The Standart Times - 1997 |
Phoenix shuffles
into stardom By Mark Kennedy, Associated Press writer Even through the fog of a nasty late-winter flu, Joaquin Phoenix remains achingly polite. "Thanks," he says softly when offered a ragged, perforated sheet of Bounty from the kitchen. The 22-year-old actor, who is unavoidably known as brother of the late actor River Phoenix, blows his streaming nose. "Sorry," he apologizes. For a performer who has
carved out an offbeat movie career playing angry,
alienated teens, his off-screen persona is marked more by
floor-gazing and foot-shuffling. "I'm just a
private person,"
he admits exhaling a haze of chain-smoked Marlboros. "Sorry." Joaquin was a TV
adolescent-for-hire before bursting onto Hollywood
screens in 1989 His next big role came in
the form of the memorably menacing Jimmy -- the socially
inept slacker with a dangerous crush on Nicole Kidman in
Gus Van Sant's 1995 black comedy "To Die For."
But between those roles, tragedy brought his private
world crashing down on Oct. 31, 1993. As his famous
brother, River, lay convulsing from a drug overdose
outside a hot Los Angeles club on Sunset Strip called the
Viper Room, Joaquin was several yards away pleading for
help on a pay telephone. "You must get here, please,
you must get here," his anguished brother said, somehow
remembering to say "please" and "thank
you" to the 911 emergency dispatcher. "I'm thinking
he had Valium, or something." River was pronounced dead Halloween morning
at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. His surviving brother's private
grief is still raw. Joaquin took a multiyear
hiatus from Hollywood. He admits, somewhat sheepishly,
that the script for "To Die For" sat unread for
many months. "I just wasn't interested," he says. "I just have
this tendency to expect the worst from a story. You know,
I always see really bad acting, for some reason." Cajoled, he finally picked it up
-- and then couldn't put it down. "It was one of
those strange experiences where, as I'm reading it, I
know what Jimmy's going to say before I read it. The
feelings just sort of pop out at me." This month, Phoenix leads
some of Hollywood's hottest young stars in director Pat
O'Connor's touching Eisenhower-era drama, "Inventing
the Abbotts." He joins Billy Crudup as two
working-class brothers snared in a complex relationship
with three wealthy Midwest sisters, played by Jennifer
Connelly, Joanna Going and Liv Tyler. This time, there
was no delay getting on board the project. "Some things
just touch you, for whatever reason, and this felt so
honest to me," he
says of the screenplay. "It wasn't trying to be
anything that it wasn't." Born in Puerto Rico, he
spent much of his childhood on the move, living in
Oregon, Mexico, South America and Florida with his
talented siblings -- River, Rain, Liberty and Summer --
while his parents struggled with odd jobs. "When you grow
up with a large family," he says, "you have friends right
there." One day,
while raking leaves with his father, Joaquin decided that
he wanted an earthy name like his siblings. His
parents
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