‘I used to kill myself trying to be the perfect woman’
‘Until I was 40, I ate everything,’ she confesses. ‘I cooked everything with butter and salt and sauces, and I used to wonder why I felt so queasy in the evening. Now I eat a lot of steamed vegetables, and I love it. I’m much more health-conscious than I used to be. A lot of awful things happen to people as they get older, and I believe much of it has to do with the foods we eat and keeping the body clean inside.’
We’re settled cosily in the actress’s sprawling French-style farmhouse in one of the busiest canyons in Beverly Hills. Light pours into the airy living room from the open French doors that lead to the pebbled courtyard. There’s something almost mystical about this room. It’s the way the late afternoon light falls on the exotic mementos around the room.
Artefacts from her world travels decorate the white walls, alongside a Murillo and paintings from Brazil. Coloured Polynesian wooden fish fill the mantelpiece. There are neat piles of books, many in French, and a stop smoking book. (Did it work? ‘I don’t remember.’)
She’s just finished cleaning up from the previous evening’s dinner party for friends and she relays the menu with guilty delight: ‘Roast potatoes, stuffing and roast chicken seasoned with lots of French herbs, then mixed cheeses. For dessert we had ice cream and crème Chantilly. Delicious!’ She sees my eyes light up. ‘Would you like some? There’s plenty left over.’
I pass, her earlier advice still ringing in my head, but it sounds amazing. Which, by the way, is how she looks today. ‘Oh no,’ she refutes, ‘I’m looking very puffy today.’ Puffy? ‘Yes. I cooked with salt last night. Salt always makes me look puffy!’ I peer closer into those remarkable emerald eyes, the face of the woman whom Newsweek once described as ‘the most beautiful woman on the screen’.
‘Lord knows why!’ she grins. ‘I sleep flat on my face, which is the worst thing to do, and I wake up looking like a map of Europe!’
She’s 68 now, a long way from the days when she arrived in Hollywood and became a sex symbol. But she is no less alluring. She looks so girlish that one is unable to refrain from asking if there’s been one of those ‘facial rejuvenations’. No, she says, then leans towards me. ‘Look, I promise, none. It’s all mental. It all comes from inside. I’m not into plastic surgery because I haven’t seen it being particularly successful on people. They end up looking slightly different. I don’t want that. I believe in developing yourself, letting your life be your map.
‘Not that I like what’s happening in my face. I can see all sorts of changes and it’s not easy to be photographed. It’s a bloody struggle, I’m telling you, trying to be what people want you to be. I like the way my face represents me. And I can tell my mental state by the bags under my eyes.’
Ah, the puffiness again. She laughs. Not a delicate tinkle, but hoots of laughter. Bisset may present a serious demeanour, but it gives way to frequent bouts of giggles. Rarely offered the chance to reveal it on screen, she has an acute and engaging sense of humour – ‘People always cast me so frightfully seriously, it’s a real struggle even to get to smile in a film.’
Jacqueline’s life is devoid of the usual movie-star trappings. No chauffeur. No secretary. She drives a car that is 42 years old (even if it is a vintage Cadillac convertible). And she’s happy and single in Hollywood. Her independence has allowed her to carve a life for herself and to live it, to some degree, alone. She has almost never wavered in her belief that marriage can destroy romance and yet her relationships have lasted around seven years, longer than many Hollywood marriages. But could her view of marriage be changing at last?
Despite her impassioned need to protect her space and privacy, this most eligible bachelorette now admits to wavering on the issue.
‘I think maybe I could do it now,’ she ponders slowly. ‘It’d be nice to nd someone… but I’ve always had those kinds of relationships where I’ve felt married to whomever I was with. It would be easy for me to fall into wifely behaviour. I can be very happy running around in my old wellies and working in the garden, looking quite untidy and extremely happy.’
She’s sensitive about discussing her new romance (‘I’m not clear what it is; it’s early days’), but concedes that, like many people, ‘once I’m in the thick of a relationship, romantic love sends everything absolutely haywire. It’s wonderful… for a while. Then you start to feel you’ve been overrun. So, I say you’ve got to have three lives – yours, his, and both together – for a relationship to work.’
