Keeping up appearances - Telegraph
BY Rosemary McBain | 21 January 2007
She's 62 and has clocked up 40 years in films, but still Jacqueline Bisset manages to look amazing - and land the parts. Yet, as Rosemary McBain discovers, there's nothing plastic about Nip/Tuck's latest guest star
There is absolutely no mistaking Jacqueline Bisset. She may be 62 years old, yet here she is in front of me, all razor cheekbones and sea-green eyes, and she doesn't look a day over 50.
She is tall, stylish in a grey sweater and dark skinny jeans, and somehow she seems to have barely a wrinkle. I stare at her face. I certainly can't see any signs of surgery.
Bisset must know the secret of eternal youth, surely? 'No,' she says, laughing.
'I do not. I get up in the morning sometimes and look in the mirror and see my face and think, "Oh my God, do something about this!" But what? What surgery can you have done that doesn't make you look like a freak? Instead, I try to stay youthful from within. I try to have an inner glow.'
What, no cosmetic surgery? Not even Botox? 'Absolutely not. I am not interested in any of that and I never really have been.'
It's perhaps odd, then, that she is about to appear in Nip/Tuck, the drama series set in a cosmetic surgery centre, as James, the leader of an organ-thieving ring.
'James is a pretty tough woman,' she says. 'I'm pretty bad in it, aren't I?' In one episode, for example, James smashes up the face of one of her gang so that they get plastic surgery to change their identity.
'I get worse, much worse,' says Bisset, eyes widening.
Why did she do the series? Because it's a good career move? After all, some other big names guest-star this season: Catherine Deneuve, Kathleen Turner and Brooke Shields.
'I don't do career moves,' says Bisset. 'But it's a show about life and emotions and sex and complications, not surgery, so it worked for me.'
But I am still interested in how she stays looking so good. 'I make a real point of eating healthily,' she says. 'When I'm working I tend to crave meat to keep my energy up, so I'll eat 3oz of protein a day. At weekends I steam a big bowl of broccoli, beans and sprouts and eat them with olive oil and lemon. It keeps me away from the chocolate.'
It all sounds very LA, I say. What else does she do? Go to the gym? Meditate? Chant? 'No!' she says. 'I look terrible when I work out so I do a bit at home and I like to garden.
'Also I think good thoughts. I try to keep youthful that way. You know when people get older and you can read bitterness in their faces? I try not to be that person. I have banished bitterness from my life.'
It is hard to imagine what Jacqueline Bisset has to be bitter about. Her 40 years in film have been, according to her, remarkably uncomplicated.
She has starred in films directed by John Huston, George Cukor, François Truffaut and Roman Polanski, to name a few.
She has acted alongside Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen and Marlon Brando. 'Most of them are dead,' she says blithely, then checks herself. 'It's so sad.'
One of her most famous roles was in The Deep 30 years ago, gracing the film posters with wet hair, wet T-shirt and a sex-kitten pout.
'Do you know,' she says in her still-English accent (she has lived in Los Angeles since the late 1960s), 'for me The Deep is a bit of an aberration when it comes to my film career. I've never taken my clothes off in a film. If I was asked to subsequently, I'd say, "I'm afraid I've sagged a bit since The Deep." I have preferred to make more interesting choices, really.'
Bisset is under no illusions about the range of parts currently open to her. 'I am happy to play mothers, governesses, that type of thing.' Indeed, last year she played Keira Knightley's mother in Domino, the biopic of the tragic bounty hunter Domino Harvey, and she is about to appear alongside Joseph Fiennes in a biopic of Vivaldi.
But she has had her own hardships. She grew up in a thatched cottage in a village just outside Reading, but her parents - father Max Fraser-Bisset a GP of Scottish descent, and mother Arlette Alexander a French-born lawyer - spilt up when Bisset was a teenager.
At the same time as the divorce, her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and Bisset ended up taking care of her.
'My mother did get very ill,' she says, 'and a lot of my life at quite a young age was spent looking after her.'
Arlette stayed in Britain when her daughter moved to the States but lived with Bisset in Los Angeles for the last ten years of her life (she died in 1999).
Another problem for Bisset was that she adored her father. 'I loved both of my parents,' she says, 'but it was difficult seeing my father as he was in the UK and I was in the States and I had my mother living with me.
Who else was going to look after her? My father remarried and had a son with his new wife when he was 70. He died a while ago but I am very close to both my stepmother and brother.'
Of course she never really meant to stay in America, she says. 'I came over for work. I thought I'd be here for a nanosecond but I never went back home.'
But why didn't she? Was it that Reading looked provincial compared with the hustle and bustle of Hollywood? 'No, it wasn't that,' she says.
