Macaulay Culkin - Alone again

By DEBORAH ROSS

I am due to meet Macaulay Culkin - at one time the highest-paid child star ever - at the Vaudeville Theatre on the Strand in London where, after a six-year break from acting, he is launching his comeback in the new play Madame Melville [which opened on Wednesday]. I'm early, and chat with the nice old bloke at the stage door.

"What's Macaulay like?" I ask

"Seems nice."

"Who was the last person to star at the Vaudeville Theatre?"

"Lionel Blair [exceedingly minor British celebrity known for his chatshow and panto appearances]."

"Tough act to follow, then."

"Actually, Macaulay's been getting fan mail this high [indicating a height of about 15cm] every day, even though he hasn't done anything for years."

"And Lionel?"

"A few at the beginning of his run, but then nothing. Nothing."

Poor Lionel. Life can just be so ruddy unfair.

I'm told Culkin has arrived and am led through the deserted theatre, up to the dress-circle bar.

Culkin is exquisitely dressed - gorgeous, deep-blue Burberry shirt, expensive-looking checked trousers. He adores clothes. "I once spent $2000 on a Calvin Klein jacket and then felt so guilty I donated the same amount to charity."

But for all the beautiful wrapping, he looks very small, almost feminine, with pale, practically translucent skin and strange, pink-hooded eyes, rather like the eyes of a rabbit in pain. He seems terribly sad.

I try to cheer him up. Lionel Blair is rubbish, I say. Not a patch on you. He blinks with bewilderment.

I tell him I could have been a child star myself, which I could have, as it happens. Indeed, I used to attend Miss Brass' ballet classes and it was all going brilliantly until, one day, I overheard Miss Brass say to my mother: "It's up to you, of course, but I feel I should point out you are wasting your money." I was heartbroken, naturally.

But Culkin insists I was lucky. "Believe me," he says, "it's smarter to keep out of it." And ballet dancers? "They're the worst. They eat nothing but fluff and celery all day." Well, that's cheered me up, but how about Culkin?

He is 20 now. A young man with, perhaps, a rather old and melancholic heart. Does he like his looks? "No. I can't look at myself in pictures. But I do make a point of looking myself in the eye in the mirror once a day.

"Everyone should be able to do that. For a while, I couldn't. I'd walk with my head down. I've made myself look up."

What's been his unhappiest moment? "I'd say my unhappiness has been pretty evenly spread." And his earliest memory? "I'll have to think about that. I've blocked so many things out."

Of course, Culkin has been through an awful lot. He did the whole "child star" bit with knobs on: global fame from the Home Alone movies at the age of 9, worth about $30 million at 13, and pretty much eaten up and spat out by the time he was 14.

More, there was the ugly business of his family's unravelling: his parents' separation, their bitter fight for custody, and Macaulay's eventual "divorce," when he was 15, from his father, Kit, the pushy stage parent to end all pushy parents.

Was Kit ever affectionate?

"No. Never." Not one little hug, even? "Not if it wasn't for show, no."

He can pinpoint the moment, he says, when it all stopped being fun. "It was when I was making The Good Son [he was 14] and I was walking down the road with my father and I asked him if I could have a break. I'd worked non-stop and I was tired. He said yes, but the next thing I knew I was working on the next project."

Culkin's still not sure what motivated his father: "I don't know. Perhaps his intentions were good, although it certainly never seemed like they were."

He is messed up, yes, but then what child actor isn't? Culkin agrees that the words "child" and "actor" don't even go together, because it's not like you're allowed to be a child and you're only rarely required to act.

I go further and float the idea that there should even be a law banning child actors which, if nothing else, would dramatically increase employment opportunities for midgets. Culkin is with me all the way. "I've always thought that, too," he exclaims.

So, messed up, but not totally ruined. His intelligence and self-awareness have always managed to pull him back from that. He's always known to avoid the cliches, which, he says, is why he's never done drugs: "People assume all former child stars will end up on drugs. So, because it was expected of me, I never got into them."

He is well-read, too. He's just finished George Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris and thinks he might re-read Catcher in the Rye next.

