I’m a wild girl,” Patricia Clarkson tells me, before breaking into a laugh so rich and peppery that it sounds as if it’s been soaked in rum. “You can define ‘wild’ in your imagination – go ahead.” Before she sprung a dare on me, I’d been trying to understand her a little. How, in her words, “a sweet, straight southern lady” had ended up living so unconventionally. “I’ve never married, I’ve never had children – norms have never been a part of my life,” she says. “I’ve always existed on the edges.”
You will recognise Clarkson’s face in an instant, even if you don’t immediately recognise her name. A prolific film and television thief, the 63-year-old has been stealing scenes for more than three decades – as Emma Stone’s outrageously sex-positive mother in the teen comedy Easy A, as Julianne Moore’s suburban bestie in Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven, as the eerie family matriarch in the Amy Adams limited series Sharp Objects. She’s popped up in The Green Mile, Dogville, Six Feet Under and Lars and the Real Girl, often carrying with her a sharp, sensual intelligence – it’s no wonder she dated Frasier Crane for four episodes of his eponymous sitcom.
