{"id":6981,"date":"2021-08-12T17:41:09","date_gmt":"2021-08-12T16:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/filmcheltenham.online\/?p=6981"},"modified":"2021-08-12T17:41:09","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T16:41:09","slug":"alicia-silverstone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/filmcheltenham.online\/index.php\/2021\/08\/12\/alicia-silverstone\/","title":{"rendered":"Alicia Silverstone"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For the <\/em>Telegraph Magazine, 1995. Looking at it now, I think I was a bit mean about her. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Alicia Silverstone wallpaper. She was an internet sensation.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A year ago, Alicia Silverstone was the \u201cAerosmith babe\u201d, celebrated for appearing in the American hard-rock band\u2019s videos, wearing inadequate clothing and a provocative expression. Her prize was the coveted \u201cBest Video Of All Time\u201d award from MTV, the channel for young men with a tendency to drool. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now though, thanks to a perfectly adorable lead role in Clueless<\/em>, this year\u2019s hit high school comedy, she is about to mean something to the rest of us. She has just signed a $10 million three-picture deal with Columbia Pictures. And her next film, she says, will be one she has produced herself. \u201cIt\u2019s nice,\u201d she says, \u201cBecause they [the studios] know that I have proved myself to be a good actress, so that\u2019s very useful to them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd how they\u2019re useful to me is that I want to be able to create really brilliant projects that are going to mean something to people and mean something to me. By being a producer I can be in control of who my co-stars are, and who\u2019s writing the movie, and who\u2019s going to be directing it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It will also, she hopes, provide her with roles that will enable her to emulate the actresses she admires. \u201cJodie Foster, Meryl Streep, Helena Bonham-Carter, Laura Dern: those types,\u201d she says, which seems to cover the ground. She does not mention Kathy Bates, for some reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Described in one American magazine as the possessor of \u201cthe most ripely precocious baby-doll allure since the nymphet glory days of Tuesday Weld,\u201d Alicia comes across as somewhere between 15, when her education stopped and her film career began, and 32, which is when actresses normally start worrying about being \u201cin control\u201d. Chronologically, she is not yet 19, but in attitude she is a veteran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amy Heckerling, writer and director of Clueless<\/em>, was on her treadmill one day (for exercise, not punishment) when the video for Aerosmith\u2019s \u201cCrying\u201d materialised before her eyes. In this, our heroine ends up dangling from a bridge on the end of a bungee rope, after modelling various crowd-pleasing but dramatically necessary outfits. She doesn\u2019t actually speak: but that didn\u2019t stop Ms Heckerling offering her the lead in the new film. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A cloud drifts across Miss Silverstone\u2019s sunny features when this story is raised. \u201cI don\u2019t know why she says that, because she knows very well that\u2019s never what really happened. It\u2019s certainly not accurate,\u201d she chides, gently. By that stage, she insists, she had already done lots of real acting, and the director was well aware of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hers is, after all, a career that started at eight, when her parents, a British-born pair of Californians called Monty and Didi Silverstone, allowed her to take up modelling. She did that until she was 12, using the money for acting classes, and then became an actress, starting with a pizza commercial. Later she was offered the female lead in The Crush<\/em>, playing a murderous erotomaniac. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately she was only 15, and would have lost the job unless she agreed to be legally \u201cemancipated\u201d. \u201cIf I had not gotten emancipated I would only be allowed to work nine hours a day,\u201d she explains, \u201cbut because I was emancipated I was able to work slave labour: 18 hours a day, sometimes 20 hours.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s an irony there somewhere, especially when you hear that the authorities in LA are desperate to stop children becoming \u201cemancipated\u201d, not to hamper the star-making machinery but because the poor are taking their kids out of school and making them work. \u201cMy dad was sneaky,\u201d confesses Alicia, \u201cHe found a small town instead of doing it in LA. I went for a test, and went to talk to the judge.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so, with one bound, she was free. Since then she has made nine films for television and cinema, though Clueless<\/em> is the first to be seen here. Her character, Cher, is a rich, pretty, vacuous 15-year-old who tries to control the destinies of her friends. Alicia is excellent: pert, likeable and suffused with a bracing yet unthreatening brand of sexuality.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s more, she delivers her lines with panache. The teenage dialogue is crisp and witty, a piece of wishful thinking by the writer\/director, who modelled her plot on Emma<\/em>. Alicia has yet to read the source material. \u201cIt\u2019s on my booklist,\u201d she grins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These days the books she studies are those which detail her box-office appeal. Clueless<\/em>, she tells me, has already taken six times what it cost to make \u2014 \u201cand that\u2019s only domestic\u201d. She is, to use the vernacular, \u201chot\u201d. But then she always has been, particularly in a whole series of pictures showing her in Lolita mode (soft toys, nightwear, soft furnishings): these are a particular hit on the World Wide Web, the computer network where her fans hang out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In interview, though, she\u2019s as demure as any Jane Austen heroine, were it not for her disconcerting habit of swivelling and arching her upper body in the direction of the interviewer, all the while producing cracking sounds from her spine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think my looks have anything to do with what I\u2019m doing,\u201d she says, fixing me with the eyes of a shopping-mall Siren. \u201cI\u2019ve said this before, but when I got my Domino\u2019s Pizza commercial I got the role not because I was pretty \u2014 I\u2019m sure there were a lot more pretty girls in the audition \u2014 but because I ate my pizza, and they really believed I\u00a0liked<\/em> the pizza.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat\u2019s<\/em> why I got my Domino\u2019s pizza commercial,\u201d she insists, with a touch of steel. Jodie Foster, watch your step.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the Telegraph Magazine, 1995. Looking at it now, I think I was a bit mean about her. A year ago, Alicia Silverstone was the \u201cAerosmith babe\u201d, celebrated for appearing in the American hard-rock band\u2019s videos, wearing inadequate clothing and a provocative expression. Her prize was the coveted \u201cBest Video Of All Time\u201d award from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-odds-and-ends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmcheltenham.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmcheltenham.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmcheltenham.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmcheltenham.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmcheltenham.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6981"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/filmcheltenham.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6983,"href":"https:\/\/filmcheltenham.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6981\/revisions\/6983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmcheltenham.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmcheltenham.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmcheltenham.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}