New Icons: McGowan, an out of mind star
by Christopher Goodwin

Discovered by Araki,loved by Marilyn Manson, brought out by Tarantino and Rodriguez with Planet Terror. Beautiful and neurotic, she will soon be a new, erotic Barbarella and then she will become Susan Cabot, Roger Corman’s psychotic muse.

She opens the door of her big and Spanish house in Los Feliz with high heels,showing me one of the most hypnotic décolleté that we can admire today in the world of cinema?It has never happened to me to meet another actress able to convey pure Hollywoodian power as much as Rose McGowan.This girl conveys with no problem,that ‘allure’ that seemed to be lost with the great actresses of the past.
“I live in the wrong time”McGowan says,while she is at the balcony of her bedroom near Hollywood hills. “Even my body belongs to the past.When i find some vintage clothes of the thirties,they always suit me.Long legs,tight waistline and a great pair of boobs”. Like Clara Bow,Ava Gardner and Lana Turner,Rose McGowan is an explosive cocktail which is Hollywoodian and full of dangerous erotism and tragedy.

Today Rose McGowan is really happy of the fact that at 33 she is finally turning into a Hollywood star.Her leading roles in Grindhouse – Death Proof by Tarantino and Planet Terror by Rodriguez-gave her a great changement.In the past McGowan starred in lots of Bmovies,the most known is Scream,but she also had a leading role in the tv show Charmed, loved by people not just in America.She was also known because she was Marilyn Mansons’ girlfriend.But what is strange about her is the fact that,her happiness is now characterized by an obsession.In the moment in which she is turning into a Hollywood star, she is concerned about a certain fear. Now that her dreams are about to become true,McGowan remembers how many Hollywood actresses concluded their days in the trash or worse.
“I have a pair of 18×24 pics of Jane Greer taken at the end of her career”.

“The dedication says ‘Thanks for remembering me’. Aaaargh. It is like a stab in the heart. ‘Thanks for remembering me’ I see my future in these words”.
So,do we have to be surprised if one of her two Boston Terriers is called ‘Fester’ like Fester of the Addams family?
The family. Everything started from there.McGowan was born in Italy.Her parents -French mother, Irish father- were members of the cult ‘Children Of God’ and they raised their six children in a commune.McGowan read ‘The crow’ by Edgar Allan Poe when she was six and suffered of somnambulism.And she hated and she hates today too,everything hippie,communes, and unshaved legs.When her father left her mother to be with the babysitter,Rose was 10.Her mother went back to USA,in Oregon, and she left ‘The Children Of God’ when the members decided that there was nothing bad in having sex with children.Rose hates Oregon and her adolescence which she spent withe her brothers and sisters and she was dragged from a parent to another.When she was 14 her mother put her in rehab even tho she didn’t use drugs.When she got out she refused to come back home and she lived on the streets getting used to visit gay clubs.She loves gay clubs even today.McGowan came to Los Angeles when she was 19 and she got a very small part in Encino Man by Pauly Shore.Acting didn’t interest her a lot,but later she got noticed by a friend of director Gregg Araki. Without even realizing that, she became the leading character of The Doom Generationabout adolescents and sex.Her performance was unbelievable-she got the ‘Best Debut’ award at the Independent Spirit Awards of 1996-thanks to the rage that characterizes Amy,a rage that Rose thinks comes from her hard adolescence and from the fact that her boyfriend was murdered before the movie shooting.Then she starred in Screamwhere she ends up killed by a garage door.Her best movie of the past is probably ‘Jawbreaker’ where she is a high school student who hides a mate’s homicide.After that,she didn’t get any important role:she says that like other actresses she was ended in a precise typology. “People always joke about how many bitches roles there are in Hollywood” she says “but i have to say it is true,at least in the scripts i have read.I was reading one last night and i was telling myself how good it was written and it was good that the leading character wasn’t a prostitute,but ten pages later she had already become a bitch. Gosh,couldn’t she be just a poor girl who suffered of troublesome manias who has to clean doors’ knobs 75 times a day or a wretch who is affected by agoraphobia?”. Both troublesome manias and agoraphobia torment McGowan who also is scared by fishes. She doesn’t eat them but also she doesn’t go into the water-she can’t swim- because she is scared by the fact that a fish could graze her.

