Seven reasons to love Robin Wright Penn
By Justine Foscari, Madame Figaro, 2009	Home   Cette page en Français

In Rebecca Miller's film, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, starring Julianne Moore, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder and Monica Bellucci, she is Pippa, a model wife whose past is revealed rather tormented. In real life, Robin Wright Penn is as complex as her character. A great actress who has been upstaged for too long by her brilliant husband and who is rediscovered today, in her forties. Seven reasons to love her without reserve while waiting for admiring her in the next Robert Redford's, The Conspirator, inspired by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

We love her "survivor" side
This tall Texan girl with a physique to be a model (a job she started at the age of 14) could have followed the road all mapped out for the girls of her kind. To manage her two oil wells (yes, she has two in Texas). Or to align the roles of nice blonde girl, a bit naive as in Santa Barbara - the soap that made her famous at 18 years old and in which she stood four years in a row -, to hang on to her marriage with her partner Dane Witherspoon, to play the fairy tales princesses (as in The Princess Bride). Instead of that, she left everything to follow a "bad boy" named Sean Penn.

We like that she succeeded where Madonna failed
Even if, still married, Robin and Sean do not live together anymore, they will have had a tumultuous love affair, which will have given birth to two children with referenced names, Dylan Frances, 18, and Hopper Jack, 16 (for Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson, two friends of the couple), to five or six divorce demands and a sublime film by Nick Cassavetes (She's So Lovely). Madonna, who, remember it, will be briefly married to the actor, had the right only to a failed movie (Shanghai Surprise) and four years of a shaky union.

We are fans of her idealistic side
As an introverted and highly sensitive little girl, she dreamed of becoming a nurse to help the others and bandage the wounds of a tortured world. Now grown up, she opted for a career as an actress but do not lose her utopia, however. She thus refuses fourteen roles the one after the other, including blockbusters like Robin Hood, Jurassic Park or Batman Forever, because she does not feel them or prefers to look after her family. And she will, during an interview, pronounce this memorable reply : "This business is strange. The bus passes, and you're supposed to get on board. Then the train passes, and you must take it. Then the plane is there, and we expect you to embark. I prefer the bicycle..."

We plebiscite her anti-star politics
Of course, we crossed anti-stars actresses by dozens, but in reality this affectedness of modesty is an avatar of their narcissism. Robin Wright Penn, we believe her at 200% when she says : "I do not like celebrity", I'm more comfortable in jeans and baskets than in evening dress", "I am very anxious", "I find myself too thin", "I'm afraid of talking nonsense during interviews", "I'm not so pretty than that"... And we are upset.

We savor she is a little like us
A woman who is quietly doing shopping at the supermarket, who preferred to leave Los Angeles to live in San Francisco, a place where we meet "real people", also a pretty woman who says : "It's so nice to be expected and not to arrive." Finally a woman whose married life has not always been easy and who do not hide it. Like when Sean Penn has left her while she was pregnant with her first child to live for one year in a trailer in full sight of all Hollywood.

We appreciate her for her talent
Moving in Forrest Gump, mythical in She's So Lovely (she missed the best actress award at Cannes), perfect in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, she amply deserves to be reassessed. And maturity well suited to her beautiful face, visibly never retouched by the aesthetic medicine, and to her deep look which penetrates inside of you.

We applause her sense of humor
Because if Sean Penn does not seem to laugh out loud every day, Robin Wright Penn has a delightful lightness. As proves it this biting remark : "It is said that ants are great workers. So how do they find the time to go to all those picnics ?" Yes, how indeed ?