When William Goldman first saw Robin Wright (Texas, 57 years old) he thought that one day she would be the biggest star in the world.
He tells it in the essential
The Adventures of a Screenwriter in Hollywood
.
If there was one thing the man who wrote the scripts for
Two Men and a Destiny
and
All the President's Men
knew how to recognize ,
He saw myths such as Robert Redford's talent emerge.
The woman who appeared at his house came to seek his approval: he was the screenwriter and author of
The Princess Bride
and had contractually demanded to have the final say on the choice of the protagonist.
“Yes, she is what I wrote,” she said.
They had found what he had written: “the most beautiful creature in the world.”
Almost four decades after that meeting, the prophecy has not been completely fulfilled.
Wright is a respected actress, she has participated in important films and has six Emmy nominations and four Golden Globe nominations, but she has never been close to being the biggest star in the world.
Because?
Because she didn't want to.
“They wanted to make me America's sweetheart,” declared
The Guardian
, “the new naïve girl, but I turned down a lot of movies that didn't excite me.
She was also too busy being a mother.”
Hollywood kept trying until the phone stopped ringing.
“Fuck it,” they said, and that explains a big part of my career.”
In Wright's life everything happened quickly.
At two years old, her parents separated and she and her brother went with their mother. At 10, her dream was to be a dancer on Broadway and she trained almost all day. At 14, she was a model and did advertising for Maybelline and Doritos. 16 tried to sneak in the cast of some John Hughes teen movie, but Molly Ringwald ended up winning in all the castings.
Hughes never called her, but the television did.
She debuted in
The Yellow Rose
, a
western
with Sam Elliot and Cybill Shepherd, and shortly after she became one of the protagonists of
Santa Barbara
, one of the great soap operas on American television.
For 538 episodes she was Kelly Capwell, the innocent and dreamy daughter of the protagonist family that she too often saw involved in kidnappings, attempted murders, and siblings who appear out of nowhere.
Robin Wright in 1984.Ron Galella (Ron Galella Collection via Getty)
Sean Penn and Robin Wright in New York in 1990.Ron Galella (Ron Galella Collection via Getty)
He only has good words for the series in which he stayed for four years.
“Sometimes we worked eighteen hours a day, so I often slept in my dressing room at the NBC studios,” she recalled.
“You had to control your time, your sanity and your immune system.
But what I really learned was the technical side of acting.
Not only did I have to remember my lines, but also when I had to turn a little to the left to favor camera one or in which line I had to face camera three.”
Too childish for adults, too adult for children
And then
The Princess Bride
(1987) appeared.
After beating Meg Ryan and Courteney Cox in the casting, she was faced with her first experience in the cinema and she did not want to ruin it, she lacked academic training and was terrified of working with respected actors.
“I didn't act.
She was just telling myself, 'Don't look like an idiot in front of Mandy Patinkin and Christopher Guest.'
And Cary [Elwes] was very handsome.
“She was convinced that we were going to get married,” she said in
Town & Country
magazine .
Today it is a cult title, but in the eighties it was released as a great mystery.
The name of its director, Rob Reiner, still meant nothing (
Stand by Me
had not yet been released and
When Harry Met Sally
,
A Few Good Men
and
Misery
did not yet exist).
Elwes's face was also unfamiliar and Billy Cristal, the most recognizable of the cast, appeared completely camouflaged behind makeup.
It offered an irresistible combination of adventure, romance, comedy, friendship, love and fantasy.
On paper it was perfect, but there was a problem: no one knew how to sell it.
Too childish for an adult audience and too complex for children.
The little recognition that the film received at the time did not contribute to Wright's stardom, but a single call was enough to change his life.
Sean Penn, Robin Wright and their daughter Dylan at their Malibu home in 1991.Donaldson Collection (Getty Images)
During the filming of
The Irish Club
(1990) she met Sean Penn and they began dating.
Both had already been married.
She for a couple of years with her
Santa Barbara partner,
Dane Witherspoon, and he with Madonna, a turbulent marriage that had delighted the tabloid press.
Before she turned 26, Wright already had two children with Penn.
They made a deal: one of them would always have to stay home to take care of the children, a type of agreement that usually appears in all the profiles of the decline of many promising actresses.
They married.
Robin Wright was renamed Robin Wright Penn and she slowed down her work rate (between 1987 and 1994 she released only four films) while her husband competed for the throne of best actor of her generation.
The angry Penn and the sweet Robin were together for eighteen years plagued by separations and reconciliations that made them one of the favorite couples of a type of press that did not cease in its scrutiny of a relationship that they saw, rather, as a kidnapping with Stockholm syndrome.
As the tabloids had predicted, it did not end well.
A ghost
“To me, Robin is a ghost,” Penn declared after the divorce.
“I have never felt loved.”
She was more explicit.
“It may not be very ladylike to say this, but I have never laughed more, read more, and cum more than with Ben,” she told
Vanity Fair
in 2015. That Ben was Ben Foster, an actor 14 years older. young man who, curiously or not, had been hailed as “the new Sean Penn.”
They broke up months later.
During their short engagement they talked about their love as if such a feeling had never existed in the world, they tattooed each other's initials and showed off on every red carpet that wanted to have their presence.
Robin Wright in a scene from 'Forrest Gump' (1994).Archive Photos (Getty Images)
He did not reach the altar with Foster, but he did with Clément Giraudet, a Saint Laurent executive two decades younger.
