It is surely a comfort to anyone still awaiting mega-success to know that June Squibb was in her mid-80s before she hit the big time. Her role as a foul-mouthed matriarch in the 2013 film Nebraska brought her an Oscar nomination, and she had her first leading role in last year’s action comedy, Thelma. Now she’s playing the lead again, in the new film Eleanor the Great and she’s currently in rehearsals for a show on Broadway. Is Squibb, who has just turned 96, sick of talking about her late-peaking success? “I think people are interested, so no, it’s not a bad thing,” she says. “But it is funny, because when I first came to New York – it was the 50s – I did The Boy Friend, a musical, and I was a big hit.” But it was theatre, she concedes. “The film thing is so different.”
In Eleanor the Great, Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Squibb plays Eleanor Morgenstein, a 94-year-old woman who, mourning the loss of her best friend Bessie, moves from Florida to New York to be near her daughter. Encouraged to make new friends, Eleanor goes to the local Jewish community centre to join a choir, but the woman belting out Stephen Sondheim is enough to make anyone rush for the door. “Oh god,” mutters Eleanor, backing away, before being scooped up by the Holocaust survivors group, meeting at the same time, who erroneously assume she’s one of them. Lonely and grieving, US-born Eleanor finds herself passing off Bessie’s survival story as her own.
“I just loved her from the beginning,” she says, speaking via Zoom from the rented New York apartment she stays in for theatre rehearsals. “All the quirks. She’s just so full of everything. I mean, she’s not very nice sometimes, and I like that because it gives you something.” Eleanor’s awful lie gets dangerously out of control when Nina – a young journalism student she befriends, played by British actor Erin Kellyman – wants to bring her story to a wider audience.
It was a lovely shoot, says Squibb. Johansson was “wonderful. She’s very honest, very open.” Squibb and Kellyman became real-life friends, put up in the same apartment building by the production. Squibb would invite Kellyman to dinner at her place, or to dinner parties Squibb gave at the Joe Allen brasserie, the theatre district institution. “Erin met a lot of my friends from New York, people that I’ve known for years.” Does Squibb have lots of younger friends too? “I do,” she says. “Well, at my age, everybody’s pretty much younger.”
Squibb is great company, funny and wise, the sort of person you could ask anything: sex, politics and religion are not off-limits. “Everyone thinks older people aren’t sexual but I think about sex,” Eleanor tells Erin. What about Squibb? “I think so, sure,” she says with a smile. “If I see a handsome young man, I recognise that this is a handsome young man. I don’t think I dwell on it maybe the way I did when I was younger, but we’re still thinking about it.”
How does she feel about the political situation in the US, and other parts of the world? “It worries me – and I’ve been through a lot. I’ve seen a lot. I think the world is in a really scary place. I’m just appalled. Now people are brazenly showing the swastika all over. I mean, that’s scary.”
Johansson cast real-life Holocaust survivors in the support group, including Sami Steigmann, a prominent speaker and educator. And Rita Zohar, who plays Bessie, was born in a concentration camp in what is now Ukraine. Steigmann especially, Squibb says, “was so dear. He was welcoming me, rather than me saying, ‘I’m here and you’re coming in [to my film].’ That I loved. It was a wonderful experience, not at all what I thought it would be. There’s no doom and gloom. We were there, we worked together and did our jobs.”
Squibb was a teenager when the second world war ended. She remembers seeing photographs in news magazines of concentration camps being liberated. They would stay with her all her life. “It was horrifying.”
Some critics feel that to fake a Holocaust experience is an especially dreadful kind of lie and morally irredeemable. Squibb is more understanding. “I do think that Eleanor’s need was to be close to Bessie and [the support group is] where she needs to do this. I can understand that. It does bring her closer.” The idea would seem to have its critics in the film industry too – Johansson said this week that one of the project’s financial backers pulled out when she refused to drop the Holocaust elements.
Grief is a big theme of the film – not just Eleanor’s, but also that of Erin, who has recently lost her mother. At the age of 96, Squibb must have had to learn a lot about dealing with grief, not just the loss of friends and colleagues, but her husband of 40 years. “Well, I am a great looker-ahead,” she says. “I always think, ‘What’s going to happen tomorrow?’ I don’t say it’s easy. I don’t mean that at all, but I think that’s what I do. When my husband died, I was more interested in protecting my son, who was in his 20s. He wasn’t a child, but it affected him tremendously. So rather than suffering grief, I was trying to help him get through it.”
Squibb grew up in Vandalia, the small city in Illinois, where her father ran a clothing shop, before joining the navy during the war and later setting up a successful insurance company. Her mother had played the piano at a cinema showing silent movies, then stayed at home to look after Squibb, an only child. She felt, she says, “from the time I had any thoughts, that I was an actress. It never occurred to me that I was anything else. I have no idea where it came from.” She took any drama or dance classes she could, then joined the Cleveland Play House. Her parents weren’t that happy. “My father was rather proud of me, but my mother always hated it. I think she would have loved it if I had just stayed in Vandalia my whole life and did the usual, gotten married, had children. That’s what she wanted.”
Squibb did get married in her early 20s, and converted to Judaism – something she says felt important to her, not because her new Jewish husband or his family expected it. It was “a wonderful experience”. The marriage only lasted for seven years, but Squibb’s faith remained, even though her second husband, Charles Kakatsakis, an acting teacher, was not Jewish. “I’m very pleased and proud to be able to say I’m Jewish.”
By her late 20s, she had moved to New York and was working in the theatre, including in Gypsy on Broadway in 1959, in which she played the stripper Electra. “I had seen it early on, and it just knocked me out. I loved Ethel Merman in it. She was a force of nature. I loved the show, and to be going into it – wow! That number, You Gotta Get a Gimmick, every night it just blew the house away.”
She made extra money with modelling, for trade shows. “Like automobile shows – I would be the host with shorts and the low-cut top and fishnet hose.” With a laugh, she says she also did photographs for true-life confessions in magazines. That sounds quite racy. “Well, it was. It was funny. I remember one day this guy and I spent the whole day in bed together and we started laughing. We don’t even know each other.”
For a young woman working in the 50s and 60s, sexual harassment was somewhat inevitable. “But I also was rather naive, and I think I didn’t see a lot of it. But of course, there was. I was a dancer, too, so it was always no clothes – just the legs out all the time!” When the #MeToo movement started, she remembers talking to a friend who had been a dancer at the same time. “I said, ‘How did we handle it?’ We both agreed that we – and other women we knew – knew what the line was, and you didn’t go over it.”
Squibb was in her early 60s when she got her first film role, in Woody Allen’s Alice, and soon she was racking up small roles in big films – working with Martin Scorsese in The Age of Innocence, with Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, with Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt. Did she feel nervous going on to film sets with such names? “No, it was always just work,” she says. “I had the script. I learned it and I was ready to go.” It helped, she laughs, that “I always feel my role is the leading role, no matter what it is. I have that ego that whatever I’m doing is the important thing in this film.”
Now Squibb is in the leading film roles, and long may it continue. She seems to have that theatre trouper resilience and work ethic, ingrained since her early training. While shooting Eleanor the Great, Squibb came down with bronchitis but, in Johansson’s words, “powered through”. She says: “I have always had a stamina and energy, and I don’t think I’ve lost that, not completely anyway. When I was working, I always managed to find the stamina to keep going, whether it was a matinee into an evening or whatever.” She has, she adds, always had a feeling “that I can do anything”.
• Eleanor the Great is in cinemas on 12 December
