Proud to be a muse, talented in her own right: Deceased Artiste Jane Birkin

There is no way I could let the passing of Jane Birkin go by without doing at least a modest tribute to her on this blog. I was lucky enough to conduct an interview with her way (way) back in 2003 when she was in NYC to present her show “Arabesque” — consisting of songs by Gainsbourg with an Arabic backing band at the Alliance Francaise.

This clip, which is quite short, is one of the most popular interview clips I’ve posted on that site – you know the one, the one that doesn’t really approve of “fair use” and has a myriad of rules to keep those who uphold that practice from posting their work. In any case, this is a short little snippet, but that’s what I used to post up there.

 

Recently, when “Uncle Jean” (aka Jean-Luc Godard) left us, I went back to the Birkin interview to excerpt her discussion of working with him on Soigne ta droite (1987).

 

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Because of her public persona as Gainsbourg's muse (in my talk with her she proclaimed her pride at having inspired and been given the songs by Serge), it was not noted enough by critics that she kept getting better and better as an actress. She’s charming as hell in some of her early “dollybird” incarnations, and her beauty is one of the only reasons to watch some of the films she made with Gainsbourg (unless Serge did the score, which gave you two reasons to see the film).

But, as time went on, she began appearing in more demanding roles and, once her relationship with Jacques Doillon had ended, she did indeed become a regularly busy actress who provided particularly wonderful turns in ensemble pieces (as in the two Poirot-by-Ustinov films she’s in) and the work of other New Wave directors, including Resnais, but most especially Rivette. (For whom she starred in Around a Small Mountain, his last film, a “small movie” extraordinaire concerning a very charming middle-aged romance.)

For we American fans, the documentary Jane by Charlotte (2021), made by Charlotte Gainsbourg in an effort to understand and relate to her mother, gave us a portrait of Jane that was very much down to earth. She may have been a music, movie, and fashion icon, but she was also a somewhat emotionally distant mother, who, it was revealed in the film, was having health problems.

In the film, which lacked a narration by Charlotte and was more of a fly-on-the-wall view of the family (thus requiring that you already knew who Jane, Charlotte, Lou, Kate, Serge, and others were), Jane having a bout with cancer is mentioned in the past tense. In her obits it was noted  that she had a stroke in 2021 and had cancelled various commitments in early 2023 because of a broken ankle and a break in her shoulder.

Then she cancelled an appearance at Town Hall in NYC in the summer of last year, having all the tickets refunded, which seemed to indicate something grievous had occurred. No more was heard until the death announcements started appearing online the Sunday before last.

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As a tribute I offer the following video clips, which relate entirely to her music career. Appraisals of her acting career are best saved for another time, as a number of her French films never appeared on these shores with English subs.

While her “Symphonique” stage show found her singing only the songs that Serge wrote directly for her (with the orchestra playing Serge’s most familiar songs with Jane offstage), it’s interesting to see that she was on French TV in April of 2021 looking in fine form, performing a Gainsbourg medley of his more, let us say, “familiar” songs.

She was seen in March of 2022 on an interview show discussing her concert performances, her “sketch” film with Agnes Varda (not a great picture — each time I see it, I want to love it, but it seems like more of a not-that-good TV comedy show transposed to film), and the documentary by Charlotte. She looks a bit bigger in this clip but is in good spirits and seems to be in good health.

And here she is on Feb 1 of this year, participating in a protest supporting the people of Myanmar. Her commitment to various causes was the least-seen but most important part of her public appearances:

 

Many of the TV appearances Jane made with Serge have become available on DVDs and on fan-generated “mail order” discs. This one, featuring him lip-synching to two songs from the classic Melody Nelson album while he carries Jane on his back, is one of the more playful clips that hasn’t surfaced on a compilation (yet).

Serge composed songs for seven of her solo albums (not counting songs for films and random unreleased tracks). The songs ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. One of the latter is “Di-doo-dah,” heard here with Jane singing it live on the Russell Harty show in 1973. 

Another minor (but catchy) song for Jane by Serge was “Ex-fan des sixties,” wherein the decade’s biggest heroes (either dead or having broken up their band) are recited in a laundry-list fashion. It’s not a major Gainsbourg song, but it’s interesting, as it acknowledges what an incredible impact the pop and rock of the Sixties had on France. (All the artists mentioned are either American or British).

