Andie MacDowell : The Trully Beauty

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Andie MacDowell is not going aging, she stills look great and beautiful at 51. The Golden Globe winner said, “As women age, we are getting stronger, healthier, we have more of a voice and we are more independent.”

Mother of three wonderful children is model of the cosmetic and haircare company L’Oréal, together with Diane Keaton and Jane Fonda. She admires Diane Keaton, she said,”As you get older, it’s not just about how you look. It’s about your interior life as well.”

Still fabulous on her age, she might have a strict rules to herself, like must never leave the house without sunblock, or must never drink alcohol, or must drink at least two liters of water a day. She laughs. “I moisturize a lot, but I have good genes. My mother and grandmother both had beautiful skin. My mother also preached about not lying in the sun and about wearing sunblock, she was before her time in a lot of ways.”

And Andie has barely changed since she first started to appear on magazine covers at the end of the 1970s. “I can still fit into a size 28in pair of jeans,” she says proudly.

How does she do it? “I exercise every day, different types of yoga, while I’m here I’ll ride a bike. At home, I’ve got a trainer. Exercise is the most important factor in looking young. If I don’t exercise every day, I’m disappointed. I feel sorry for those women who have to force themselves to do it.”

I’ve read books like The Beauty Myth. I guess I see it very differently. I don’t use beauty products or dye my hair to please anyone else; I don’t do it to capture a man, I do it because it’s something I enjoy. I think it’s innate, something you’re born with. Femininity is an amazing quality and with it comes wanting to dress beautifully, as a little girl, it’s in your nature. I watched my daughters do it, you don’t teach them.’

Andie reminisce about her teenager time, as a youngest of 4 sister, she said, “When I went through puberty and I got really long legs, I had an inkling that I might have something a little unusual. I would walk into stores and people would say, “You should be a model.” But what I really wanted to do was act. I thought that to be able to “be” someone else would be the greatest joy in the world.”

After left home and signed to the prestigious Elite Model Management in New York, knowing it could prove a useful route into acting. It was the era of Studio 54 and Jerry Hall and Bianca Jagger, though Andie says she never really got involved in that scene. Then she was able to survive the madness of modelling and had her first great love affair in Paris in her early 20s with Olivier Chandon de Briailles, the champagne heir (who later died at 27 in a motor-racing accident).

Long way from modeling, she finally found by director Hugh Hudson who first cast Andie as an actress and spotting her potential as the perfect Jane to Christopher Lambert’s Tarzan in his 1984 film Greystoke. Her time was came and she able on to prove herself, in films such as Green Card and Sex, Lies and Videotape, and opposite Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral. “What amazes me is how I survived without anybody giving me guidance. I had no credit card, I travelled all over.”

As a mother to her child, she won’t repeat any bad experiences she had to her child, “I’m much more hands-on than my parents were. I know what my kids are doing, I talk to them all the time.” Andie’s mother, Pauline, died aged just 53, in 1981, when Andie was 23. She had been an alcoholic. Her father left when Andie was six. Andie admits there were times she felt ‘100 years old’ trying to help her mother, but also says, “What my mother did give me was the belief I could do anything.”

A great big billboard of Andie with her own 19-year-old daughter, Rainey, is in the room with us. They shot a Mother’s Day campaign for L’Oréal together. Her daughter is stunning, with Andie’s incredible eyes. Does she want to follow in her footsteps?

“She has been studying dance and musical theatre – she has a beautiful voice. Now she has decided she wants to go to New York to study acting. And I said, if she doesn’t have a job after two years, then she should come to London for a year, and she liked that idea. But I have told her she must want to act, not want to be famous. She knows and she understands.”

Her new movie with Aidan Quinn, The 5th Quarter, based on a true story, in which she plays the mother of a teenage boy killed in a car crash. With all she had now with hard work and a little luck Andie, never thought being famous, she is not chasing for fame

It was on an assignment for Gap in 1984 that she met fellow model Paul Qualley. They got married, and had three children: as well as Rainey, she has a son, Justin, 23, who is studying business, and another daughter, Sarah Margaret, 14.

After they broke up in 1999, Andie went on to marry her childhood sweetheart, Rhett Hartzog, two years later. That marriage lasted three years. I’d read that she had not long ago married a local used-car salesman. Is that true, and how is it going?

‘Oh God, that was nothing, that was very short-lived,’ she says, without denying it. ‘I’m single and I have been for quite a while.’

She does realise, though, that she never got over the pain of her parents’ divorce. ‘I was never allowed to cry, so I never mourned that loss. So when I went through my first divorce, I mourned the original one, I mourned the loss of my father, which is classic. I suffered for a while. My second marriage was a rebound; I hadn’t really resolved all my problems.’

She has had to ignore the pressure put on her by other people, mostly married friends, that she simply has to be with someone.

‘I think it’s their discomfort with you being single. Now, though, I like being single. I took a sabbatical [from men]. I took time to discover who I really am. I think you make so many sacrifices in a relationship to be who they want you to be that you lose track of who you are. It was during yoga that I started thinking about the things about myself that I really enjoy. It’s OK to be alone.’

She still loves men, but is now ‘enjoying the process of making male friends and not jumping into the fire’. But doesn’t she find dating soul destroying? Wouldn’t she rather stay at home watching TV?

‘These new relationships are not about falling in love – look at it as making a friend who happens to be male.’ I tell her I got divorced a year ago. ‘You did?’ She grasps my arm. ‘Then you have to give yourself more time.’

Enthused nonetheless with the idea of finding me a boyfriend, she scribbles down a list of the self-help books she has found invaluable.

‘You should read the Robert A Johnson trilogy, He, She and We, and The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other by James Hollis.’ Isn’t it interesting that one of the world’s great beauties is reading relationship books by the shelf load? ‘I’ve been rejected plenty,’ she says.

‘The older you get, the less you worry about what people say and the more you worry about what you want, because this is it. I don’t hang out with people I don’t want to hang out with. When you’re young, you go to more trouble to be nice, but now? My time is way too valuable.’

Andie MacDowell is truly beauty for me, not only outside, but she had inside beautier. She does learn about her life have been through, and she taught the children. She is now appearing in the new L’Oréal Paris Revitalift Neck and Contours campaign.

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