When Meg Ryan walks into a room these days, there is no sign of the paparazzi that dogged her every step during her marriage to Dennis Quaid and subsequent romance with Russell Crowe.
In fact there is little fanfare at all when the 47-year-old actress quietly arrives at a Beverly Hills hotel, dressed in a conservative navy blue Jill Sanders dress and matching pumps, to dutifully talk about her new all-female drama The Women. Back in 2000, the woman known as America’s Sweetheart was earning US$15 million a movie and standing tall alongside Julia Roberts on the list of actresses with box-office clout. The older but still gorgeous Meg sitting in this hotel suite today is now enjoying a new phase in her career of relative anonymity after a series of box-office flops. But somehow you know she really means it when she flashes that dazzling smile, flicks back that still-tousled blonde mop of hers and says she couldn’t be happier.
“I have been very happy and very interested in filling out my experience in life and having a little girl and a sixteen-year-old son,” Meg says in a determined tone. “In the last four years I think I’ve been very free to be a little bit of a nomad and do exactly what I want when I want to do it. Fame – especially for as long as I’ve been famous - takes a lot away from your firsthand experience with the world, so I feel like I’ve been filling in the cracks.”
A major reason for Ryan’s more relaxed and reclusive stage of life is Daisy True Ryan, the daughter she traveled to China to adopt on her own in 2006 who is now three. She laughs when asked how Daisy gets on with Jack, the teenage son she had with Dennis Quaid. “They are the weirdest little combination,” Meg blurts out happily as she gets comfortable by kicking off her shoes and sitting stork-like with one leg tucked under her rear end. “I see them walking around and there is Jack, with his strange Q-tip sort of haircut and he’s 6’2” and then there is this controlling little dark-haired beauty and they are the craziest combination!”
Despite many years of protecting her privacy - especially after Meg’s ten-year marriage to Dennis Quaid came unraveled in 2000 and her public fling with Proof of Life co-star Russell Crowe that same year seemed to turn the public against her – Meg is happy to dish cute stories about both children and seems much more at ease as the proud mother and not the reluctant movie star we now view her as. “I was taking Daisy to this antique fair the other day,” she muses on her favorite subject, “and I stick her in the stroller and we’re rolling along and I see her head down there looking around and she goes, ‘oh no, we are lost!’” Meg mimics in baby talk, slapping her leg in hysterics. “She’s so in charge! We got off a plane the other night and were waiting for our bags and she suddenly says, ‘I think we should take the bus’ and Jack is like, ‘OK, maybe we should take the bus!’ It’s a very bizarre, hilarious dynamic.”
Meg’s life seems so full these days away from Hollywood, it’s almost surprising she is back on the publicity trail again. But the petite star willingly throws herself back into the fray because The Women was a labor of love that took thirteen years to get made. Murphy Brown creator and screenwriter Diane English approached the then-A-list star back in 1995 with her idea to update the classic 1936 Clare Boothe Luce play The Women, which was also made into a 1939 classic film directed by the legendary George Cukor. “I always thought it was a good story and that it was really about what happens when women break up, when really great friends break up and what the dynamics in a female relationship really are, so I thought it would a fun update to show who women are right now and what they’re thinking about,” Meg says.
The project came and went in various incarnations with other stars including Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman also attached at various times but when it finally got the go-ahead, Diane English was also making her directorial debut with a new group of powerful actresses and Meg couldn’t resist.
In The Women, Meg plays affluent housewife Mary Haines, who discovers her husband is having an affair with a perfume salesgirl named Crystal Allen (Eva Mendes). The ladies in her life swiftly rally to her side, including best friend Sylvia Fowler (Annette Bening), humor essayist Alex Fisher (Jada Pinkett Smith) and eccentric mother hen Edie Cohen (Debra Messing). Everybody has an opinion on whether she should leave or stay, including her mother Catherine (Candace Bergen) and a flamboyant Hollywood agent (Bette Midler) she meets when she hides out at a women’s health camp in the mountains one weekend. But when Sylvia makes a career decision as editor of her struggling magazine that betrays Mary’s confidence, it is this breakup that devastates all of the friends the most.
One could easily imagine an all-female set turning into a nightmare akin to Desperate Housewives but Meg insists it was more of a lovefest. “We couldn’t be more different, this group of women,” she admits, “but we couldn’t have had more respect for our differences and we couldn’t have been more interested in one another because every one of them is so strong and so articulate, so that was fantastic getting to know them all.”
The effervescent blonde-haired blue-eyed pixie first tugged at our heartstrings in 1986 playing the girlfriend of Anthony Edwards, Tom Cruise’s best friend, in Top Gun, uttering the star-making command, ‘take me to bed or lose me forever!’ A year later she met her future husband Dennis Quaid when the pair co-starred in Innerspace and they reunited in the contemporary remake of D.O.A. a year later.
But it was in 1989’s When Harry Met Sally, when she famously demonstrates how a woman can fake an orgasm to Billy Crystal, that she really became a force in Hollywood and by 1993, she cemented her stardom opposite Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail in 1998.
Alas, instead of embracing her cute-as-a-button stereotype, Meg seemed determined to break the mold, and so followed a string of flops, including; Courage Under Fire, When a Man Loves a Woman, Proof of Life, In the Cut and Against the Ropes. Her last independent film, My Mom’s New Boyfriend, went straight to DVD but surprisingly, Meg doesn’t get the least bit defensive when asked about the state of her career today.
“I think it I was more defined by my career, it probably would have been difficult,” she shrugs, “but I’m a really creative person in a lot of ways and it’s been this unbelievable time to see what else I’m good at. You go through these funny waves with fame when sometimes you are famous and sometimes you are not, and you can look forward to these lulls because you get to have real interactions with other people and have unexpected experiences.”
While Meg talks non-stop about Daisy and Jack, she’s still reluctant to open the door on her love life. She won’t say if she’s dating but does hesitantly admit she’s left the door open for marriage in the future. “I think it would have to be the person, because I don’t feel like I’m aiming for that institution,” she confides with a hint of a grin. “It’s not my goal but I think at its best it’s fantastic and at its worst it’s just miserable!”
As well as her devotion to her children, Meg has also thrown herself into the kind of travel that causes her to describe herself in that warm honey-toned voice of hers as “an adventuress”.
“I was just in India and in Cambodia the year before that and I was in Africa too,” she says excitedly. “I’ve been to India probably seven or eight times and always every time I leave I say I’m never going back in there and now I am probably going back again next month! In Cambodia, Daisy and I went to visit a friend who runs an orphanage in Phnom Penh, and she is a great traveler so that’s been fun. And Jack and I just spent time in Italy, so it’s something I was never able to indulge in before because I was working so much.”
Meg has also been traveling on a metaphorical level these days, and after our chat stays in this area for a while, she finds herself recommending an Eckhart Tolle book, The Power of Now, which she also once recommended to her friend Oprah Winfrey, inspiring a whole movement which turned the writer into a self-help guru and frequent guest on Oprah’s talk show.
“I’m a seeker with a capital ‘S’,” Meg says unabashedly. “Eckhart has a philosophy that feeds my other interests and is all about presence and expanding your life by embracing the entirety of ‘right now’. It’s a simple philosophy but it goes with a lot of other Hindu and Buddhist philosophy I study.”
Right now, it seems, is a good place for Meg Ryan to be.