 

Moving from the ridiculous back to the sublime, here is one of the songs that Serge entrusted to Jane that is considered one of his best works which he never sang. It was recited by Catherine Deneuve at Serge’s funeral service and was always in Jane’s repertoire, if she was doing “both sides” of Serge.

The title, “Fuir le bonheur de peur qu'il ne se sauve,” translates loosely as “Fleeing happiness for fear it will run away.” A very helpful YouTube poster named Julia has subtitled the song in English but hasn’t made the video embed-dable for some inexplicable reason. (I always wonder why people make sure their vids are not to be embedded – will that negate the possible copyright claim? Those are either going to come or they’re not; adding the embed function serves to spread your work around more.) 

You can watch the subtitled version here. And here is the song in its “version originale” with Serge onscreen listening to Jane singing it.

Over the years, Jane sang with a number of other performers. Perhaps because her first song was a duet with a guy (“Je t’aime, moi non plus” with Serge), she continued to work very well with male partners. One personal favorite was Bryan Ferry (with whom she sang a Roxy classic). Also, in Bertrand Tavernier’s Daddy Nostalgie (1990), she duetted with Dirk Bogarde on the song “These Foolish Things,” which Ferry had brought back to life on his first solo LP in 1973.

“Je t’aime” was such a big hit in France and England that a follow-up was attempted twice: “69 Anee Erotique” and the “new dance” that Serge proposed (which, let’s face it, was not all that much more than syncopated groping) with this number.

 

Some fascinating footage appears here — Serge personally instructing Jane on how to sing one of his songs for her solo albums. (He definitely conceived of her “choir boy” voice as an instrument to be included in the orchestration of his songs.) Also, Jane talks in 1997 about his death and how he left her 25% ownership of the Melody Nelson album, in case “things went wrong” in her old age.

 

In 2003 when Jane was touring the world with her “Arabesque” show, featuring Gainsbourg songs with arrangements for Arabic instruments, she appeared on various programs in Europe to promote the shows she was doing. Here she performs Serge’s rousing “Elisa,” slowed down and made into a hypnotic ode.

 

Jane had another touring show after “Arabesque,” but her final major undertaking in terms of musical performance was a show called “Birkin Gainsbourg: The Symphonic” (which sounds much better in French as “Le Symphonique”). The show played here at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 1, 2018, and was an absolute delight. Only one guest star joined Jane onstage: Rupert Wainwright, who sang "Ces Petits Riens" and "La Chanson de Prevert." There is a video of Rufus joining Jane in a different venue here.

The whole "Symphonique" show (minus guest stars and from a different venue) was aired on French TV and can be seen here.

In Charlotte’s documentary about her mother, it is noted that the only time they sang together onstage was here in NYC at the Beacon Theater on March 6, 2020, a short time before the pandemic lockdowns began. A scan of YT reveals that, while the Beacon show might’ve been their only planned and rehearsed appearance together, they did sing onstage on another occasion. In 2013 a video was posted of them singing together at a concert in Monaco, duetting on Serge’s “La chanson de Prévert”:

 

Birkin stated in my interview with her that her first-ever performances in the U.S. were for the “Arabesque” tour in 2003, and thus her first-ever NYC performances were the two times she performed that show at the Alliance Francaise. (I saw the second of those two shows and it was wonderful.)

Her last performance in NYC was most definitely the Beacon Theater show, as a show that was to take place on my birthday (June 18) was announced for last year (2022) at Town Hall and was cancelled very quickly without explanation. (The mention of cancer in Charlotte’s documentary and the stroke she suffered in September 2021 were alerts that she perhaps was having health problems.)

Oddly enough, the first hit you get on Google when searching to find when it was that Jane played her last concert is the thoroughly unreliable Concert Archives site, which lists the cancelled June 18, 2022 gig as if it actually took place. One wonders how many other cancelled performances are on the pages of this website….

In any case, the reason to re-see the Symphonique show at the Beacon was that, this around, Jane had invited guest stars to join her onstage. So I attended the show and was very glad to see Jane duetting with both Iggy Pop (!) and Charlotte G. 

