Jane Fonda’s Vietnam-related sloganeering in the Sixties didn’t seem odd: she had the pedigree of a true firebrand. But Daryl Hannah as Hollywood’s Emmeline Pankhurst? The image of the 45-year-old actress is forever frozen as the leggy mermaid in Splash (1984). It’s about time for a little reinvention.
Hannah has been winched down, after 27 days up a tree, by authorities in a protest over the planned destruction of a community garden in Los Angeles. Other stars, including Joan Baez, Laura Dern, Martin Sheen and Danny Glover, have lent their support, if not quite as physically as Hannah. “I’m very confident that this is the morally right thing to do, to take a principled stand in solidarity with the farmers,” Hannah said, raising her fists as she descended from the tree. With protesters removed, plans to build a warehouse on the site are back on track. One wag noted in the Los Angeles Times that if stars such as Hannah felt so strongly, why didn’t they stump up the cash to buy the site — or open the doors of their estates to the garden’s plot-owners. To be fair, Hannah is in the premier league of truly committed Hollywood greens: her home in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado, runs on solar power. She grows organic vegetables and fuels her vehicles using biodiesel.
Hannah grew up in Chicago, “a sheltered kid” whose inspiration was Margaret Hamilton, who played the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. Her stepfather, Jerrold Wexler, was rich and she had bodyguards. After appearing in advertisements, she made her film debut in Brian De Palma’s The Fury. After Splash came lead roles in Wall Street and Steel Magnolias. With her big-screen career on the wane, she has gone indie, appearing in a Tarantino (Kill Bill) and John Sayles’s Silver City.
Last year, Hannah denied reports that she received a diagnosis of borderline autistm as a child and borderline agoraphobia as an adult. “If people think I’m kooky or eccentric because I don’t wear designer clothes, then fine.” She is unmarried: one of her exes was John F. Kennedy Jr, and she has also been linked with Dodi Fayed, Val Kilmer and Mickey Rourke. “I would probably have liked to have 12 kids by now and I’d probably have liked to have saved the world, too. But I’m working on both.”
She’s aware she might seem strange but “Sometimes you have to aim for the moon. Then you might get over the hedge.” Or winched down from the tree.