“I like my coffee,” says Blythe Danner, shaking her head as if embarrassed. “I can’t wake up unless I have it. I’m still not quite awake, in fact.” The 72-year-old actor makes sure she gets cream with her coffee – “it’s the one bugaboo I have” – even if her request for it, after she is initially brought milk, resembles an apology. But Danner’s self-effacing demeanour is no act. Over the course of our chat, the actor continually does her best to to deflect attention to something, or someone, else. It seems to put her at ease.
A case in point is her children. As soon as her cream arrives, Danner – unprompted – praises the Guardian for positively reviewing her son Jake Paltrow’s debut film, Young Ones (aka Bad Lands: Road to Fury). Later, again unprompted, she talks about her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow. “She’s an animal of a whole other kind,” she says. “She very much has my husband’s brain, and facility for speaking eloquently and acting extraordinarily. I think she will act more as her children get older. I certainly hope so, because I think it’s cheating the world not to.”
The tendency towards evading the spotlight extends into Danner’s work life. In her 50 years as an actor, she has only played supporting roles on the big screen. She confesses that was by design. “I’m a company person – I’m a supporting player,” she says. “For so many years, I hated being scrutinised by the camera. I was uncomfortable. Physically being able to throw myself around the stage – you cannot do that on film. I just never put myself in that box of being a lead in film.”
Born in Philadelphia, Danner graduated from Bard College, New York, a liberal arts centre. She won a Tony award for best supporting actress in 1969, for Butterflies Are Free, on Broadway, and set her sights on Hollywood. She’s had an exemplary run in the industry, working with everyone from Sidney Lumet (on Lovin’ Molly), to Woody Allen, numerous times. Yet Danner has never been a household name like her daughter, chiefly because she’s never been offered the chance to lead a film.
That changed last year, when writer/director Brett Haley got in touch with a plum offer. Haley’s film, I’ll See You in My Dreams, centres on Carol, a widow and former songwriter, who after years of enjoying a quiet existence, finds a new lease of life after striking up a friendship with her pool maintenance man (Martin Starr), and courting the affections of a potential love interest (Sam Elliot). “I almost turned it down,” Danner says. “I saw in the script that I was in every scene – I’d never done that. I never went after something like this. But my agent said: ‘You’re a fool if you don’t do it.’”
Danner filmed I’ll See You in My Dreams in just 18 days, and says she cherished working on a micro-budget drama. “As an actor I feel much freer and [more] comfortable when it’s made on a tiny budget – because nobody is looking at the watch,” she says. “The stress factor is eliminated.”
I’ll See You in My Dreams premiered at Sundance in January, and was released in the US in the summer. It was one of the rare independent films to turn a profit – managing to outgross the teen-skewed Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, despite playing on far fewer screens. She says its success took her by surprise and adds: “I’m just grateful that before I’m dead, I got a good role on film.”
Chief among the reasons the role appealed to Danner was Carol’s predicament of being older, yet feeling vibrant inside. “I feel invisible too,” Danner says. “Walking down the street after you’re 65 is very different from when you’re younger. You’re perceived very differently. I pass the mirror and think: who is that? You feel exactly the same inside. But on the outside, obviously you’re not.”
Like Carol, Danner is a widow; her husband, producer/director Bruce Paltrow, died of cancer in 2002. Danner says her experience of loss informed the character, making playing her “so easy” – something she says she felt strangely guilty about. “There was so much on the platter,” she says. “It just presented itself.”
With the Oscars months away, Danner now finds herself on the awards circuit, campaigning for a best actress nomination for her first on-screen lead role. She says her daughter put her up to it. “Gwyneth said I had to make an effort, not necessarily to get an Oscar nomination, but just to be out there to celebrate a lovely role in a wonderful movie. It’s also my 50th anniversary in the business. So I thought: OK, why not?”
What would her first nomination mean? “It would mean that I’m acknowledged and recognised, which I feel I am now,” she says simply. “I’m just absolutely revelling in the goodwill that’s been thrown my way.
“To be in this business for 50 years has been very fulfilling. I’ve missed some good roles here and there because of wanting to be a good mom, but nothing I’m embittered about. I’m just happy this is all happening now.”
• I’ll See You In My Dreams is available now on DVD