Jane chose to sing “Ballade de Johnny-Jane,” from the soundtrack of Serge’s film Je t’aime, moi non plus (1976), with Charlotte. This was an interesting choice, as it first appeared on the soundtrack to the film and is an odd song that refers to the film in its lyrics. 

It also, oddly enough, was a song that Jane duetted on with Vanessa Paradis. The latter is a surprise, since Vanessa had Serge write the lyrics for her second album about a year before his death. She was the only artist who requested he do rewrites on some of the lyrics, and he wound up wisecracking, “Paradis, c’est l’enfer” (“Paradis, it was hell”). Here are Jane and Vanessa singing “Johnny-Jane.”

And here is some lovely YT poster’s very good recording of mother and daughter singing father’s movie theme song:

 

Now further down the rabbit hole, we can thank YT poster “secularus” for posting not only the preceding video, but also videos of the two songs that Jane did with Iggy at the Beacon. 

The first was “Elisa,” which they had also done the preceding evening on “The Tonight Show” with that grinning, chuckling idiot as host. The “Tonight Show” people made sure that there is no post of that performance on YT. All the better to watch this dynamic duo perform it onstage:

 

Iggy first tackled Gainsbourg’s lyrics with a tuneful cover of “La Javanaise” in 2012 (on his album Apres). Far closer to the spirit of his own songs is Serge’s “Requiem pour un con,” which taunts the listener and calls them an “ass” (or twat, in one online translation that I think is a bit too loose and a bit too British). Here Iggy does the song with Jane:

The song that Jane ended all of her Gainsbourg shows with was the aforementioned “La Javanaise.” It was written by Serge for Juliette Greco, who had the initial hit with it. Serge also recorded it himself and sang it in some of his live shows, later in his career.

Jane’s performances of it were always especially moving, as her voice cracked throughout it, and it always seemed like the song’s simplicity made it the perfect way to end a tribute to Serge. Especially because this most romantic of tunes, set in a waltz tempo, actually says that the couple dancing will be in love “for the length of a song.”

In one particular rendition she did on a Gainsbourg tribute on French TV, the audience sang the song along with her, which made it perhaps the most stirring tribute to Serge ever (with the French public so familiar with his signature song that they took over from the onstage singer). That version doesn’t appear to be on YT (or is tucked away somewhere), so I’ll end with a different version, in which Jane sings the whole song alone.

This is from a charity benefit show she participated in back in 2017. She is wearing sneakers and an old-looking pullover, and is sporting a cast on her left arm. This makes the performance even more endearing, as if she was going to keep singing Serge’s music no matter what happened to her health-wise. And she did, for which we can only be intensely grateful.

Note: Thanks to Despina Veneti her excellent sampling of Jane B. photos.

Media Funhouse guests speak about Godard

It’s been a few weeks since Uncle Jean (aka Jean-Luc Godard) died, and I do plan on writing something about his life and work for this blog. But in the meantime, I wanted to post what I initially thought of as “the end” of the piece, namely a collection of eight videos in which Media Funhouse interview subjects spoke about Godard. Two of the guests were admirers who happened to meet Godard as their indie filmmaking careers flourished; two were performers in his 1980s films (commonly thought of as his “comeback” films, although he never really left — he just stopped and then restarted making fiction films); three were collaborators behind the camera; and one wrote the first (and still best) biography of Godard in English.

I should explain that these interviews were done under various conditions. In some, I spoke to the guest under very tight time constraints, so my Godard-related questions were slipped in “under the wire.” In others we had ample time with the guest and so they could go on at length about their admiration for, or work with, Godard. The interviews were shot in conference rooms, hotel rooms, a Lincoln Center office, and one artist’s kitchen. I was very happy to get these responses about a filmmaker that clearly fascinated the interview subjects as much as he fascinated all of his diehard fans for the last six decades-plus, and I’m now happy to share them all in one package. 

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As an “appetizer,” two clips from different interviews with Hal Hartley, where I asked him about Godard and his influences. He had interviewed Godard for a U.S. filmmaking magazine and had the great experience of telling Uncle Jean that he went to one of Godard’s recent films with his actor-friend Martin Donovan, who “laughed at the wrong part” of the film. Godard’s answer? “There are no wrong parts.”

