Andie McDowell

“Something inside me would have broken if I were… Something would have stopped beating. Do you understand? ”. These words full of feeling and hope come from the throat of Sarah, the protagonist of Harrison’s Flowers . Undoubtedly, the most intense work embodied to date by Andie MacDowell. In the skin of a fighting woman who denies fate the death of her husband, the actress takes it out on her before those who saw her as incapable of giving a character anything more than a pretty face. A recognized role, distant in time, almost twenty years now, from a humiliating beginning, when in her first film, Greystoke, the legend of Tarzan , her voice was supplanted by Glenn Close ‘s.. She then thought of throwing in the towel: “I looked in the mirror and felt stupid for having tried making movies,” she says. But she held on until she saw her name shine in the Hollywood firmament.

The image of Rosalie Anderson MacDowell (4-21-58, Gassney, South Carolina) became familiar thanks to publicity. Her indisputably beautiful features provided her with one of the sweetest contracts ever pocketed by a model: half a million dollars a year for 12 work sessions. Curiously, when she was little she had a complex about her full lips, the same ones that in the collagen era caught the attention of the Elite agency. The same ones, too, that impacted the director Hugh Hudsonwhen he saw her on the cover of a fashion magazine and chose her for Greystoke… Then came St. Elmo’s Fire, but he had to wait for Sex, Lies and Videotape – “the last chance I gave to cinema ”– to produce the crush. The film became one of the biggest in American independent film history, and Andie is notable as a repressed southerner, to the point of long-standing identification with her character. Nothing is further from reality. In fact, Andie grew up in a permissive environment. Her alcoholic mother never had authority over her. “She was free to do whatever she wanted,” she says, “and that’s what I did,” including flirting with drugs.

Far from that shadow, in the 1990s he walked his palm through the red carpets and chained premiere after premiere. His resume begins to be adorned with prestigious films such as Marriage of Convenience or Crossed Lives . Romantic comedy ( Trapped in Time ), action ( The Great Falcon ), thriller ( Ruby Cairo ) and drama ( Object of Seduction ), passing through the western ( Four Women and One Fate ), no genre can resist it. He also makes a fictional couple with the best actors of the moment: the Depardieu, Malkovich, Willis… However, the definitive accolade to his career comes between meetings and disagreements with Hugh Grantin the unique ceremonies of Four Weddings and a Funeral . It was Andie’s stellar moment. “Once you’ve tasted success,” she says, “it’s hard not to want more and more. But it is important to be content with your own achievements”. After Four Weddings… she held firm on the screens with films like The End of Violence , The Muse and Entanglements of Society . A professional stability that contrasts with the personal one. Divorced from former model Paul Qualley, she has three children. In a very short time we will see her again in Crush. It will be time to confirm that her state of grace in Harrison’s Flowersit was not a mirage, but the definitive triumph of the MacDowell formula: a mixture of sex appeal and irresistible intelligence.