The year was 1986, and I had just graduated from high school—both in real life and in the films of John Hughes. Onscreen, the high schools I attended were big and Midwestern, mostly situated in the suburbs of Chicago. In reality, if I wasn’t filming or ditching class, I went to a small French school on the west side of Los Angeles called the Lycée Français, an institution I had so rarely attended in person that when I flew back from New York for one day to accept my diploma my mother referred to it as my “honorary degree.” At the time, I was arguably one of the most recognizable high schoolers in America, but it had been a while since I had felt my age. When I left school a few weeks early to star in “The Pick-up Artist” with Robert Downey, Jr., in New York, I was already incorporated—and yet I still couldn’t legally order a drink in a restaurant.
During that film shoot, I got a call from my agent telling me that the Franco-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard—who died this past September, at the age of ninety-one—wanted to meet with me to discuss the possibility of my playing the role of Cordelia in an adaptation of “King Lear.” My only association with Godard at that point was a poster in the French clothing store agnès b. It was a collage of images from some of his most iconic movies—“Contempt,” “Alphaville,” “Pierrot le Fou.” I was drawn to the style, especially Jean Seberg’s fetching pixie cut in “Breathless.” I bought the poster but had yet to watch any of the films.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der December 19, 2022-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der December 19, 2022-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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QUARTET ISLAND
Mendelssohn on Mull celebrates chamber music away from urban pressures.
FIX YOU
The self-help positivity of Coldplay.
ILLUMINATIONS
Suzanne Jackson captures the transformative power of light.
RAT PACK
The classic rodent studies that foretold a nightmarish human future.
ROYAL TREATMENT
The unrivalled omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth IL.
WELL, WELL, WELL
Eating—and not-in the epicenter of hype diets.
NEWARK STATE OF MIND
Mayor Ras Baraka's reasonable radicalism.
DOOM SCROLLING
Social media and the teen-suicide crisis.
THE WORKER REVOLT
Harris and Walz try to stop blue-collar Americans from drifting to Trump.
THE CHIT-CHATBOT
Is talking with a machine a conversation?