I used that as a springboard for an earlier question to Hartley in the ’96 interview and then slipped in a query about Godard before the end of the chat. In ’06 Hartley answered the question in a broader sense, discussing how important it is for filmmakers to have influences and to openly copy them, on the way to developing one’s own style. 

 

Leos Carax is one of the most talented directors around, but few know about his acting career. There hasn’t been much to it (six supporting roles of various size in films directed by others) — then again, his filmmaking career has consisted of only six (splendid) features so far. 

He made his acting debut on film (minus a bit as an extra in one of his own pictures) in Godard’s KING LEAR (1987). I asked him about his appearance in that film and also about his being influenced by the French New Wave.

 

Next up is Jane Birkin. Ms. Birkin acted only once for Godard, in SOIGNE TA DROITE (Keep Your Right Up, 1987). She had a small part, but I thought it was still important to ask her what that time spent with JLG was like, and she came up with a lovely portrait of a cranky, laser-focused man with a bad cold. (None of which should surprise a diehard Uncle Jean fan.)

 

Independent filmmaker Amos Poe discussed his paean to Godard, UNMADE BEDS (1976), in my interview with him. That film revolves around a guy in ’76 NYC who believes he’s living in a French New Wave movie at the turn of the Sixties.

That part of our chat was interesting, but an even juicier morsel came out later in our lengthy interview: Amos had been ripped off money-wise by Uncle Jean! Watch the clip for details, but the story involves Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Robert Fripp, and a proposed remake of ALPHAVILLE.

 

The filmmaker Claude Miller served a long and fruitful apprenticeship assisting other directors in the 1960s. He was as an assistant director or production manager for Bresson, Truffaut, Demy, and Godard. I got reflections from him on three of those four, and here is his remembrance of time working with Godard on 2 or 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER (production manager, and he’s also seen as an actor behind a pile of books on a table in one sequence), LA CHINOISE (no official credit, but he said he worked on the film to me), and WEEKEND (assistant director).

He had fond memories of working with JLG, and he certainly was present at a great moment in Godard’s career — when he was making his “last” fiction films, before he went fully political (and non-fictional) for a decade.

 

D.A. Pennebaker was a consummate documentarian who shared quite a lot in my discussion with him, reviewing his older films while also promoting his more recent ones with his partner/wife Chris Hegedus. His time with Godard was spent making (with his partner Richard Leacock and Uncle Jean) a Godard project called 1 A.M. (ONE AMERICAN MOVIE). It was to be a sort of panorama of America on the brink of revolution, but Godard left the project after most of the footage was shot and abandoned the whole thing.

What Pennebaker edited together, called ONE P.M., does play like one of Godard’s “pitch” storyboards (drawn so he could get a notion of what he wanted, but also to cajole money out of producers). It’s a series of unrelated episodes, some documentary, some fiction: Rip Torn acts up a storm around NYC, Eldridge Cleaver is seen being wary of the filmmakers’ cameras, Tom Hayden gives lengthy speeches, and the Jefferson Airplane beat the Beatles to the punch by having a rooftop concert months before LET IT BE. (And getting chased off by the cops.)

In the meantime, we see Pennebaker’s footage of Godard staging and shooting some of the scenes — it’s by far one of the closest studies of Godard at work in the Sixties. Even though he’s not making a classic film, you can still see his imagination (and budding interest in radical politics) radiating all around him.

 

The last two interviews featured here gave me the most information about Godard as an artist (and as a person, although Birkin’s remarks can always be kept in mind). Cinematographer Caroline Champetier, who worked with JLG for a number of years on every project he did, from fiction features to video essays, provided some excellent insights about his working methods. Here we talk about her first film with him, SOIGNE TA DROITE, where she was behind the camera filming Godard as an actor (playing his “Uncle Jean” character – this time called “The Prince”).

She also rebuffs the notion that he was a master of lighting and instead calls him a “master of framing,” detailing how his very specific methods of framing an image made his visuals so distinct and readily recognizable.

 

And finally: The only full-length interview I did that was entirely concerned with Godard was with film critic and historian Colin MacCabe, whose biography “Godard: Portrait of the Artist at Seventy” had just been published. (The first biography in English and, as I said above, still the best one in this language.) When I spoke to him in early 2004, a lot of Godard’s “late period” films had yet to come out on DVD (and there was no such thing as the “underside of the Internet” where rare foreign films with English subs were lurking, ready to be grabbed and watched).

