Emerson Tenney (left) and her mother Terri Hatcher (right) in London at the world premiere of the newly 3D remastered Coraline, in which Hatcher stars. Photo / Getty Images
The former Desperate Housewife on malicious rumours, ageing gracefully and why an “evil” mother is her greatest ever role.
Older women struggling to pack for the holidays take heart: even former Bond Girl Teri Hatcher isn’t sure how to dress for the heat. “I’m leaving this afternoon for a holiday somewhere that can hit 90 degrees and I realise I don’t have any clothes that make me look cute in that climate. I mean, it’s hot here in Los Angeles but I don’t leave my house!”
Hatcher - best known for her sparky starring roles in the TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1997) and Desperate Housewives (2004-2012) – turns 60 this year. From her home in California she tells me that she “isn’t worried about the number. One of the gifts of ageing is that you care much less about what other people think. But I still think I have expectations of my own appearance…”
Married twice (briefly in the late 1980s and then to actor Jon Tenney the father of her daughter from 1994 to 2003) she celebrated her 59th birthday last December by posting photos on her Instagram page in which she’s grinning widely in a leopard-print bikini and telling fans she had spent the day “in nature with loved ones, enjoying the cold ocean, warm hearts, moving, talking, and laughter.” Today she says she thinks any woman should feel free to do the same: “I believe in what they say: A ‘bikini body’ is just your body in a bikini.”
Unlike many of her peers, the direct and likeable Hatcher tells me she’s resisted cosmetic surgery. “I don’t have any judgement around it – and never say never, right?! – but I haven’t had a face lift, I don’t do Botox or fillers or anything. I don’t wear that like a badge of honour. Everybody has to do what works for them and I certainly won’t sit here and say it’s easy to age.”
For her part, Hatcher has not enjoyed the loss of functionality. “Not being able to lift as much, run as fast… Not being able to have a couple of glasses of wine and get up in the morning. Eugh!” And she acknowledges that the value our culture places on the appearance of youth is complicated and struggling to evolve. “Historically, I understand, it really counted,” she says. “Think of Cleopatra. Beauty has always been something humans have put on the top of their list. But we’re conscious beings. Are we ever going to get to a point where we can lead with something other than: ‘You look great in that dress’?”
She sighs. Hatcher has regularly appeared on polls of the world’s sexiest women, topping the FHM readers’ vote poll in 1997 and making number 38 on the Men’s Health magazine poll of the sexiest women of all time in 2011.
Hatcher was among the first wave of Hollywood stars to call out her industry’s sexist ageism. Now there are more (and more interesting) roles for women over 40, I wonder if she feels she just missed out the new wave of opportunity she helped to create. “Yeeesss, I think that’s true…” she mulls. “But the situation is still not great. Male movie stars still have co-stars 15 years younger than they are. And you have a lot of older actresses who are still not working.”
To illustrate her point, Hatcher takes me back to a “vivid memory” of shooting the pilot episode of Desperate Housewives in 2002. “None of us knew each other and we were doing a scene where we were all sitting around having coffee. In between takes we were all getting to know each other and as part of that I remember everybody revealing their ages. I’m 42, I’m 41, I’m 43 and so on. Then of course, Eva [Longoria] was: ‘I’m 29′ – she was the outlier.”
As the only child of a computer programmer mother and a nuclear physicist father, Hatcher ran the stats in her head and blurted out: “Oh my God. If ABC had been allowed to ask us our ages there is no way they would purposefully cast five women over 40 in their pilot! Absolutely no way!” Today she reflects that “we didn’t look like we were over 40. Of course as soon as everybody found out that was the case then it was kind like a thing. People were saying this show had put women in their 40s out there.” I can hear the eyeroll across the ocean.
While Desperate Housewives got credit for making its 40-something female stars the emotionally complex drivers of plot action, reporting around the show focused on rumours of infighting between the stars. While no tabloids bothered with the intricacies of the dynamics between men on cop shows, early noughties showbiz columns bulged with speculation about the relationships between women working on shows like Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City. Many reporters were determined to undermine the feminist plot lines with gossip about women’s inability to work together.
Often one woman was tarred and feathered as a diva and when it came to Desperate Housewives, that woman was Hatcher. She had already been portrayed as a difficult, tardy presence on the set of Tomorrow Never Dies – even though it later transpired she was suffering from morning sickness and star Pierce Brosnan was forced to apologise for his criticism of her behaviour.
There were rumours that the other female cast members found her overbearing and accusations that she asked the crew not to make eye contact with her. But other witnesses suggested that the show’s creator, Marc Cherry, may have been at the source of the tension because he ran a bullying set designed to divide those who worked on it.
