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CINEMA

This is what award-winning actress Heather Graham looks like at 54 years old

The actress has turned her hand to writing and directing with her new movie Chosen Family: “I was working through something that was cathartic for me”.

The actress has turned her hand to writing and directing with her new movie Chosen Family: “I was working through something that was cathartic for me”.
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Heather Graham made her television debut as a teenager, two walk-on parts in ABC sitcom Growing Pains in 1987. But she is perhaps best known for her part as porn starlet Brandy/Rollergirl in Boogie Nights, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (1997).

It ended up changing her life, leading to major roles in Jay Roach’s 60s pastiche spy comedy, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (as Felicity Shagwell) and Bowfinger, alongside Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin.

“I was an actress who was, I don’t know if the right word is ‘struggling,’ but wanted to get bigger jobs. I was basically going on auditions, and to read a script that good, you usually thought, ‘Oh, they’re probably going to cast someone famous.’ I thought I didn’t have a shot,” she recalled.

Boogie Nights, Heather Graham’s big break

Establish stars Drew Barrymore, Gwyneth Paltrow and Tatum O’Neal had been considered for the part of Rollergirl but Graham’s agent insisted that Graham should be given a chance to read for the part.

To get that job at that point in my career was huge,” the actress acknowledged. “It was really hard to book something great if you weren’t famous, so getting that job really was a massive breakthrough for me. And when you read a character and it’s named Rollergirl, you just think this is cool. She’s such a cool character, never takes off her roller skates! I mean, it’s so original and unique.”

Graham has come along way since then, moving towards more independent projects such as Broken and Miss Conception and more recently, writing and directing her own movie, Chosen Family, in which she also stars as Ann, a troubled yoga teacher, who is trying to break from the shackles of a dysfunctional family but the more she searches for inner peace, the more complicated her life becomes.

Heather Graham’s debut as a director

Graham admits that she drew on her own personal experience for inspiration, and opens says that she is still estranged from her own parents.

“I think it’s just that, as a women in the business, I wanted to see more female stories told by women, so I thought, ‘I’ll make it'” she explains. “I guess I made the kind of movie I want to watch - just something that was inspiring and about my journey in some ways. Just something that’s meaningful to me.

“Sometimes I love being movies as an actor and telling a story that’s not really personal but I wanted to tell a story that really meant something to me,” she adds.

In spite of a tough childhood, in which she confesses she was “cute but nerdy”, and a problematic home life, Graham has carved out a successive career in Hollywood, and she hopes that her new film will inspire the women who watch it.

Chosen Family was released on 24 October and can be watched in selected theaters and on demand (Amazon Prime, Apple TV, VUDU, Google Play, Plex and Spectrum.

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