I had seen Godard’s film and video work of that time at select screenings at rep houses and (mostly) MoMA, so I was able to talk about it with Mr. MacCabe, but I wasn’t sure if my viewership had, so I spoke with him here about Godard’s perception of his audience and how one should watch his brilliant eight-part sensory overload, HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (made from 1988-98). 

Mr. MacCabe, who had not only interviewed Godard many times and wrote the biography but also produced three of his video essays, was quite generous with his knowledge of his subject and gave me some very valuable answers about how to take in the essays, which are indeed the masterworks of the last three decades of Godard’s career (along with a few of the final fiction films). This is part of a longer chat.

The Gainsbourg Girls: arthouse adventurers

I’ve talked on past Funhouse episodes about the phenomenon of American stars wanting to be “loved” and forsaking the art of acting as a result. There are exceptions — Johnny Depp is pretty adventurous in his choices; Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in her prime have all shown they are willing to play unlikable characters or work in lower-budgeted films that are just, well… good films. I see this adventurous spirit in a lot more European (and, to an extent, Asian) stars, though. Today’s cases in point are Jane Birkin and her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg.

I’ve just seen the latest films starring both women, and both are remarkably off-mainstream pics in approach. Granted, Charlotte’s film has a fairly major U.S. arthouse distributor (IFC Films) and is a cause célèbre already, which will guarantee some attendance and possible pissed-off word-of-mouth from people who take a chance on it and just don't get it, 'cause they were looking for a braindead multiplex horror pic. At the other end of the spectrum, Jane’s movie, the latest film by Jacques Rivette, the underrated genius of the New Wave, is a quiet and slow, quite pacific character piece called 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup, which is being called Around a Small Mountain in English. The film works as a kind of short epilogue to Rivette’s work to date, touching on themes he explored in depth in the past: the thin line between theater and life, the tentativeness of male-female relationships, the stranger who learns more about a “clan” and tries to join in their activities. The clan in this case is a traveling circus troupe, and the stranger is Vittorio (Sergio Castellito), an Italian traveling from Milan to Barcelona. He falls for Jane B., as “Kate,” a woman who was banned from the circus by her father (yes, a touch of melodrama here…) after a “whip act” she was doing with her partner/boyfriend resulted in his death.

I have only met Ms. Birkin for the length of an interview I did with her (a half-hour at most), but she is a very lively, opinionated, no-nonsense kinda lady. She also is allowing herself to age very naturally, and this has become a very positive factor in her becoming a finer and finer actress. As most folks know, she began as a perfect “dollybird” in the Sixties, a model who was incredibly attractive and sexy, and who eventually solidified her place in French popular culture in her union with Funhouse god Serge Gainsbourg. Her life has therefore been lived pretty much in public (as has been Charlotte’s), but what has been heartening for her fans is that she has gone from a beautiful screen presence who simply looked nice, to a character performer who can actually act. In 36 vues, she is a “woman with a past” that is revealed as the film moves on. Rivette deftly revolves the film around Castellito’s intended flirtation with her — a charming instance of a late middle-aged near-romance, a la the last few films of Alain Resnais and Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Rivette intercuts scenes from the circus's acts, including, yes, a pair of clowns who are as dependent on dialogue as they are on physical shtick (the Theater of the Absurd finally hits the Big Top). In the process, he uses theatrical devices in a cinematic way (as he has been doing since his masterwork L’Amour Fou, which I spoke about in a different context a few weeks back).

Birkin wears her age well. She has not had plastic surgery, and so major kudos to her. This makes her the polar opposite of Hollywood stars who transform their faces in a garish way as they get older, and even when they’re at a fairly young age (what motivated Nicole Kidman, a beauty who had “cred” as a legit actress, to fuck up her forehead with whatever procedure she had done?). Jane B. plays a troubled soul here and, along with Castellito, gets some of the film’s most wistful dialogue: at one point reflecting on why she needs to travel from the city to the countryside to properly dye fabric for a designer house, she reflects “The light just isn’t the same in the city.” Birkin is the biggest “star” in the film, but she doesn’t behave as such — she is part of the ensemble and can still appear glamorous, but doesn’t seemingly need or want to at this point. As a lady “of a certain age,” she has become a different kind of “dream girl.”

