New stuff
|
The Education of Anna Paquin
Eric Gladstone
Anna Paquin has to find a gift for
her friend's birthday. "I love
birthdays," says the actress,
who turns 18 herself on July 24.
So on a sunny summer day. She
goes out to shop -- not at the
mall, like your average teen,
not on Beverly Hills's tony Rodeo
Drive, befitting an Oscar-winning
actress, but in the funky collection
of boutiques and curio shops on
Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice
California.
"I like old things," says Paquin
studying one antique watches in a
glass case, "just thinking about
where they've been." In another
storem she reaches for something
red and fuzzy, then drops it
suddenly. "Furry handcuffs,"
she says with a shudder, "I don't
think so."
So sophisticated and yet still an
adolescent, Paquin has grown up
literally before our eyes, ever
since she won the 1993 Best
Supporting actress Oscar for
The Piano at age 11. In the
Last seven years, she has blossomed
from the impish bonnet-clad Flora in
that movie and the duck-chasing Amy
in 1996's Fly Away Home to
Donna, who trades sex for shelter
as a homeless teen in 1998's
HurlyBurly and Alison who
rebels against her fractured family
in the 1999 Woodstock-era film
A Walk on the Moon. Having
just graduated from high school, the
actress is about to emerge as a
young adult in three new roles:
a mutant superhero in the summer
blockbuster X-Men; a punk
prostutute in the controversial
independent film It's the Rage;
and a '70s-era groupie in Cameron
Crowe's as-yet-untitled fall film.
Smartly but casually dressed in sandals,
a pink plaid skirt and a white T-shirt,
Anna Paquin is quite firmly on the cusp
of girlhood and womanhood: The nails
on her toes are painted sparkly purple,
but her fingers are plain: her face
hasn't a trace of makeup: and the
only styling in her hair is dragonfly barrette.
"Eighteen is a good age," she says, confidently
staring you in the eye, "'cause you get the
benefits of being a kid without the restrictions.
Not that I'm irresponsible of immature."
Not at all. Everyone who works with
Paquin says as much. Her X-Men costar
Hugh Jackman calls her "a brilliant natural
actress," nothing that she waited on the
set for eight hours to help him on his first
day of filming. Rage director Jim
Stern says Paquin is "an incredibly bright
woman and incredibly mature for her years.
She's astonishing." And Diane Lane, a former
teen actress herself, who played Paquin's
mother in A Walk on the Moon, says,
"She's so different than I was at that age.
Anna's just a lot stronger."
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Paquin was
raised from age 4 outside Wellington,
New Zealand, by her mother, Mary Paquin,
an English teacher, and her father Brian
Paquin, a phys-ed instructor, along with
her older brother, Andrew (23), and sister
Katya (19). The youngest Paquin got into
acting very much by accident, tagging along
with friends to The Piano's open
auditions. "I didn't really know what an
audition was," she says, speaking with
an accent that flips back and forth
between California cool and New Zealand
trill. "I didn't even know that there was
such a thing as acting." Nevertheless,
from the moment filming began, she loved
it, if only because "everyone includes you
-- You're not the youngest child who's too
young to play with the big kids." And,
she adds, "it was like playing dress-up
all the time, all the funny old dresses
I was wearing."
Paquin says her famous Oscar moment,
where she stood for at least 20 seconds,
in shock and breathless, before she was
able to utter a coherent word, is just
a blur: "I had no idea what I was doing.
I could hardly see over the podium."
But she says she wouldn't change a minute
of it. "If I had gotten up and read this
perfect little speech, that so would
not have been me." Paquin keeps the
statuette hidden away in a closet because
"I wouldn't want to make anyone uncomfortable.
Out of sight, no one thinks about it, and
I'm just Anna."
In 1998, at age 16, Paquin enrolled in West
Los Angeles's small private Windward Prep
high schood and took up residence with
her mother in a modest apartment nearby.
They moved to make it easier for her to
work in movies, and also because Paquin
had her eye in attending an American
university. Now that Paquin has graduated,
her mother plans to return to her
teaching position in New Zealand, and
Anna will begin her freshman year at
Columbia University in New York. "I
just want to have normal a college
experience as I can possibly have,"
she says. "I just want to be like
everyone else, where no one really
pays attention." As her major, she is
considering English (she took an
advanced-placement class during
her senior year), psychology or
French -- which she has already
tried out on the streets of Paris.
"It was so amazing actually being
able to speak in another language,"
she says. "my first two sentences
made them think I speak French
-- yay! But then I can't understand
a word they're saying!"
Paquin admits to having wanderlust
for Europe, Asia, Africa -- just about
anywhere, say the amateur photographer,
"where it's going to be visually
completely different, [with] different
cultures. I want to see everything.
'Cause I trevel a lot, but I don't
really go anywhere. I go back and
forth [between] big North American
cities; I spend way to much time on
airplanes, but I'm not really seeing
anything."
Paquin's early success hasn't spoiled
her. After sinking a basketball free
throw on the Late Show with David
Letterman on April 1, 1996, she
donated her $10,000 prize to the
Make-a-Wish Foundation, which
grants wishes to terminally ill
children. She exceeded her school's
community service requirements by
working in a downtown L.A. soup
kitchen and spending her last
spring break at a special education
center. "Once you start working at
those places, you end up wanting to
do more," she says. "It's a really
good feeling."
But don't believe that Anna Paquin is
an early candidate for sainthood just
because the worst thing she will admit
print about herself is that her cello
is collectiong dust. "The most rebellious
thing I've ever done is not going to be
written about in an article that my
mother's going to read," she says
definitively. "So we can forget
about that. I'm going to leave
that up your imagination."
Maybe that's why she won't say whether
or not she's dating and laughs nervously
about how the sexuality she's displayed
onscreen has influenced her real life.
"The only thing I can definitely say is
that you cease to be self-conscious after
you've had to kiss somebody on-camera
with 30 people watching." Even when
she attended an all-girls school in
New Zealand, she says, "I was never
one of those girls who thought
guys had cooties."
At another store, Paquin peruses some
vintage magazines with giggle, saying
that they remind her of the dog-eared
Playboy decorating the tour bus on
Crowe's rock-era film and the stack of
'70s Rolling Stones that the
director (a former RS writer)
gave her to study. Conveniently for
the sake of her character, Paquin
supposes she's be more flustered meeting
Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant than
meeting almost anyone in Hollywood.
As for actresses she admires, Paquin
again reaches back to more glamorous
time, when stars like Marilyn Monroe
and Grace Kelly "or anybody who got to
dance with Fred Astaire" lit up the
screen. "I can't imagine going to work
every day and, like, tap-dancing and
singing. I just think that would be
amazing."
Her career path has been compared
to that of another class act --
former child actress Jodie Foster --
But Paquin says there's no clear
plan for her transition into
adulthood. "I just do what feels
right," she says, "I think the
great thing about getting to do
what I do is that you can try
out being a different person
without having to screw up
your life to do it."
US, July 31, 2000
กก |