At dinner, she said to her two sons and, “I met this comedian-actress girl today her name is Rosie O’Donnell.” And Jacob, her gay son, said, “Oh my God, I love her! She’s on VH1! She’s friends with Madonna! Mom, you’ve got to cast her.” So I always credit Jacob Bernstein with being in Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle. And then out of League, Nora Ephron came and did a reading with me. Penny Marshall saw me and called my agent and asked if I could play baseball, so that’s how I got into A League of Their Own.
Had you been auditioning for a lot of sitcoms?Īt the time, I was a VJ on VH1. I don’t know that I was necessarily looking to be in movies, but I did not say no when they came around. And then I think how amazing it was that three summers in a row I was in one of the biggest movies, because The Flintstones came out right after that. So when I think of Sleepless, the first thing I think of is Nora. We became close friends, and I lived in the same building that she did. I was very lucky when I got cast and met Nora Ephron, who changed my life in so many ways for the better. Those were the two things I had in my dream pile. Or being a backup singer for Bette Midler. I always wanted to be Vivian Vance or Shirley Booth or Valerie Harper - I wanted to be the funny friend in something, probably a sitcom. Well, I never really wanted to be a stand-up comic, per se.
#Meg ryans hairstyles in sleepless in seatle movie#
Very few actors ever get two movies back-to-back that are as good and impactful as A League of Their Own and Sleepless in Seattle - and they were your first two! At the time, had you been trying for a while to get movie parts? So she called me up to talk about all things Sleepless, including the way Bette Midler influenced her performance, the time a crew member taped her monologue to his leg so she could get Ephron’s words right, and attending the premiere with her good pal Madonna. Interviews are one of her gifts she has a knack for peppering answers with interesting cultural references and specific anecdotes. O’Donnell, who recently moved to Los Angeles after years in New York and last appeared on Starz’s Run the World, remains one of our most forthcoming celebrities. Eventually, she deployed her charisma as the host of one of TV’s best daytime talk shows.
O’Donnell had been a successful stand-up comic, but her movie career soared after that.
Sleepless saw the largest opening gross for a rom-com at the time and became 1993’s fourth-highest-grossing release. TriStar Pictures postponed its release from March to June, hoping the film would serve as summer-blockbuster counterprogramming - the same strategy that TriStar’s sister studio, Columbia, had employed for When Harry Met Sally four years earlier. Together, the two movies made O’Donnell a star.Īlthough romantic comedies were thriving thanks to sensations like Moonstruck and Pretty Woman, Sleepless was seen as a sleeper hit. Even the way Becky holds Cheetos, her pinkie raised as if they’re fine dining, is amusing. Along a stacked ensemble that includes Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Victor Garber, and Gaby Hoffmann, she’s an MVP. Playing Becky, the sappy, wisecracking BFF to Ryan’s destiny-agnostic Baltimore Sun reporter, it was O’Donnell’s second role after 1992’s A League of Their Own. And yet Sleepless is also very much a fantasy itself, and a lovely one at that. The central credo of Sleepless in Seattle is best summed up in a line that Rosie O’Donnell says to Meg Ryan: “You don’t want to be in love you want to be in love in a movie.” Nora Ephron’s Oscar-nominated classic, released in 1993, doubles as a comment on the way Hollywood romance has perpetuated fantasies of what love looks like. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photo by TriStar Pictures
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