Meg's never-ending love story

10 April 2012

I warm to Meg Ryan as soon as I notice that her beige trousers are undone. There's something slightly irresistible about a celebrity, styled and primped to the nines for a day with the media, wandering the corridors of LA's Four Seasons Hotel with a sliver of knicker showing. Evidently none of her people - nor any of the multitudinous publicity girls with clipboards - has noticed.

I take it as a sign that this is a new, relaxed Ryan; even her longerthan-usual, wavy, unstyled-looking hair could be a metaphor in this respect.

In her new film Kate and Leopold, which also stars the delicious, formerly-London-based Aussie Hugh Jackman, Ryan's Manhattan publicity exec falls for a posh English gent who just happens to have been catapulted a couple of centuries ahead in time. The film is in fact slightly cloying, and a better vehicle for Jackman than it is for Ryan - unexpected, given that Kate and Leopold is yet another romantic comedy. But most bothersome about the film is Ryan's hair, which clearly saw some poor on-set stylist spending copious hours daily to ensure every follicle looked immaculate, with not a hint of Ryan's natural kink in evidence.

Since Ryan is both synonymous with and evidently fond of romantic comedies, it is no wonder she remains indelibly tagged as "America's sweetheart". Julia Roberts may from time to time have sidled alongside her into this particular pigeonhole, but Erin Brockovich's colourful self-expression in matters of cleavage and chat helped Ryan regain her hold on the title.

Yet she is slightly defensive when I ask if she actually feels like America's sweetheart. "I don't know what that means," she laughs, a little uncomfortably. "I shouldn't be irritated by it because I don't feel like it has anything to do with me at all."

If truth be told, Ryan has tried to sidestep romantic comedies recently, though they appear to retain the grip on her of a lover she can't kick though she knows his behaviour is reprehensible. "I like this genre a lot," she says, smiling and shrugging her teeny-tiny little shoulders. And simplistic as it sounds, Ryan loves playing "love". "It's everything. It's black and white, it's great, it's stupid. How do you have life without it? I feel dumb talking about it, but you just know it when you have it."

She certainly had it with Russell Crowe, which ensured their kidnap drama Proof of Life would be excoriated long before it reached the multiplex. No romantic comedy this; nor was City of Angels with Nicolas Cage - a darker film than the then-persistently perky Ryan was known for, and one she says she still adores. But it seems a while since Ryan was somehow really gutsy on film; adventurous enough to show us the really good dramatic actress she was in Restoration (1995) or Courage Under Fire (1996).

Interestingly, Ryan is much less fluffy and frivolous in person than her romantic comedy characters suggest. She is articulate, bookish - "I love tight, succinct prose like Hemingway" - and able to hold forth authoritatively on current events. And she appears to live a full life which does not revolve around her own celebrity - a different life from the one proffered for our consumption by paparazzi photographers these past couple of years. Ryan is used to the paparazzi, of course. But pictures of her with Dennis Quaid and their son Jack were worth tuppence next to those of her cupping Crowe's face, in seemingly innumerable branches of Starbucks.

What was that odyssey like for her? "Well, I didn't ignore the paparazzi," she says. "I felt like I was fully engaged with them the whole time.

"I normally do ignore them, because I normally ignore the whole famous side of my life. But this time there were things that my lawyer felt were actionable, and I had to read certain things." She has not acted on anything - "it's not worth it" - and she won't delve any deeper than this into her private life.

SHE seems to exhibit no signs of a broken heart, nor of a new love. And though she admits her divorce from Quaid last year was a difficult choice, she says it was necessary.

"I think I backed away from making the decision [to end their marriage] because of how we both felt it would impact upon Jack. Dennis and I were both very conscious of that, and both of us had seen our parents get divorced - and we know it's not pleasant for children. So that was always uppermost in my mind, and though divorce was a hard choice to make it was overdue. It was a process I needed to go through and move on with my life.

"I think everybody comes to those points or moments in their life where change is inevitable and necessary - and sometimes very revealing and important. It propels you forward in life, and that's what I feel has happened to me.

"It's very difficult to be a mom and a career person and have a relationship. I didn't succeed in doing it all."

Ryan says she is always busy. If she is not working, she is writing - either e-mailing ("I love e-mailing my friends; I love good writing") or writing in her journal. "For 15 years or so" she has been "obses-sively re-doing houses". She is currently prepping her next role in a true story, playing real-life boxing coach Jackie Kallen, whom she calls "an amazing, complicated character".

Is Ryan a complicated woman? "Yes I am, in the sense that I don't even understand myself. For instance, I have no idea how romantic I am. I really appreciate a romantic gesture, but I'm not a sentimental person. I don't need to have flowers all the time. But I do need to be listened to. I feel like that's a really romantic thing - when someone really sees you, really hears you."

Though it's difficult to imagine Russell Crowe as an especially chivalrous suitor, Ryan is a sucker for the old-fashioned wooing on show in Kate and Leopold. "In the 19th century, people had time to cultivate their romanticism. And I started thinking, 'Oh, that was a time when people kissed one another's hand and you had little letters sent out to your lover. People learned how to be romantic. It was an art."

Would-be Leopolds at large today are, she thinks, "people who probably have a lot of money, are probably European and have time to delve into the art of etiquette and romance. Life has got so fast now, and not only are there few men like that, but I think very few women know how to receive those sorts of gestures.

"There have been so many mixed signals in the last 20 years about what's appropriate behaviour between men and women. As women we feel more comfortable and validated in the workplace - not that we've achieved parity at all. But I think we have achieved respect."

Rather perceptively, Ryan points out that in Kate and Leopold her character Kate is "powerful as a man". And that, she says, is where she falls down. "Ultimately, she didn't learn to be powerful as a woman - and that's a whole different thing that we're all learning how to do."

Interestingly, Ryan dresses in her films much like she does off set - in a slightly mannish style. She wears shirts, trousers and sensible, flat, lace-up shoes. Today, she is dressed a little more girlishly in a beige peasant blouse and those undone trousers.

After spending an hour with her, it's easy to visualise Ryan's other persona - being a regular "mom" taking son Jack to school. It's that side of her life that's crucial, she says, to give Jack some kind of normality.

Though his parents are whisked through all sorts of barriers in their lives, literal and otherwise, they do not always allow their son the same deferential treatment. "Jack waits in line. We don't let him get whisked through things," she says. "There are the little tiny things all the time that you have to be kind of vigilant about."

The little things that make us all human and fallible - like showing off our knickers inadvertently. Next time, I'll tell her. Definitely.

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