‘I stopped talking to my parents – and life opened up’: Heather Graham on family, ageing and ‘creepy’ film-makers

Heather Graham … ‘If you feel that you’re hot, you feel hot. And I do feel hot.’ Photograph: Ben Ritter

For almost all her life, Heather Graham says, she was a “people pleaser”. It was encouraged in childhood, she says, this obligation to put others’ needs above her own, and it endured even after the 1997 film Boogie Nights had made her a star and she had severed all contact with her “judgmental, authoritarian” parents.

Now 55, Graham was in her 40s before she recognised her self-sabotaging tendencies, and tried to correct course. “I realised, no, actually I can just ask myself, ‘What do I want?’ and make myself happy,” she says over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “I wish I could have had this when I was 20 or 15. If I wasn’t trying to please other people, what would I have done?” It affected her romantic life and sometimes her work. “There were moments where I feel like I could have stood up for myself more,” she says.