They secretly married in August 2018 in France and spent their honeymoon in Ibiza.
Wright filed for divorce four years later.
During her marriage to Penn she was, as he defined her and at least professionally, a ghost.
Until in 1994 she landed another career-defining role, the sweet and tortured Jenny Curran of
Forrest Gump
.
She received a Golden Globe nomination and the world wondered where she had been.
Once again, a bright future seemed to await her, although she had not yet turned thirty, she seemed like one of those comebacks that she likes so much in Hollywood, but again she resisted integrating.
“Hollywood actors are well-paid animals in a zoo.
And if you agree to play the sideshow, and smile on the red carpet, and appear in every fucking envelope that's opened, then you can become a celebrity and become a commodity.
But if you decide not to do that, you are considered unprofitable,” she lamented in
The Guardian
in 2014.
Robin Wright and Clement Giraudet in Paris in 2018.Jean Catuffe (Getty Images)
During the nineties she played some interesting roles, she starred in
Moll Flanders
(1996), received a Screen Actors Guild nomination for Best Actress for her role in
Trapped Between Two Men
(1997) and participated in risky productions such as the animated film
Beowulf
(2007). )
and
Two Perfect Mothers
(2013),
in which she and Naomi Watts play two friends who sleep with their respective children, but almost her entire career could be summed up in the phrase that Danny Huston says to her in
The Congress
: “Your films over the last fifteen years have been a failure".
In this visionary proposal by Ari Foldman, Robin Wright is Robin Wright, a forty-year-old actress who dazzled the world in
The Princess Bride
and
Forrest Gump
and whom her studio, Miramount, wants to digitize to always keep her in her twenties and, at the same time, recover the money it had cost them for “their bad choices.”
Those bad choices were real: he rejected the role that Laura Dern ended up playing in
Jurassic Park
and also said no to
Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves
,
Batman Forever, The Cover
and
Born on the Fourth of July
, claiming that Oliver Stone had a problem with women.
And Netflix arrived
It was the North American version of
The Men Who Didn't Love Women
that gave an unexpected boost to his career, not so much because of its impact, so little that the planned trilogy remained a single title, nor because of his meager role, but because the effect it had on its director David Fincher.
Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright at a 'House of Cards' press conference in 2013.Jesse Grant
Today Netflix is synonymous with success and its products reach a larger audience than any film release, but then it was still a mystery.
Especially for Wright.
“I didn't want to do television, I had been stuck in
Santa Barbara
for years and remembered how difficult it was to memorize so many pages a day,” she recalled in
Harvard Business Review
.
“I loved cinema, I loved traveling and experiencing different cultures and characters, but David convinced me.”
The director asked him to trust him and assured him that it would be a revolutionary project, thirteen hours to develop a character in a series that each viewer could watch whenever they wanted and at the pace they wanted.
The future.
The actress complained about the character's lack of substance in the British original and her role was changed.
“Let's build the character together,” Fincher offered, “she will become the Lady Macbeth of his Richard III.”
The awards that came proved Fincher right.
He became a style icon for his luxurious and immaculate wardrobe and also for his androgynous haircut, a highly praised coincidence.
“I had cut my hair because it was damaged after too many dyes for different projects.”
She also became a symbol for equality in Hollywood: when she discovered that Netflix had cheated her and she was not receiving the same salary as Kevin Spacey, she threatened to leave the series.
Between 2014 and 2016, Spacey went from earning $500,000 to $1 million per episode, while Wright earned $420,000.
She achieved her goal.
“We must encourage the young generations to express themselves.
Feminism means equality.
And period.
The same salary for the same job.
Now things have to move forward on the part of those who make decisions and finance films, who are mostly men,” she declared in Cannes in 2017 during a debate around her debut as a director.
The other big controversy of the series also affected it.
Harassment accusations against Spacey led to the actor's dismissal with one season remaining.
Those responsible for the series decided to bet on it and, although the last season is the weakest - it was impossible to continue twisting the plot - his interpretation was brilliant.
“Kevin and I only knew each other between the shout of 'action' and the 'cut' and during the breaks, where we joked, but I didn't know the person,” he told the American program
Today
.
“We were really co-workers, we never socialized outside of it.”
Robin Wright collects an award at the Karlovy film festival in 2023.Gabriel Kuchta (Getty Images)
If Wright regrets not being more “profitable” it is not so much out of economic interest or to fatten his ego, but rather to give more visibility to the causes with which he collaborates.
She has been dedicated for years to projects associated with the Congo (the conflict in the country is the deadliest in the world since the Second World War) and especially the role of women as victims of war.
Perhaps looking for the impact of these causes explains how he has lost his fear of participating in
blockbusters
.
In recent years she has been the powerful and very toned General Antiope in
Wonder Woman
(2020)
and its sequel and was also part of Denis Villeneuve's
Blade Runner
(2017).
The world has once again discovered another Robin Wright, a star whom Rebeca Millers, her director in The
Private Life of Pipa Lee,
defined as “a great actress trapped inside the body of a Norse goddess.”
This month she returns to Netflix with
Damsel
, the latest film by Canarian director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, and she does it again with a story about princesses, although now she will be the villain of the story.
Another reinvention of the actress who did not want to be the biggest star in the world.
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