Stormy Heather

Heather Graham sits at a Columbus Avenue pavement table on New York's Upper West Side, drinks through a straw from a plastic cup of something which appears to be cold, creamy and caffeinated, and answers questions, laughing a lot, pretending to enjoy it.

Two young girls, barely into their teens, approach her.

'Sorry,' says one. 'We don't want to bother you, but it's my friend's birthday. Can we have your autograph?'

'Sure,' she says evenly.

'I think you're awesome,' the girl declares, as Graham signs.

'Oh, thanks.'

Then the birthday girl, who seems much more shy and nervous, speaks. 'I dressed up as Rollergirl for my birthday party,' she says.

'Oh, did you really?' says Graham.

Rollergirl was the part Heather Graham played in the 1997 film Boogie Nights, the role which lifted her out of a long, stuttering career in vaguely lucrative but inglorious blonde-girl B-movie purgatory. And if it is sweet that a young girl should be aping Graham's finest performance, it is also a little peculiar and unsettling - Rollergirl is, after all, a porn star with an innocent, eager-to-please smile who never takes off her roller skates, even when having sex, and who, in the first 10 minutes of the film, nonchalantly asks a naive teenager, 'So, are we gonna fuck?' and in one motion, slips off her dress to do so.

When the fans have gone, I repeat the birthday girl's sentence to Graham: I dressed up as Rollergirl for my birthday. I find it a little weird, but she simply laughs. 'Isn't that funny?' she says.

Heather Graham, who is 29, has just moved to New York with her film-maker and actor boyfriend, Edward Burns (recently seen in Saving Private Ryan). 'We're going to be bi-coastal,' she explains. She owns the house they share in Los Angeles; he rents this New York apartment which, she rambles enthusiastically, 'is like an Edith Wharton book, it's been in this guy's family for a hundred years and has old floors from that period, it's really cool, you feel like you should be receiving gentleman callers, it's really neat...' Last night they had his parents over for dinner for the first time: 'I made this garlic shrimp and then we made steak and I made this zucchini patties thing and then we made asparagus and mashed potatoes...'

When she was young, growing up in Agoura, a small town 45 minutes' drive from Hollywood, Graham would fantasise about escaping to New York. 'I always had this dream of coming to New York and struggling and, like, eating peanut butter,' she says. 'Being this struggling actress in New York seemed really romantic.'

It never happened. She started working as an actress when she was 16, and by the time she first lived here - for three months, when she was 19 - she already had her own money and a boyfriend's smart New York apartment to stay in. 'I had a different kind of peanut butter years,' she says. 'Not money struggles - other kinds of struggles, you know.' That is as specific as Graham is often prepared to be; whatever the messes that have littered her life, she prefers to refer to them obliquely, if at all.

She remembers herself as an ambitious child. 'I was obsessed,' she recalls. 'I was: "If I don't make something of myself, I am nothing." I just had not a lot of confidence and self-esteem, but for some reason I had the idea that I could be an actress.' It was her mother who spurred her along: 'She was always pushing me to do it and gave me confidence about it - I think she was a bit of a frustrated artist.' Graham was also inspired by Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice: 'I just liked watching her face when she was talking... I just remember thinking it was really cool.' Soon after she started taking acting classes, she got an agent. 'There's a certain market, now and then, for kids who are 16 years old and look younger,' she says.

She likes to say that License To Drive, in which 'two guys steal their parents' car and go on a crazy night and I'm, like, the girl at school who one guy has a crush on and I get really drunk and pass out', was her first film; it was certainly her first modest success, and the $60,000 it paid her would enable her to leave home. But there were other, earlier learning experiences, including a Disney Sunday night movie in which she played a cheerleader and OJ Simpson played the high-school coach. 'He was a very nice person,' she says. 'It just goes to show you can never really totally predict a person's personality.'

Her first false dawn came in 1989, when she appeared opposite Matt Dillon in Gus Van Sant's compelling, much-praised Drugstore Cowboy. It seemed to her as though she had made it. 'I thought, wow, this is so great - I'm conquering this town,' she remembers. But, as she looks back on it now, she thinks she was still short on confidence, poor at making decisions and too easily influenced by agents who pushed her towards the easy money. 'I let them talk me into movies that I didn't believe in,' she says.

The first two were Shout, which found John Travolta right at the bottom of his mid-career trough, and Guilty As Charged, which starred Rod Steiger. 'I thought, "Rod Steiger! He's so amazing!"' she says, shaking her head. Slowly, her career slipped back to where it had been before. She would get some parts from people who remembered Drugstore Cowboy, but after a while even those became less frequent.

As hers slid, other careers rose. Often, Uma Thurman would get the parts for which Graham would be passed over. And then there was Gwyneth Paltrow. 'She had a really small part in that movie Shout,' Graham says, 'and I remember watching her career just explode.' She smiles. 'I think I used to feel really negatively competitive.'

Paul Thomas Anderson, the writer and director of Boogie Nights, was one of those who still remembered Drugstore Cowboy. But he worried that Graham seemed too angelic and would not be up for the kind of performance that the part of Rollergirl demanded. He was wrong. 'I think,' she says, fixing me with a determined stare, 'you never really know what a person's been through. Do you know what I mean?'

