Personal Best February 1982: Mariel Hemingway looks back on her iconic role as a young track star in love with a female teammate in this athletic coming-of-age tale. (Justifying our love).Lesbian movie fans still talk about Personal Best for its gloriously glo·ri·ous adj. 1. Having or deserving glory; famous. 2. Conferring or advancing glory: a glorious achievement. 3. frank sex scene between Hemingway and real-life Olympic hurdler Patrice Donnelly. "It was a powerful movie on many levels," says Hemingway. "I mean, I grew up on that film. I started it when I was 17; I was 21 by the time it came out. Not only did I have to train physically for that amount of time, this character I was playing--this Chris Cahill--was confused and growing up in the world. She just didn't know who she was. By the same token, I think I was a little bit like that myself. I had never had a boyfriend, I was still really a naive naive - Untutored in the perversities of some particular program or system; one who still tries to do things in an intuitive way, rather than the right way (in really good designs these coincide, but most designs aren't "really good" in the appropriate sense). girl. So for me, it was a discovery of who I was. And I think it's why I wasn't uncomfortable with anything. I was in a period of my life where I was unsure anyway. There is the time where you wonder, Well, who knows what I am? I think I went through that a bit with that character," says the actress. Hemingway's journey clearly brought her to a very hip place: She has since played gay several times, famously fa·mous·ly adv. 1. In a way or to an extent that is well known: "his famously neurotic mannerisms [are] lampooned in the novels of Evelyn Waugh" planting a lesbian smooch on Roseanne in prime time. And she was hilarious as a married woman who goes gaga ga·ga adj. Informal 1. Silly; crazy. 2. Completely absorbed, infatuated, or excited: They were gaga over the rock group's new album. 3. Senile; doddering. for lesbian sex in the indie in·die n. Informal 1. One, such as a studio or producer, that is unaffiliated with a larger or more commercial organization. 2. film The Sex Monster. But for Hemingway, Personal Best remains a personal landmark. "The beautiful part of the film is that it really strikes a chord chord, in geometry chord (kôrd), in geometry, straight line segment both end points of which lie on the circumference of a circle or other curve; it is a segment of a secant. A chord passing through the center of a circle is a diameter. with so many," she says. "I can't really say that there's anything specific; there was so much about the movie that colored my life. But what I've loved about it is that over the many years that have gone by since then, there's not a few months that go by that someone doesn't say to me, `I just have to tell you that that movie helped me. It made me feel OK that I was a girl and that I was gay.' So that's nice. It's like [having been on] the cutting edge of something. I mean, now you could make that movie and it wouldn't mean so much. But it meant a lot then, and I think that's cool." |
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