His notion of life is not, thankfully, one where ambition means matching what he achieved when he was 11. "I just want to work on my terms, with the people I want to work with." And he can afford to be picky, as he's hung on to most of his fortune. "We lived off the 15 per cent my parents earned as my joint managers. The rest went into a fund I couldn't touch until I was 18. So at least I have something to show for everything I've been through."

His choice of Madame Melville is a wise one. A new play by Richard Nelson (who won an Olivier Award for Goodnight Children Everywhere), it's about a 15-year-old American (Culkin) in Paris who receives some extra-curricular tuition from his French teacher (played by the spectacularly wonderful French actress Irene Jacobs, who starred in the films The Double Life of Veronique and Kieslowski's Three Colours Red).

From the evidence of some rehearsal video footage, it looks as if Culkin might be able to cut it in a way perhaps even the supremely talented and versatile Lionel Blair cannot.

Culkin, the third of seven children, was born in New York to Patricia Bentrup, a telephonist, and Kit, a one-time actor who never made it and ended up working as a sexton in the local church. At the age of 6, Culkin jun was already acting in stage shows at the city's Ensemble Studio Theatre.

But what would he have done if he'd had the choice? He says that's impossible to answer. "I'm sure I wanted to be a fireman at 5, but from 6 years old acting was who I was and what I did."

He worked, worked, worked in little film parts - until Home Alone, an innocuous and silly film about a boy accidentally left at home when his parents go away, took off like a lit match dropped into a petrol tank.

Boom! It made $1.2 billion worldwide. There were Culkin posters, Culkin key-rings and Culkin dolls.

The actor was befriended by Michael Jackson. Here's a quote from an interview Culkin gave when he was 11: "We always go to Toys R Us. We each get a shopping cart and go up and down the aisles, picking out what we want. Who pays? Michael." Michael Jackson, I say, spooky or what?

Culkin is offended. "He is not spooky," he says. "He isn't. He's one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life." Are they still friends, then?

"I'm godfather to his children. We understand each other on a deep level. We've had similar lives."

It seems that Jackson was a rare find. There simply were no other friends at that time. "I only really had acquaintances. I do run into them occasionally, but I've changed so much since then. Then, I was just a numb little kid who woke

up and went on set to say some words I'd learned the night before."

In retrospect, it might be easy to see that Culkin could not endure. That he was a phenomenon, not an actor; that he would fizzle out almost as quickly as he flared. Kit did not see it, though.

Kit raged through Hollywood. Macaulay would only do such and such a film if his sister, Quinn, could be in it. Macaulay would do that film, yes, but only for $8 million. Macaulay won't work with that director. Fire the director.

Hollywood would, probably, have worn it if the films had been great successes, but they weren't. My Girl. Richie Rich. The Page Master. The Good Son. All hopeless flops. And by then Culkin didn't know who he was or where he was any more.

I ask him if, despite everything, he loves his father. "Perhaps, on a deep level, but on a day-to-day level, no." The question of forgiveness, though, is trickier. "I can't truly answer that. He's done a lot of wrong and never explained himself. He just ran away. If I never see him again, so be it."(Culkin hasn't seen him since he was 15.)

What if he were to call today to say he wanted to talk? "I'd want to hear what he has to say, but I'd be pessimistic. I'm not sure if he has it in him to apologise."

After retirement at 14, Culkin attended school for a while. "I went to the Professional Children's School in New York, which wasn't professional, we weren't children and it was hardly a school. It was full of musical prodigies and a 10-year-old magician, who was pretty good, in fact.

"I never learned anything there. I got most of my education from the Discovery Channel and the Learning Channel. I dropped out in my senior year, when I got married."

He married Rachel Miner, an actress, at 17. They separated recently, but it might not be a permanent thing. "It's complicated. I can't say what the future has in store. We're still friends. We're trying to figure out if we can live together on a day-to-day level. She taught me a lot about being a man, and the responsibilities men have."

But it must be hard to be a man when you haven't been a child. "That's what you have to learn. You have to have some sense of who you are." He says that he has learned "that nothing really matters, apart from being a good person with good intentions." And I am genuinely moved.

Our time is up and we part affectionately. I give him a big hug, because he looks like someone who needs big hugs, and find him all brittle, bird-like bones under his Burberry shirt.

I promise to come and see the play. I hope he is good.

- INDEPENDENT