The “embarrassing” movies Daryl Hannah apologised for making: “Oh, god, I’m sorry”
Perhaps it’s my age, or perhaps I’m completely the wrong demographic for her, but when I think about Daryl Hannah, I can come up with precisely two facts and no more; firstly, that she was a mermaid in that 1980s film with Tom Hanks. And secondly, she married Neil Young. That’s it. But let’s assume she has done plenty more than that, and plough on regardless.
Because Hannah has actually had a long career, making movies even before her tail-finned adventures in Splash with Mr Hanks in 1984, in fact appearing in a Brian De Palma film called The Fury as far back as 1978. She also popped up in Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi Blade Runner in 1982, but dotted among these stand-outs were also some films she is no doubt rather less proud of, which we’ll come to.
Maybe a new category for Hannah could be invented along the lines of ‘an actor who was in lots of films you remember, but you don’t remember them being in them’, because after all she did feature in the Michael Douglas smash Wall Street (albeit winning a Razzie for worst actor) in 1987, and the same year played Steve Martin’s love interest in Roxanne, the Cyrano de Bergerac retelling that saw Martin make lots of jokes about his own very long nose.
That was enough to land her movies alongside leading names Peter O’Toole and Woody Allen, but it was Steel Magnolias that had the most star-power in 1989, with Hannah playing a smaller role opposite the likes of Julia Roberts, Shirley Maclaine and Olympia Dukakis.
Back then, in the 1980s, Hannah was actually quite refreshingly honest about her early career, or at least the standard of some of the films she appeared in, including the widely panned rom-com Summer Lovers in 1982 and the 1984 drama Reckless, which, to be fair, didn’t go down as badly and was at least written by Chris Columbus.
Hannah apologised to Rolling Stone about her first few leading roles and said, “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Embarrassing.” Which is remarkably forthright for someone who was in their mid-20s and trying to forge a career in movies. She went on to act fairly prolifically throughout the next four decades, and yet, as we discovered at the start, you would be fairly hard-pressed to name anything she was in.
The outlier to that are definitely the two Kill Bill movies from Quentin Tarantino, released in 2003 and 2004, in which she was very, very good as the monocular Elle Driver, codename Mountain Snake, a deadly assassin and one of the names on the sword-swinging hero Uma Thurman’s hitlist.
Her performance was seen as another example of Tarantino going back to names some may have forgotten and getting career highlights out of them, and Hannah was duly nominated for awards for her work on the movies. Unlike with John Travolta, however, it didn’t lead to the kind of roles she might have liked, and a look at her 20 years since doesn’t show too many well-known titles.
She has been in the news more recently, though, as she crops up in Love Story, the FX retelling of the life of John F Kennedy Jr, from producer Ryan Murphy, Hannah having once dated the son of JFK. In the ’90s-set show, Hannah is played by Drew Hemmingway, who says she wrote the actor a ‘love letter’ before taking on the part. Hannah, meanwhile, has spent much of the last few years documenting her husband Neil Young’s touring and music.
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