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Interview
"Let's be honest. I have grown up surrounded be people who had been absolutely everything but normal." Dakota Johnson, 26 years old, has not arrived at this confession without bursting out into laughter immediately afterwards. She had her parents in her head when she said that? Yes, but not only them.
"I was not born in Hollywood, but I have spent most of my time there since I was a teenager. There was always a crowd of artists in all genres surrounding me. Famous or not, it was people who are definitely quirky."
A crowd that seems directly straight out of a casting for a talent contest and youth that is no less theatrical. The history of Dakota’s parents could elsewhere put on the idea of being the writers of soap opera twists. Her father, Don Johnson, is already an actor in Los Angeles when he encounters, at 22 years old, the beautiful Melanie Griffith, 8 years younger. A teenager, certainly, but nevertheless, the daughter of Tippi Hedren, the muse of Alfred Hitchcock, who will film notably in The Birds. The love at first sight between the two was immediate. The lovers married when she passed 18 years old, in 1976…to divorce some time later. A decade passed. They found and remarried of which the actress became pregnant with their girl.
Dakota have retained the lesson in the love life, like the eventful one of her father and mother? "I have especially taken that it should not be like that!" Resting eternally romantic and optimistic, "I happens to believe that I will one day meet the great love of my life that will last all my life...but I also have instants where I fall in cynicism, I say to myself that to find 'the love' with a capital A, comes too rarely for me to have this chance."
Burning projectors
Her parents would have then, been privileged with the great love with a capital A but also a capital S. They have been separated since she was 4 years old, then got together for a time again before divorcing for good at her 7 years of age. At the middle of this string of sentimental dramas, the more older memories of Dakota are on film sets, television and between two countries, in airplanes. Without understanding too much of what has happened, she also saw her parents enter and leave the curing from detoxification. "With this recoil, I have realised that I had a not normal childhood but not necessarily bad. In fact, I never knew another [childhood] to compare." Under her eyes, her father become the companion of the actress, Patti D'Arbanville and then of Barbara Streisand, in which her mother fell in love with her partner in the film Two Much, a certain Antonio Banderas. The genealogical tree, plenty of glitter, become more and more thick, which put on six step-brothers and sisters. But next to this true family opera, there is also space, solitude and silence.
Far from Hollywood, it is in an sublime domain of billionaires, at the heart of rocky Americans, that Dakota spent her first years. With schooling in the public school of Aspen, a very chic ski resort. "My most beautiful moments of youth, I passed it living at my father's ranch in Colorado. Life was simple, peaceful and my dad taught me many super cool things. Before I was 9, I knew how to shoot a rifle, mount a horse and ride a motorcycle. It was a dream existence." The adolescent, on the other hand, was lots more complex. "At 15, my parents decided to send me to a catholic boarding school for girls. I have hated this experience since the start." It is in this Californian establishment for fortunate families that she is confronted with jealousy and mockery from the girl friends. "To have only girls, they trigger horrible situations. At 16 years, some magazines had started to speak of me and invented horrible histories under the pretext that I was the daughter of celebrities. It was disgusting as I was powerless to react against the attacks.”
The appeal of the big screen
But to be the girl of the cult comedy series, Miami Vice, and of an actress who won an Golden Globe for her role in Working Girl also has advantages. In 2006, she was chosen to be Miss Golden Globe and participate in the celebrity ceremony before hundreds of millions of audience members. A Hollywood agent talked with her just after the event, her career start between fashion photography as a model and auditions for small TV jobs as in cinema. “My mother and grandmother have had strong feminine but also very sexy roles in their respective careers. They have encouraged me to exceed myself when I accepted Fifty Shades of Grey. I felt very at ease with my nudity.”
A point that beginning in 2016, she will return with her partner, Jamie Dornan for the next, Fifty Shades Darker, as well as the third film of the trilogy, Fifty Shades Freed.
“We must link the two filmings, which does not displease me because even if I love the character of Ana Steele, I have desire of other experiences.”
Exactly, how does she envision her future? “If one speak of next year, I see myself living in New York. But in 15 or 20 years, I imagine being well situated in a lodge far from Hollywood, like my father’s ranch in the mountains.”
And with children? “Of course, but I must start by finding the father before thinking of having a baby…And I am not in a hurry!”
At the cinema, she embodies elsewhere, the mother of a 6 year old boy in Black Mass, playing the companion of Johnny Depp for the biographical film on the life of the terrible Whitey Bulger, one of the biggest american criminals. On can remark that the life of her parents could also make an excellent biopic. “Please, certainly not. Do not count on me to play the role of my mother…or even to go see that on the big screen!”
Questions (In sidebar)
My favorite toy
“Bambi! I had a plush that represented this Disney character because I had been fascinated by the animation, at the time sad and sublime.”
The phrase that annoyed me
“Tuck in your belly and straighten up because this enhances your breasts!” (Laughs)
A childhood smell
“The lawn of the garden when it was freshly mown. The gardener came every week to look after the property of my parents and I loved to smell the grass coming through the window of my room, which I had left open on purpose that morning”
My preferred candy
“Toblerone. I loved the chocolate as a child and it is again my little sin today.”
My hated vegetable
“Asparagus. Their simple odour in the kitchen is enough to make me flee from the meal.”
My first love
“We were young children but there was a guy named Jackson. It is the first time that I had thought to be in love. I was way too young to understand really, what it signified.”
The heros that made me dream
“Cattleman. I would love so much to embody [her] one day on screen!”
Thanks to @DakotaJLife.