'You know, if my career hadn't have worked out I would have been totally happy to come back to Reading. It was more that I didn't have work at home. I'd been a model for Bailey and Terence Donovan, but they kept telling me I was too fat. I'd have to hide behind another model and peep out.'
She tells of going on a fashion shoot to Italy and all the other models eating huge plates of pasta while she was allowed only an apple. 'I knew it wasn't a job for me there and then,' she says.
Also, she was learning a lot in Hollywood. 'I really didn't know how to act,' she says, 'so I went to auditions and I was quiet and thoughtful and watchful. I saw what other people did and copied it.'
Did she ever make mistakes? 'Oh yes,' she says. 'I remember Polanski saying we were going to do "lines off" and I thought he meant speak our lines in Russian or something. I didn't know it meant to do lines off-stage.'
She also says she spent years saying 'sonofabitch' as one long word, and it was an age before someone explained to her it was actually son-of-a-bitch. 'I felt so silly,' she says.
But most actors were generous towards her. 'When I was acting with Sinatra in The Detective, the director was being mean to me and Sinatra would stand up and point at him and say, "Leave the kid alone!" and I thought he was great.'
Who wasn't great then? 'I found Steve McQueen on Bullitt was sort of manic and yet very hard to know. We didn't get close.'
Somehow Bissett was never gobbled up by the Hollywood machine in the way others were. 'I knew aspiring actresses who moved to LA and got greedy. They got involved in seedy and sordid things, but I never did. I kept very focused and determined.
'Also, people always acted in a decent fashion around me. I had a boyfriend then, he was a musician, and he would say to me, "You're as fragile as a butterfly," and I think that fragility worked.' She doesn't seem that fragile, I say. 'Underneath I am very strong and professional but it worked for me. People liked to protect me, not exploit me.'
Maybe this quality, the dichotomy between being at the same time fragile and strong, is what has made her so attractive to men (apart from her looks, obviously).
'Oh, I love men,' she says. 'I really do like them, but…' She tails off. She has never married or had children even though she has had some long relationships.
She was with the actor Michael Sarrazin, the producer Victor Drai and the late Russian ballet star and actor Alexander Gudunov for seven years apiece, and more recently spent 11 years with Emin Boztepe, a Turkish martial arts expert, who was 17 years younger than her. They split up last year.
'I would have liked to get married,' she says when I ask her why none of them managed to get her down the aisle. 'I am certainly not against it, but I saw what happened to my parents and I did not want to repeat their mistakes. I did not want to become a nag.
'Of course, every time I see my friends get married I sort of envy them. They look so happy and then three months later the woman seems so subdued. It is the same for me. I become subdued when I am in a relationship. I feel I lose something important that is me, and I value myself and my freedom and my independence, so after a while the relationship stops working.'
Surely it must be hard to go through all those break-ups, though? Wouldn't it be comforting to have a partner for life, especially now she is… Bisset raises an eyebrow. 'What, getting old?' she says.
'There is nothing to say I will be on my own. As for the break-ups, I treat every man who has been in my life with respect, even if the relationship hasn't been that good. I don't throw mud in their faces or go out with their friends as soon as we part. I value them and that's how I cope with it.'
What about children, though? Does she regret not having any? 'Not at all,' she says. 'Again, I see friends with older children and they chat and have dinner and I think, "That must be fun." But I don't regret that I don't have that.
'There is not much I can do about it anyway and, you know, people don't change much. I really know that now. Despite what anyone else wants you to do, people only ever do what they want to do.'
She seems very happy with her life, I say. 'Oh, I am,' she says. This is partly to do with the fact that she has lived in the same house in the Benedict Canyon district for the past 35 years.
'I find it centres me. My house and I know each other very well.' When she is not working or doing her garden, she says she loves to travel. 'I travel a lot and I do work I enjoy. What more is there?'
Does she find she gets frustrated with the stars of today? After all, she's worked with so many of them and she is godmother to Angelina Jolie.
'Goodness me,' she says, 'I think these young actresses are doing very well for themselves.' Then she adds with a conspiratorial wink, 'But some of these young ones don't even learn their lines! Maybe they think it is cool but they come on to set and they don't know anything and they throw their weight around and… it's no good for anybody and it's extremely unprofessional.'
Who does that, I ask her, begging her to tell. 'No,' she says primly. 'I can't name names. I don't want to scold them in public. It makes them much worse and when they fluff their lines continually because they are flustered then… well, that makes my life much more difficult. Instead I coax them into hopefully getting on with it a bit and then we can all go home and that, at the end of the day, is precisely where I want to be.'
And, with that, my time is up and I must go to my own home, too. Which is a shame, for it has to be said Jacqueline Bisset is the best company I've kept for quite a long time.
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