t even recognize where I was on my own property. I was wandering through what I thought was bushes and all of a sudden realized they were   tree tops and there was my tepee, sticking two feet out of the ground It was buried under snow and it took me two days to dig it out, it had completely collapsed, it was squashed in, but as soon as the sun hit it just popped back into the shape and nothing had been damaged incredibly.”
Hannah has never married. Intimate relationships appear to have been difficult for the actress too.  After a decade with Jackson Browne, she was involved with John F Kennedy Jr. for five years. Given her personality, I wonder why she’s always chosen  famous partners. “It’s all to do with who come across in your profession, what paths you cross in your world,” she shrugs, explaining that she never set out to fall in love with President Kennedy’s son, whom she met as a teenager. “  It’s one of those things you don’t necessarily manipulate, if you’re attracted to someone and they’re attracted to you it just happens and that was actually a pretty easy relationship compared to some of my others, in terms of our dynamic together. But he was a person like anybody else you know,” she laughs. “He had his ups and downs.”

There’ve been various serious relationships since then, but Hannah is currently single. ‘Either you find someone you fancy or not, you know. I have lots of friends so I don’t get lonesome, but sometimes of course I go    ‘oh it would be so nice to have a soul mate who could identify with what I’m going through, it would be lovely to share a special moment with someone.’ ”  She would like a family and is seriously considering adoption. “ I do know that there are over half a million kids right here in the States who need to be adopted or need homes, that are so called hard to adopt ‘ kids because they’re not babies and come from troubled backgrounds, so I think that’s probably    the way I would go.”

At the moment, Hannah’s life is full. She has several new films including Love and Virtue, a drama with Peter O Toole and John Malkovicch and she has been campaigning to stop human trafficking.  Without actively deciding to spearhead a green celebrity movement, she is widely viewed as the most knowledgeable environmentalist in Hollywood and is working as a consultant on a range of big scale projects, including the massive Earth Aid concert this summer, that Al Gore is organizing along with a host of rock musicians. And there are constant requests from movie stars wanting ecological advice. “A couple of days ago I was at a party at Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas’s house for Al Gore to celebrate his Oscar winning film,  ‘The Inconvenient Truth’,” says Hannah,   “Penelope Cruz and Leo Di Caprio were there and loads more stars. Melanie and Antonio’s 10 year old daughter Stella has convinced them to ‘green’ their houses so I’m going to help them get on solar power in all their five homes and get all their cars on bio diesel. “

Hannah is well aware that it’s easy for rich celebs like Melanie and Antonio to join her Green crusade, but she’s convinced that with a serious focus on research and green policies on an international level, alternative energy could be far more widespread and cost effective.    It’s unlikely that the current American President is ever going to consult Daryl Hannah for eco-advice, but I wonder what she’d do if the next President  – perhaps Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton invited her to the White House in an advisory capacity in 2009?  “Well I don’t have much faith in politicians. I think they’re all sellouts, they’re not courageous leaders, but I’d say that I’d like to see large-scale investment by the government to make solar power more efficient, more available and affordable for everyone. It’s the cleanest form of energy available. We spend more money at the gas pump in an hour than we do on solar research in a year. That’s plain stupid. We need to concentrate on conservation and alternative forms of energy, rather than relying on fossil fuels.  We really have to step up to the plate before we see extinction of species and destruction on a wide scale. I think things are changing, but I’m worried that they’re not changing fast enough.”

END

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