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Paquicking it in
The Piano's Anna Paquin returns to the screen in Jane Eyre
Pam Lambert
We last saw her in 1994 at the Oscars, wearing her
royal-blue taffeta dress and matching beaded beret, and clutching a gold
statuette. Now, perched tentatively on the edge of a sofa in her suite at
Manhattan's stately St. Regis Hotel, Anna Paquin looks more like a bird about
to bolt than the star of three major motion pictures. Ask so much as what her
older brother is doing back home in New Zealand, and she seems eager to seek
the security of the next room, where her father, Brian, is waiting.
Which is understandable, and part of her charm. Even now, two years after
taking home the Best Supporting Actress prize for The Piano, Paquin is
only 13. And because her fiercely protective parents have succeeded in
shielding her from the downside of success, Paquin is submitting only to a
handful of interviews to promote her new movie, Franco Zeffirelli's Jane
Eyre.
Paquin spouts no soundbites, just as, on the set, she never agonizes
over her motivation. "She has tremendous natural ability that is unschooled in
the best sense of the word," says Jeff Daniels, who plays her father in another
film, Flying Wild, due this fall. "Sometimes she doesn't even know what
she's doing or how good she is at certain moments."
One of those would have to be that special night when Paquin stood onstage at
Los Angeles's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in front of a TV audience of 1
billion. Wide-eyed and holding the Oscar Gene Hackman had just handed her, she
delivered an endearingly breathless list of thank-yous.
"I was completely overwhelmed. I just thought I was going to sit there and go
clap, clap, clap, and the other person goes up and gets it," says Paquin.
Looking back, though, she has no qualms about how she handled being the
second-youngest person ever to win an Oscar. (Tatum O'Neal was 10 when she won
Best Supporting Actress for 1973's Paper Moon.) "There's nothing you can
do to prepare yourself if you have no idea what to expect." Paquin never had a burning
ambition to act. The youngest of three children of
recently separated high school teachers--her father is a Canadian native who
teaches phys ed, her mother, Mary, a New Zealander and an English
instructor--Anna was leading the life of your average 9-year-old near New
Zealand's capital, Wellington, when a friend told her about a newspaper ad for
film auditions. On a lark, Paquin says, she "got up the courage to call"--her
father told her she would have to phone herself--and beat out 5,000 other
hopefuls for the part of Holly Hunter's daughter in Jane Campion's The
Piano. Even then, the family didn't realize how big the movie would be.
Recalled Brian Paquin: "I told my mother in Winnipeg that, if we're lucky, it
might come to her local theater in a few years. Suddenly we're dealing with
Jurassic Piano."
For a while it looked as if the little girl from Lower Hutt, New Zealand, was
poised to become the next Macaulay Culkin--four film offers arrived the week
after her Oscar win. But that was not the life the Paquins wanted for their
baby. (Their older children, Andrew, now 19, and Katya, 16, had done no
acting.) The family engaged a Hollywood agent to act as a buffer, then flew
back to the land of lush, sheep-flocked hills. "We're trying to avoid the
trained-seal syndrome, the dog jumping through the hoop," Brian said.
"Fortunately for us, New Zealand is pretty removed from it all."
Anna makes almost no public appearances, even in her homeland. Interview
requests are routinely rebuffed. "Sometimes people say, `Are you Anna Paquin?'
and I go, `No,' and just smile and walk off," she says. She means she's not
that Anna. "You cannot say she came back [from the Oscars] with her head full
of glory and pranced around," observes family friend Sarah Gaitanos. "She just
wanted to get on with her life."
Today, that life seems very much that of a typical young teen. Paquin, who says
that in her first year of high school her grades are "pretty much quite good
ones," enjoys "mucking around" with her golden retriever Jessie and her
girlfriends, as well as running and playing rugby. She watches few films and
says she has seen only a "censored" version of The Piano. ("Someone puts
their hand over my eyes in the bits I shouldn't see.") "I still don't really
think about acting that much," says Paquin, who has had no formal training. "I
just do it."
Most recently, Paquin spent a month in England costarring with William Hurt and
Geraldine Chaplin in Jane Eyre. "Basically," Paquin notes of the
character, "she's had to learn that if she doesn't stand up for herself, no one
else is going to." That shoot was followed by four months in Toronto on
Flying Wild, the true story of an estranged father and daughter who
rebuild their relationship while teaching a flock of formerly captive geese how
to migrate. During the filming she was struggling with some family problems of
her own. "Anna was very upset some days" by the unfolding separation of her
parents, who took turns staying with her on the set, director Carroll Ballard
says. "It left her feeling very sad at times."
But, most of the time, the Flying cast found Paquin a smart, spunky
costar. Says Dana Delany, who often played pool with her and lost: "Anna said
she wasn't sure if she wanted to be an actor or a barrister, so she could argue
with people for a living. Especially boys."
For now, though, Paquin is happy to continue making movies. "You get to go to
neat places and work with neat people," she says. But forget about any part
that requires her to cut her long hair. (That's a pixie-style wig she's wearing
in Jane Eyre.) "No way!" Paquin exclaims. "It's not worth it, changing
your entire physical appearance. I'm just a kid."
People April 15, 1996
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