Charlotte, the daughter of the genius Serge, is the best actor in the whole Gainsbourg/Birkin clan, and shows her mother’s spirit for taking on adventurous roles — although I am usually struck by her impeccably refined upper-crust British accent. Her latest role in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist earned her the Best Actress award at Cannes, and an incredible amount of interviewers asking her what it was like to play a “misogynist” vision. Since I took the time to defend Roman Polanski last week, (whom, by the way, cranky Lars once referred to as “the Polish midget,” so I do revere auteurs who make fun of each other), I feel it is contingent on me to point out that I don’t feel that Von Trier is a misogynist. I feel he is a died in the wool utopian who has turned cynical, a misanthrope rather than a man who hates women. Women make good sufferers in cinema; I can’t enumerate the number of filmmakers who have centered on women in peril and/or crisis, but I’ll just haul two names out: John Cassavetes and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Of course… von Trier has something very different in mind with his latest outrage. Antichrist is a cerebral horror pic, a variation on both Strindberg (one of his favorite writers) and The Shining (hey, he should nick from Stephen King — since the latter completely wasted everyone’s time with his POINTLESS U.S. redo of The Kingdom). Much has been written about the film, and in fact *given away* by the press (suffice it to say it’s best if you don’t read too much about the freaking thing before you see it), but I think I’m on very safe ground to call it a tough, tense emotional psychodrama in the style of Strindberg, Bergman, and Cassavetes (him again!) that morphs into a full-out horror thriller as the film moves on. It is an ultimate “battle of the sexes” narrative acted out only by Charlotte and Willem Dafoe (there are no other performers in the film, literally, until an epilogue I will not go into here). Their relationship, as a couple who have lost their young child, is an Old Testament-like connection which superimposes Cain and Abel onto Adam and Eve (that one’s mine, haven’t seen that in any of the overly informational reviews and articles). I can only add that any fiction film that has a credit for “research on anxiety” has to be a little deeper (and a lot weirder) than it appears on first glance.

The film’s horrific third act, in which numerous physical acts of violence occur, transforms Antichrist from being a standard arthouse feature to a feature that might (that’s *might*) appeal to some mainstream viewers — most will no doubt hate it, as they wander in when the Halloween-weekend screenings of Saw 6 are sold out (it is installment six of that torture-porn franchise, ain’t it?). Gainsbourg’s triumph here is that she does indeed render Lars’ abstract vision of a woman in grief in a realistic fashion for the first two acts of the film. Her character is highly sympathetic, and is the emotional anchor of the film; Dafoe’s husband character is a therapist who wants to help his wife with grief therapy, but as von Trier noted in an interview included in the press kit, “my male protagonists are basically idiots, who don’t understand shit.” (Again, cynical and perhaps misanthropic, but not misogynist….)

von Trier has remained an enfant terrible as he has hit late middle age. He is a provocateur who has constantly sought new ways to rouse his audiences, from the literally hypnotic stylization of his first three films to the overriding theatricality of his “Dogville” trilogy (no one knows if he’ll ever make the third; in fact, this film sort of stands as the third leg of the “women in crisis” trilogy with Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, although Antichrist is much more extreme than those two wonderfully intense experiments were). In any case, Charlotte (I tend to use her first name since I so identify her last name with her legendary dad) and Dafoe carry the film without question — they convince us they are a functioning couple living somewhere in Seattle (the film was shot in Germany) who are very sexually active and did at one time love each other, but now are beyond the bend after their child has died.

The film stands with what I consider the best of modern horror, efforts by filmmakers like Lynch and Polanski (yes, him again) that upset the viewer in ways that don’t involve leaping out of your chair because a crazed killer in a scary mask has appeared onscreen. The most truly disturbing works of horror and suspense are those that put us on edge, and involve emotion and the mind rather than sheer adrenaline and a butcher knife. It’s also impossible to give a nuanced performance in a slasher or torture-porn pic, and Antichrist contains two terrific performances. It's no wonder where Charlotte G. got her adventurous spirit from — it’s no doubt a legacy of her immaculately talented father, and her mother, a fine actress who’s unafraid of the "horror" that is age.