Anyway, during those years she appeared in some music videos and promoted the clothes line ‘Bebe’.She dated rock star Marilyn Manson.They met at a premier in 1997,after Marilyn Manson had moved to Los Angeles.Manson had been having a thing for her since he sawThe Doom Generation.They seemed a cool couple. She said “We are both crazy so we are a perfect couple”. He said that he fell in love with her when “we went to this bar and she started dancing really sexy dancing to Iron Maiden, which I thought, if a girl can dance to Iron Maiden, this is the girl that I’m going to be with forever”. He also said “Rose is the weirdest person i know”. And told by Manson it is a compliment. “There is something very tragic about her,like Marilyn Monroe,that conquered me.Ours is a great relationship”.After they split up in 2001 -they have been together for four years and engaged for two- McGowan -and that is not a surprise,she is rarely without a boyfriend- she had some relationships,with Ahmet Zappa, son of the rock legend Frank and with David Zinczenko, Men’s Health editor. Now she is dating Robert Rodriguez,who directed her in Planet Terror. She is convinced to be “a man with really nice breasts” and that is maybe what made begin the conversation with Robert at Cannes,from which her role has origin. In the movie,she plays Cherry Darling, a nightclub dancer who would like to be a comedian but who ends up with a machinegun-leg,with which she kills lots of zombies. “I told him that i couldnt understand why,in movies, HE can’t be SHE, or why the heroin can’t be the hero” remembers Rose. Anything she said – or did – that night, hit Rodriguez. “She caught me by surprise”, says he. “When you meet a personality like that, you understand that if you can multiply that for 50 times on the screen, you will do bingo”.Some time later, he called her and told her she would have starred in his movie and he would have changed her existence.The role that was written for her inPlanet Terror was – Rodriguez admits that- created just for the woman who he met at Cannes. It was the role of male hero.But the name,is pure McGowan. “Well,it came out from one of the lots of topics we talked about that night”she remembers. “i told him that if i have had a daughter i would have named her Cherry Darling,but i can’t call a girl like that (it means rape and easy girl) because she would be teased at school”.In Tarantino’s episode Death Proof McGowan is Pam,a very different girl from Cherry, blonde, sweet and a bit hippie. The talk with Rose McGowan is overwhelming such as Robert Rodriguez movie. She knows everything about the old Hollywood and she saw every movie from the 20′s to the 50′s. She also talks with me about lots of horrible things that happened to her.

The other day she was going out with her new car and “I was invested by a psychotic. It is normal. I didn’t even got angry”. For the majority of people, home is a shelter: for Rose McGowan it is a psychological battle territory. Her last residence, built in 1923, near Hollywood Hills, was inhabited by “an entity who tried to kill me. Well i don’t think it was angry just with me, but i think there was something, something very bizarre”. She also had “a psychotic neighbor,she spent time saying i did things i actually didn’t do.She measured the bushes of the neighbors”. Now that she has moved, “I have neighbors who are Republican Mormons. I want to buy their house. I want to shave it to the ground with a bulldozer”. Now that you know what kind of girl McGowan is, you can understand why she can’t wait to play, after sexy Barbarella, Susan abot in Black Oasis directed by Stephen Elliot (Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert). Here is the story told by Rose in her inimitable style.
“Susan Cabot appeared in lots of movies of Roger Corman during the 50′s, “she says. “The most known is The Wasp Woman. She was 1,30meter and she was obsessed by the fact that her life and career weren’t how she wanted.She was Re Hussein of Giordania’s girlfriend but later he found out that her real name was Harriet Shapiro and that she was Jewish and he left her. She had a baby and she convinced herself that he was Re Hussein’s. She was obsessed by him and she wanted him to be tall and strong. But the baby was a dwarf and she submitted him to a therapy, 40 injections of hormones a day and he also had plastic surgery to his legs because she didn’t want him to be a dwarf. He began going to the gym and he was obsessed by Bruce Lee.Then he got crazy and he killed his mother hitting her with nunchaku.Anyway,later he stayed in jail for two years and then he – Susan was married to a younger man than her,who left her when she became totally crazy- dated the mother of this man. A very bizarre couple, because she had Alzheimer and he was affected by something to his brain. He had it because of those injections. I can imagine that couple: he was brain damaged and she had Alzheimer. But the climax of the tragedy is that, he killed his mother, and his mother killed him. I can’t wait.”