While this narrative paints Hatcher as not a member of the girls’ team, she famously put herself on the line to back the narrative of a teenage girl who shot herself in 2002 after being abused by Hatcher’s uncle – who also abused the actor at the age of 5. Hatcher’s testimony helped ensure her uncle’s incarceration and she has continued to speak out in defence of women’s rights. So she’s angry that she’s so often portrayed as being “not a girls’ girl”.
“There are a lot of things that have been said that are not true and I don’t really address them,” Hatcher tells me, wearily. “The people who are important to me know the truth.” She also suggests that we consider film sets as we would any other work environment, in which front of house staff are not responsible for the company culture. “You wouldn’t look at Starbucks and think the only people making that work are the baristas. There’s a manager. A store owner. A purchaser. There is a hierarchy and it is silly to judge something off of four people. That doesn’t tell the whole story.”
We’re actually talking today about a role in which her age - and her relationship with her co-stars - is irrelevant because it’s an animation in which Hatcher only appears as a voice. Coraline – Henry Selick’s 2009 animation of Neil Gaiman’s 2002 children’s book - is a story about a girl who’s tempted out of her normal, family life by a fake universe hosted by a perfect mother who (unlike her real mother) lives to bake and dote. The heroine must resist this Insta Perfect world to recover the real love of real people. Hatcher plays both the real mother and the fake mother. She tells me that her own daughter was only around 8 or 9 at the time and so she related powerfully to the real mother.
“I was a single mom back then,” she says. “Like the character in the film - who loves always - I could be distracted by the stresses of managing finances, managing work, managing life. I remember I went into the first reading for the film - only knowing it was an animation - and expecting to do some nasally, comedic cartoon bunny voice and being told to do a real mother was great. I made her voice very grounded. Irritated. Because there are times when, as a real mother, you can’t give your full attention. Then the fake mother’s voice was all air. Light. Very sweet but there is no love or responsibility really tethering that and it’s only when the fake mother is threatened that you begin to realise she is evil.”
My own children were genuinely terrified when they first watched Coraline when they were small. But I must admit it was gratifying to see them willing the heroine on in quest of her real (if tetchy and distracted) mother over the idealised version. Hatcher tells me that when she was a child her parents were both often busy with work.
“My own mother was often out of town,” she recalls. “I do remember one time my dad came back from work, probably tired and frustrated, and wanted to watch a horror film that was on television. I would have been about 9. I found the images too frightening to watch but I remember really wanting to be with him. Not wanting to be alone. But he said I had a choice: either stay with him and watch the film or go to my room. The whole scene stayed with me.”
Hatcher insists that playing the good/bad mothers in Coraline was “definitely the best role of her career”. But she speaks fondly of all her parts, including playing the late Matthew Perry’s girlfriend in sitcom The Odd Couple (2015). She says that she and the Friends star “maintained a relationship over the years. We would text each other a few times a year and, well, I’ve never told anybody this story but it was probably a year before he died that I got thrown off of the dating app Hinge because the app thought I was pretending to be myself. I posted about that on Twitter and I got a text from Matthew. He said: ‘I got kicked off of Hinge too! What the heck are both of us doing on Hinge anyway?’ I thought: Yeah! What are we doing there?!”
In the wake of Perry’s death, Hatcher found herself rewatching Friends. “I think that man was just brilliant, a comedic genius,” she says. “He has gone way too soon and he was always wonderful to work with. We had this cool intermittent, supportive relationship behind the scenes so I hope he always knew that I was there for him.”
Looking back on her “extraordinary, long career”, Hatcher says she never knows what people will say when they approach her in the street. They might want to talk about Coraline (“because I see lots of people dressed as Coraline on Halloween, she’s the OG cool goth girl”) or Lois Lane or Desperate Housewives.
She also still gets people coming up to congratulate her for her role as Jerry Seinfeld’s girlfriend on Seinfeld in 1993. After the comedian is caught speculating on whether her character’s breasts are fake, Hatcher storms out of the scene shouting that “they are real and they are spectacular!”
“People do still shout that at me,” she laughs today. “It’ll be on my tombstone! I’m joking. But, I mean, they are still real, but a bit less spectacular.”
After 40 minutes of chatting to Hatcher I’m so won over I’m tempted to suggest a rewrite. “Teri Hatcher: she was real, and she was spectacular.” Hatcher laughs. “Oh yeah. Y’know what? I’d love that!”
The 15th anniversary re-release of Coraline is in cinemas from August 15
The Kiwi actor has been part of the Star Wars universe for more than 20 years.