In the past, she was ‘quite needy’, which she’s controlled as she’s grown older. ‘If I didn’t get three compliments after cooking a meal, I would get very depressed. I used to kill myself trying to be the perfect woman, the perfect cook, the best actress. It’s an awful pressure to put yourself under. But I’ve come to realise that I don’t need everyone’s approval. Sometimes, if people don’t like you – tough.’
While she is unusually frank, she has learned to tread warily and save innermost feelings for her closest intimates. Yet she can be disarmingly candid, a rare quality in Hollywood.
She is certainly a complex woman. ‘The appetite to learn is still the strongest thing in me,’ she tells me vehemently, thumping a cushion that has become squashed under her elbow. ‘I always had a fear of being emptyheaded and frivolous, so I became very self-conscious and cerebral.’
A true survivor of the System, she has always relied more on her brains than her beauty to carry her through life, a fact she attributes to her strict upbringing. ‘I’ve survived Hollywood because I stuck to my own way of doing things. I won’t compromise.’
A ‘horrendously shy’ child, she grew up with her older brother in Surrey, their father a doctor, their French mother a lawyer before her marriage. At 21, after a brief modelling stint and one line in The Knack, she arrived in America. Groomed for stardom via a debut opposite Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney in Two For The Road, the young Bisset learned to maintain her independence in an arena notorious for its destruction of souls. The battle scars are there – ‘I’ve been so battered at times that I tend to react and become overaggressive before it’s necessary’ – yet she has emerged relatively unscathed.
For years she was used mostly as a sex kitten to enhance the screen’s macho stars. From Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, and in lms such as Bullitt and The Detective, she became Hollywood’s favourite girlfriend. The often vacuous roles brought her international fame, but they also impeded her growth as an actress. ‘I think I could have done a lot more a lot sooner if I’d had the right parts,’ she concedes. ‘But I allowed a degree of anger to set in.’
When her wet body emerged from The Deep, clad in a clinging T-shirt in the classic exploitation scene, her visibility – and her fee – soared. She proved able to rise to the challenge of such austere lms as Forbidden, Anna Karenina and Under The Volcano. Selective in her choice of roles, she has always opted for characters of depth.
‘It’s very difficult for me to do nothingness. It always has been. I have an almost complete impatience with stu that is just generic. I need things to challenge and inspire me. These days I search for lms that look at behaviour in a way one hasn’t really seen before. I’m as interested in the traditional ways of a woman as I am in the feminist side of a woman today.’
That quest is what spurred her to accept her latest role in the upcoming BBC Two drama series, Dancing On The Edge. She plays an aristocrat in this 1930s saga that has racism at its core. It tells of the rise to fame of a black jazz group who struggle to circumvent bigotry among the English upper classes. ‘There are all sorts of plots going on, even a murder, and ultimately this milieu turns against the young black bandleader. It’s very intricate, fascinating and extremely well-written.’
Bisset’s ties with Britain remain strong. She still owns a house near Reading, and often visits her brother and friends. Might she return permanently one day? The closest answer I get is that she’s ‘thinking about it’.
By her own definition, she is aggressive, bossy, vulnerable and sensitive, emotional and mercurial. Alexander Godunov, with whom she had a seven-year relationship, once described her as a panther. Bisset considers a combination of ‘a rabbit and a pussycat’ to be more apposite. ‘I’m not as glum or moody as I used to be. I smile a lot more and because I’m so content I think I’m a nicer person.’
The face of Avon cosmetics, she exudes vitality. But it wasn’t always that way. ‘I always had a lot of energy,’ she recalls. ‘I was a real dynamo, but then I found I couldn’t attack with the same vigour. And it became an obsession, this energy that wasn’t there. I thought, “My God, is this it? Is this what happens when you get older? I’m not ready for this”. Looking back, I realise it was just bad diet and not exercising. Because now that I take more care of myself, I feel great.
‘Stress is what ages you the most and I try hard to eliminate it from my life. I don’t want to believe all this stu about slowing down as you get older.’ She punches the cushion back into shape and adds: ‘I don’t want to waste my time. Life’s too precious and I’ve got too much to do.’
© Barbra Paskin, 2012
Dancing On The Edge is scheduled for broadcast on BBC Two next year.