"I feel sorry for Madonna. I think she is a very sad and rather lost soul. " - Robin Wright, a.k.a. Mrs. Sean Penn

THE WRIGHT STUFF

FOR TWO YEARS I WAS GIVEN scripts which were just like remakes of The Princess Bride," complains Robin Wright of the downside of the 1987 Rob Reiner cult movie hit that first made her name. "And it has taken this long to completely drop that first impression."

With Gillies MacKinnon's The Playboys, released in the UK this month, the 25-year-old Wright at last has a brand new calling card, that of Tara Maguire, the shameless Irish hussy who scandalises a small County Cavan village in the 50s by not only having a baby out of wedlock, but refusing to thereafter name the father. The Texas-born actress' change of fortunes couldÑ and shouldÑhave come earlier, however, had her heaviness with hubby Sean Penn's child (now one-year-old daughter Dylan) not pre- vented her from taking on the plum role of Maid Marian opposite Kevin Costner's Robin Hood in what went on to become the biggest grossing UK movie of 1991, with the part, of course, going instead to Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio just four days before shooting.

"I was very upset at the time and feel annoyed even now," admits Wright. "I could not under- stand why Meryl Streep, for example, is allowed to work while pregnant and I'm not."

Perhaps, then, Annette Bening is asking the self-same question even now, since it was she who was originally cast as Tara in The Playboys before her bulge with young Kathlyn Bening Beatty forced her, in turn, to give way to Mrs. Penn.

"It's a sort of justice in a way," chuckles Wright. Everyone was after this partÑall my contemporariesÑbut I got it. It was a very important one for me. It's rare for any actress to front a film, whatever the size of the budget."

Considering that just seven years ago she was - yes! - a model with absolutely no intention of acting, this is progress indeed, progress enhanced by the fact that her performance in MacKinnon's tale of post-war border shenanigans more than stands up in the company of quite terrific displays from such veterans as Albert Finney and the ubiquitous Milo O'Shea.

"One day, my agent asked if I'd be interested in acting," she recalls of her introduction to the art of board-treading. "And it scared the shit out of me. I remember in high school being so frightened of drama class that I would cross three sides of the quad just to avoid going past and hearing the voices on stage."

Her nerves were, apparently, calmed only by weighing up the even worse nightmare of continuing as a model.

"Modelling is the most degrading business," she insists. "There is always someone saying things like, 'She has a fatter ass that I thought from the pictures,' with you standing right there in front of them. When you're 16 and thinking, 'But mom says I'm beautiful,' such remarks can have a devastating effect. So I said yes to the chance of doing some acting to escape it all."

And now, with young Dylan and old man Sean Penn in town - literally, in fact, since the reformed hellraiser is sitting nearby here on The Playboys set, bouncing his daughter on his knee Ñlife, presumably, resembles the proverbial bowl of cherries ?

"I live comfortably with Sean now, but luxuries are not all-consuming," she sighs. "When I had money in the past, I would always travel rather than spend it on big apartments or cars. And I still feel exactly the same way."

And what, finally, of the reported antics of Sean's most celebrated past paramour, one Ms. Madonna Ciccone, including the alleged note to her ex-husband's hotel in Cannes last year suggesting that it could, and should, have been the diminutive popstrel preparing to give birth to a junior Penn?

"I feel sorry for Madonna," says Robin Wright, damning with faint sympathy. "I think she is is a very sad and rather lost soul. Yet deep down there is a real person who is as sensitive as the rest of us . . ."

GARTH PEARCE

EMPIRE July 1992 issue 37 p 50

last updated August 29th 1997