Since then, the most common perception of her has swung the other way - as someone who regularly conceals a wildness and a sexual openness behind a thin veneer of innocence. She played on this perception in her most commercially successful film so far, the lovably flippant Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, in which she played the character of Felicity Shagwell ('Shagwell by name,' she introduces herself, 'shag very well by reputation').

She does it again in Bowfinger, her latest movie [released nationwide on 22 October], which was written by Steve Martin. It's about a failing film director (played by Martin) who, unable to get big Hollywood stars to act in his movie, resolves to shoot scenes around one such star (played by Eddie Murphy) without their knowledge. ('Did you know,' Steve Martin's character desperately bluffs as his plan begins to fall apart, 'Tom Cruise had no idea he was in that vampire movie till two years later?')

Graham plays the young Ohio girl who gets off the bus in Hollywood, smiles, says, 'Where do I go to be an actress?', then merrily sleeps with whomever can help her up the next step of the ladder. 'I thought that would be fun,' she says, 'that I'm, like, this innocent person that's very manipulative and ambitious. I just love that I'm not what I seem.'

She says that people who meet the real Heather Graham often have the wrong idea.

'With my boyfriend,' she offers by way of example, 'when we started going out, he thought I was this crazy, wild person. He was' - she voices his incredulity - '"You're not that?" I mean, in parts, I know I have a crazy side, but I remember when he first met me, he was checking my arms for track marks...'

I am a little taken aback. Jokingly? I ask.

'No,' she says, 'seriously. He thought I was a heroin addict. He looked between my toes!' (Junkies who want to conceal the most telltale signs of their habit sometimes inject into the veins between their toes.)

Why did he think that?

'Because he thought I was this crazy girl.'

I suppose he also imagined that when the two of you went into the bedroom, you wouldn't get out for the next three-and-a-half days?

She giggles airily. 'Well, you know, that is true,' she says, then adds, carefully: 'No, just kidding.' And then she says: 'But someone had said to him, "Oh, wow, she's a total slut", or whatever. And someone said I had dated Jack Nicholson.'

And?

'I had never dated Jack Nicholson. I had never even met him.'

I am well aware that at some point we will discuss Heather Graham's parents. In most stories about Heather Graham, her strange relationship with them sits in the centre. The simple facts, as Graham has told them before now, are that her father, an FBI agent, and her mother, a children's book author, do not approve of the way she lives her life or the films she makes, and she does not approve of her authoritarian upbringing. They do not talk.

But I do not bring them up. When I sit down at the table, I ask her what she has done so far that day (got up late, had a lunch meeting, walked in the park) and simply let the conversation wander where it will.

Soon she is describing the animals her mother used to make out of pine cones and the place where they lived: 'A scary suburban neighbourhood not totally dissimilar from American Beauty.' (American Beauty is the mesmerising Sam Mendes film, yet to be released here, in which terrible things happen in repressed red-roses-against-white-fences American suburbia.)

A lot of pastel colours and fake smiles, I suggest.

'Yeah, definitely,' she says. 'Cheerleading. If you wore, like, a pink shirt, you had to wear pink socks. And it was the Eighties, so everyone had curled their hair and hairsprayed it to death. Most people were white Republican middle class. There was kind of a real fear of everything - stay in your little world and be careful of everything that's out there. Very judgmental about everyone and everything. I just felt like I didn't really fit in because I was more of an oddball type.'

When did she first feel really judged?

'Well, I was Catholic, so probably the moment I started realising all the rules I was supposed to obey... It just makes you feel like your natural urges are wrong, and you second-guess yourself. And I think it made me, like, sort of indecisive. Like, I want to do this, but I should probably do that, but all my urges are wrong... you get really confused about it. My parents, they didn't really want to hear my point of view. I think they were willing to hear it, but they would just then tell me about how their point of view was right and mine was wrong.'

The moment she left high school, she left home. Did that freak them out?

'Yeah. Mmm hmm. They just couldn't understand why I wanted to leave.' She sits upright. 'But you know what?' she says. 'My publicist gets pissed if I talk about my parents too much.'

This seems such a strange thing to say that I am dumbstruck for a moment. Um, well it's your life, I eventually point out.

'I know,' she says with ersatz breeziness, laughing. 'I know.'

I think you should decide what you want to talk about - not your publicist.

'I know. But the only thing is, every article about me is about me and my parents, for some reason.'

But - I point out - I've just sat down and started talking to you, and followed the conversation where it's gone, so it may say more about you than about my questions.

'Yeah. OK. Well, we can try other subjects, though, if you want. OK?'

There must be a reason why we've ended up talking about this, I persist, and it's probably the same reason you've talked about it before - it's obviously something to do with who you are.

'Right. Right. Right. No, it definitely has a lot to do with who I am, but it doesn't mean you have to talk about it in an article, really. I think people have a hard time understanding... no.' She stops herself.

What were you going to say?

There is a pause. 'Um, because I don't speak to my parents now, people I think have a hard time understanding that, and it seems very ungrateful. Unless you go into a long, long explanation, which I don't really want to go into, it's... actually, it's not hard for some people to relate to, but it's a subject that people get very incensed about. I've met people before who I don't even know and they're like, "You've got to talk to them - you must call them right now." And I've opened this up because I've talked about it, but it's, like, "I don't want you to tell me what to do with my personal life, and it's kind of annoying."'

Does either side try and make contact with the other?

'Ummm... mmm... I don't know,' she says. 'Can we talk about some other things, and then we'll come back to that?'

Continued on next page

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