Kirsten Dunst is being served up again for public consumption. She is dressed in white. Her long hair, currently dyed brown, is freshly fussed and her make-up is pristine. She has a movie to promote. By my calculation, it is her 47th.
Yet the poor kid is only 24. She is a pale, slimline little thing, with a rather grumpy face. The view from the Cannes roof terrace where we meet is stunning. White yachts the size of liners are on a seascape of the darkest blue and there is a heady feeling of wellbeing and pleasure. But Dunst has the blank-eyed look of someone who wants to be far away.
Her latest film, Marie Antoinette, is certainly worth talking about. It is directed by Sofia Coppola, who worked wonders with Lost in Translation (2003) and The Virgin Suicides (1999). It is a fresh look at the court of Versailles, into which the 14-year-old Austrian princess married in 1770. Dunst delivers an exquisite portrayal of a rich girl lost in decadence as she weds the teenage dauphin, the future Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman). And here we are in 2006, when Hollywood is awash with the most outrageous excesses, with an actress who seems to be at exactly the same point in her life as her character in the movie. “Very few people recognise the real me,” she complains. “We all feel sad and lonely, but there is more of it in me than is realised. I’ve had to grow up very fast in the adult world of acting. I’m watched a lot, and it’s hard to find my freedom.”
Dunst has been performing professionally since she was three, in television commercials. She had a succession of TV roles before an uncredited film part in Woody Allen’s segment of New York Stories (1989). After a flurry of other roles, she had her first screen kiss, aged 11, with Brad Pitt in the 1994 film Interview with the Vampire. It could have also been the kiss of death to her fledgling career. But Hollywood seemed mightily attracted to this child who acted like an adult. The roles rolled in with the big boys: Jumanji (1995), with Robin Williams, Mother Night (1996), with Nick Nolte, Wag the Dog (1997), with Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. Then, suddenly, she was fully grown and earning a fortune. She played Mary Jane Watson, delivering the upside-down kiss to Tobey Maguire, in Spider-Man (2002), the American tennis champ in Wimbledon (2004) and the quirky air stewardess hired by the director Cameron Crowe last year for Elizabethtown.
But, frankly, it has all been too much, too fast. Dunst has been educated on film sets, surrounded by grown-ups from childhood. Her life has been complicated by big fees, family tensions and the paparazzi. And it shows. It is etched deep in her tight little frown. It shows whenever she starts talking about how she wins roles and how much Hollywood means to her. It is sown deep in her needy desire to please. Even when she auditioned for Interview with the Vampire, the director, Neil Jordan, was so concerned by her behaviour that he asked her mother: “Is she right in the head?” Dunst recalls: “I was sobbing in the room because I did not want to let anybody down. It was a major part to get for everybody, so I was desperate for it. I had been training with my acting coach and was not afraid to do the emotional stuff.”
There has been plenty of emotional stuff, it seems, from the divorce of her parents, when she was 13, to her long-term relationship with the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, 25, which seems to flick on and off like a light switch. Her Swedish mother, Inez, who has been the driving force behind her career, lives near her home in Los Angeles. So does her only sibling, Christian, aged 20. Her German father, Klaus, remains 3,000 miles away in New Jersey, where she was born and brought up.
“Money can make life complicated,” she observes. “A lot of people depended on me from an early age. I had a lot of financial responsibility for my family. I was more than happy to help them. But it made me feel old before my time, on occasions. I was always responsible and sensible.
“I went through my teens like an adult, always being careful not to stay out too late or get myself into trouble. What happened was that I became isolated. I felt like the one with the responsibility, the one who had to make important decisions. For most kids, it is a carefree time. But not for me.”
The early maturity is understandable. Film sets are, quite frankly, occupied by many adults who are wildly eccentric, emotionally crippled or just plain nuts. They role-play, like children. The only difference is that they are given cameras and sound equipment to play with, and allowed to feel that it is perfectly normal to dress up, put on make-up and play games from dawn till dusk. Child actors often take a good long look and find themselves behaving more responsibly than those around them.
Continued on page 2...()
Dunst has clearly taken a strict line on the drug culture when working on a film. “I have never once come across cocaine,” she says. “Maybe someone has been using it, but I am very naive on that. Or perhaps I am not offered it because they know my work ethic. I don’t smoke and have only tried pot once in my life. I do everything in moderation. I drink, but do not get plastered. I deal with my problems, so I do not have vices over which I have no control.”
Although she was back on the working treadmill when we met, filming a third Spider-Man film — hence the brown hair, rather than her natural blonde — Dunst took the weight of responsibility from herself by having several months off after Marie Antoinette. She also moved into her own home in the Hollywood Hills, where she lives alone amid antique furniture and original art. “I started not enjoying being on a film set,” she says. “The only thing that works for me is having chunks of time off. Otherwise, you have no personality left for yourself.”
Dunst makes her points in a voice that does not whinge or whine. She just pointedly gives the facts. She may be funny and witty, but there is little evidence of it here. She does not have the down-to-earth jollity or sense of irony of a twentysomething British actress — Keira Knightley springs to mind — so comes across as rather a serious soul. She has probably been trotting out these meetings since she was about 10. When people take children deadly seriously, why should they not take themselves equally seriously?
