Private school, camps, great parents. Like Emma, Gwy- neth does seem
to have passed through her young life with "very little to distress
or vex her." She grew up on 92nd Street with German nannies, golden
retrievers, and an ador- able younger brother, Jake, who's only 20
and just made his directorial debut with a short film at the Sundance
Film Festival. Jake's a St. David's boy.
Her mother, she says, "wanted (her) to become Margaret Mead," and her
father was afraid that the life of a perform- er would be an
unsuitable one for his daughter. Gwyneth con- vinced them of her
talent after appearing with Danner in a 1991 Williamstown Theater
Festival production of Picnic. "I first saw her onstage in Picnic
when she was 17," says Mira- max executive producer Donna Gigliotti.
"And I thought, This is major." Gwyneth acknowledges that her familial
connections used to get her phone calls returned; but now, as she
sweetly and justly enough puts it, she has earned "the respect of my
peers, and the people with the power to make movies."
"Among her many sickening qualities," McGrath says, "she can do
everything you ask her to without having to re- hearse it or ever see
any of the objects involved-like archery, horseback riding. She just
says, 'Oh, sure, I can do that.' I said, 'You're going to have to sing
and harmonize,' and she said, 'Oh yeah.' If I'd said, 'You know I need
somebody to do twelve back flips over buring barrels, 'I'm sure she
could do that too."
"Some people were born to sing," says Gwyneth matter- of-factly.
"They just can or they can't."
"She can play Emma," boasts Miramax's Weinstein. "She can play a
whore (as indeed she does in the upcoming Hard Eight). She can do
anything."
"Everything she does, she does to perfection," adds producer Haft.
"She never seemed to have trouble with anything," sighs a former
classmate.
McGrath says, in fact, that during the time he was adapting the Emma
screenplay, he couldn't picture another twentysomething actress in
the leading role. Not Julia Rob- erts, Sandra Bullock, Drew
Barrymore, Marisa Tomei, Laura Dern. "I didn't know who I wanted to
play it," he says, "and I was worried I had no one in mind." Gwyneth,
meanwhile, was up in Canada making Moonlight and Valentino when she
got a visit from "some agents (from ICM) trying to steal me from CAA-
which I almost succumbed to. They said, 'We have this genius Doug
McGrath, and you have to do this movie,'" At a reading at Miramax,
she says, "I was like, When do we start?"
She wanted the part so badly, she made a pact with Harvey Weinstein
to do The Pallbearer with David (Friends) Schwimmer first, even
though she thought the script weak (so, as it turns out, did
audiences). Weinstein "bribed me," Gwyneth says. "He admits it."
But though she says she's protective of her "artistic integrity,"
she agreed to do the deal because Emma was "the best part ever
written for a young girl."
"You stick with me," says McGrath, in a fit of anxious
perfectionism. "I'll show you all the things wrong with Emma."
"What?" says Gwyneth.
"The truck!" he exclaims. Apparently there's a one- second shot
where a lorry sits parked on a nineteenth-century street.
"Oh, shut up," says Gwyneth.
"I can read the license plate on it now," McGrath moans.
"What are you, computer-enhancing it?"
"I have studied it."
"Don't listen to this man-he doesn't make any mistakes."
"I have so many to choose from," McGrath laughs.
"Like what?" says Gwyneth. "You were never in a bad mood on the set,
you never raised your voice or lost your temper..."
"The day of the eye-lines?" he ventures, referring to the trouble
they had positioning Emma and the evil Mr. Elton correctly in a
carriage scene. "A topographical map on my forehead."
"Ach. If that's losing your temper, will you move in with me?
"I certainly make tons of mistakes all the time," Gwy- neth adds,
sipping her tea.
"IT'S VERY STRANGE TO BE FAMOUS," GWYNETH IS SAYING, "BUT right now
it's on a really nice level. I can work when I want to, and I don't
have to work if I don't want to, and very sweet people shake my hand
on the street or take my picture. I'll walk by NYU, and a girl will
come up to me and say, 'I've seen all your films and I'm an acting
student and can I just talk to you for a second?' And it's nice."
A couple of years ago, Gwyneth was offered the female lead in Cool
As Ice, playing opposite Vanilla Ice. She want- ed to do it, she
admits. "I needed the money." Fortunately, she says now, her parents
talked her out of it.
"I have really stayed away from doing leads in films until now on
purpose," she says. "I turned down five studio films because I was
learning. At that point, if I had done something just to be the
star of a movie, the resposibility would get placed on me. I'm in
no hurry, and I'm not that ambitious anyway. So I would say, 'I
don't want to do this, I'm not ready for this.' I didn't want to be
held accountable for the success of a film at 21."
At 23, it's a different matter. As much as she had made mistakes,
Gwyneth says, she has found the experiencs salutary, improving.
Like Emma.
"I think the fact that Emma learns from her mistakes shows how she
has such a capacity for life and the import- ance of other people,"
says Gwyneth. "The thing that I loved best about her is that even
though she makes terrible mis- takes, she learns from them. That's
such a wonderful quality in somebody."
GWYNETH RAN INTO AN OLD SPENCE CLASSMATE LATE LAST YEAR at Grange
Hall, the bar-restaurant in the West Village. This was well after
the young superstar fell in love with her; after Emma was in the
can; and after Gwyneth was on her way to make three more movies in
quick succession (the upcoming Kilronan with Jessica Lange, Hard
Eight with Sam- uel Jackson, and Great Expectations with Ethan
Hawke, which she's about to shoot).
"I'm so out of it," the former Spencie says, "I had no idea what
she was up to. And I said, 'Hey, how are you, what have you been
doing?' And she said she was acting, and I said, 'Well, stick with
it. It's hard at first, but you'll get there.' And she was like,
'Yeah.' She was a really good sport about it. She could have made
me feel like such a fool."
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