Alicia Silverstone
Actress
Alicia Silverstone has been around
for so long that it is hard to
believe she is only 28. She started modelling when she was
eight, starred in her first film at
15, and made her name playing
the superficial yet kind-hearted teenager Cher
in the hit movie Clueless when she was just 18.
She is slim and gorgeous with a flawless
complexion — the standard Hollywood look
— and it is hard to believe that, after her role
as Batgirl in Batman & Robin, for which she
was required to put on weight, she would
be faced with chants of 'Fat girl! Fat girl!'
wherever she went.
She recalls:
Once, when she was asked to describe herself, her summing up ran to just three words:
'deep, selfless, passionate'. Which goes some
way to explaining why she once smuggled all
her empty water bottles from her London hotel
room back to California, fearing that they
wouldn't be recycled otherwise. 'I've got to
save the world,' she said.
She is a curious combination of perkiness
and bite. Her perkiness enables her to put a
positive spin on almost everything, while her
bite emerges when you delve, in her opinion,
too deeply into 'personal matters', which really don't seem that personal at all. But, given
that she has worked in showbusiness most of her life, perhaps she deems such defence mechanisms necessary.
She begins perkily enough,
however, discussing her latest
film, Beauty Shop, a hit comedy in the U.S., starring Queen Latifah and Kevin Bacon. It's a lively enough movie with
Alicia playing the lone white
hairdresser, Lynn, in Queen Latifah's salon, although both
are somewhat overshadowed
by Bacon's narcissistic hairstylist, Jorge.
Says Alicia:
Still, when you've worked for as many years as Alicia has, then any free time you can get
to sort out your filing cabinets
must seem like a blessing, although it's baffling why anyone would want to take them
to work and install them in
their trailer.
After the success of Clueless,
which took £150 million at
the box office, Alicia landed a £7 million multi-picture development deal, and
produced her first film at 19.
She has worked non-stop ever since, sometimes successfully, as in Kenneth Branagh's
Love's Labour's Lost, and sometimes not so
successfully, as in Batman & Robin, which
flopped. Her last TV series, Miss Match, was
taken off the air after just one series, although she earned a Golden Globe nomination
and rave reviews for her role
as a divorce lawyer by day
and matchmaker by night.
She has packed a lot into a
short space of time and gives the impression of being much
older than her years. She says:
Alicia's father, Monty, is a
British-born property developer, while her mother, Didi,
is a former Pan Am stewardess from Dunfermline,
Scotland. The couple met in
Florida, and Alicia and her
older brother, David, were
brought up in San Francisco. Says Alicia:
At the age of 13, she discovered that she had
an elder sister, Kezi, living in London. Kezi,
the child of a relationship that Monty Silverstone had before he married Didi, couldn't have had a more different upbringing from her
famous sister. For while Alicia was brought up
in a secure home in relative affluence in the
States, Kezi spent her childhood moving
between several different foster homes, her
mother unable to cope with the rigours of
bringing up a child on her own after Monty left
her just months after Kezi's birth.
In an interview earlier this year, Kezi said,
'It wasn't much of a childhood', although it is
interesting to note that, like Alicia, Kezi also
started modelling (though not until she was in
her teens) and did some acting, too, with small
roles in Footballers' Wives and Jonathan
Creek. Now, she is best known for her musical
career, having had a hit with her single What
A Feeling.
But it was not until she was 18 that
Kezi decided to contact Barnardos
to try to trace her father (who,
unbeknown to her, was also trying
to find her), and in 1990, when
Kezi was 19 and Alicia 13, they
finally met. Alicia was told by her father, at
first, that Kezi was a distant cousin (he wanted
the girls to get to know one another before
telling Alicia that she had a half-sister). After
Kezi had returned to England, Alicia's father
eventually came clean and told his youngest
daughter the truth. She phoned Kezi straight
away and, incredibly for someone so young and
seemingly without a hint of rancour, told her,
'I've always wanted a big sister.'
Alicia is cagey when discussing her family,
particularly this aspect of her childhood, but
she admits that she and Kezi:
'We became psychologically connected very
quickly. Kezi lives in England and I'm out
here, so although we kept in touch, it hasn't
always been easy to meet up. But over the
years, we've spent a lot of time together. One of
our cousins died in the World Trade Center
attacks on September 11, and although that was
a horrible time, it was also when a lot of families were able to reconnect...
'It was so strange, but ever since I was a
young girl, any chance I could get to hang
around an older girl and be her friend, I would
take it. When I was two, I was hanging out with
five-year-olds, so maybe somewhere, subconsciously, I knew I had an older sister.'
When asked if they've ever discussed their
respective childhoods, Alicia clams up — 'this
is getting way too personal' — but she admits
that they will
And has Alicia seen Kezi acting
on TV yet? She looks startled.
Alicia's own professional career began at the
tender age of six, when her father took some
snapshots of her lying on a sheepskin rug in a
bathing suit, and thought that his daughter had
a future as a model. She modelled for a few
years, an experience she claims not to have
particularly enjoyed, but which 'enabled me to
pay for acting classes. I knew from a very
young age that I wanted to act and my dad was
really encouraging.'
Alicia says that she loved acting lessons
because:
Why would
someone so young require therapy or catharsis? She sighs:
At 15, she won her first movie role, as a
teenager obsessed with a journalist twice her
age in the film The Crush. While making the
film, she caused a stir by going to court to
became 'legally emancipated' from her parents
and declared an adult, in order to get around
child labour laws that would have interfered
with her working hours.
The action, supported by her parents, was
described in many newspapers as a 'divorce',
something that still rankles with Alicia who
insists that she:
The Crush was followed by several appearances in Aerosmith videos, a few TV shows and then her role in Clueless, which shot her to
worldwide fame.
After that, it was perhaps inevitable that
a backlash would ensue and it did, almost
immediately. Her first film venture as a
producer, on the movie Excess Baggage,
which she co-starred with Benicio Del Toro
was a flop, as was her next film, Blast From
The Past.
Then came Batman & Robin,
which Alicia starred as Batgirl opposite George Clooney and
Chris O'Donnell — a film notable for the vitriol of the reviews
and the harsh assessment of Alicia's
figure, encased as it was for much of the film in
a skintight catsuit.
'The irony was that I became a vegan out of personal choice, and my body just got so
healthy and skinny, and my skin became radiant, that I started looking fabulous anyway. So it all worked out in the end.'
And does Alicia think that far too much emphasis is put on looks these days, to the point where plastic surgery in Hollywood has got out of control? She screws up her face.
Which is all very well, except that the things
that are interesting are the subjects she clams
up on. She has been seeing Chris Jarecki, the singer of punk band S.T.U.N., for several years but won't talk about him; and, predictalbly
when asked about rumours of on-set rormances
with Benicio Del Toro and Kenneth Branagh insists, 'Just write that they're all true'', in a
tone that gives absolutely nothing away.
But she does admit that she would eventually
like to start a family:
'I'd love to raise a family on a farm and grow
my own food, and grow my hair down to my
ankles and be a kind of punk-rock hippy.'
Just don't expect Alicia to tell you about it when she
does. That's too personal.
alicia silverstone gallery
dvds (shipped from uk)
batman and robin uk dvd | beauty shop uk dvd
alicia silverstone
biog. |
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alicia silverstone
biog. |
gallery | dvds | videos |
other galleries
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