Rose tells Wright that "Jodie Foster once said [...] that if you'd wanted to, you could've been the best actress of your generation, suggesting that you didn't want to." Wright says "I never thought I was good," but later Private Lives of Pippa Lee director Rebecca Miller suggests that Wright has had "maybe not the most pragmatic career." And elsewhere Wright has mentioned passing on roles to spend more time with her kids. A recent Redbook interview quotes her as saying, "I turned down so many films because I wanted to be a mom that…they stopped offering." But she also makes it clear that this was a choice, something she "wanted" more than being the best actress of her generation, whatever that means. When Redbook's Stacy Morrison tells her, "People might be tempted to say, 'You gave up your life so he could be Mr. Sean Penn,'" she responds, "He was already Mr. Sean Penn. " And she says,

I really wanted to be a mom. I didn't want my kids to be raised by a nanny, which would have been the case if I were working two movies in a year, you know? And I would have been hospitalized with fatigue. So that's where the no-brainer came in. I did what I wanted to do: I raised my kids.

The fact that Hollywood's version of greatness is incompatible with Wright's preferred family life may be more Hollywood's problem than hers. Underscoring this, Wright makes it clear that The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is the first movie she's truly proud of. It's that pride that appears to prompt Wright's tears, and she later says of working on the film, "Me personally, as an actress, I think I just went, 'get over being scared.'" This kind of confidence comes later in life for many people, not just actresses, and it's a shame that Hollywood is most interested in women when they've not yet developed the self-concept age can bring.

The obsession with youth may be one reason that, as NY Times film critic Manohla Dargis said yesterday, "women are starved for representation of themselves" onscreen. It's not just that older women want to see older women — it's also that women want to see female actors portraying the same variety of human experiences that male actors do, and in order to do that, they may need to mature a little bit. Much has been made of the male actor's ability to grow old and still get roles, but this isn't just about a few gray hairs and the ability to appear opposite younger starlets — it's also about the freedom to grow and change as an artist, something Hollywood doesn't allow very many women. The movie industry, like so many others, needs to make space for women to live their lives, which may include taking some time off to have kids, and definitely includes getting older and wiser.

Related: Robin Wright Penn: Life After Sean [Redbook]

Earlier: "Fuck Them": Times Critic On Hollywood, Women, & Why Romantic Comedies Suck

Julianne Moore channels either a giant clam or a Georgia O'Keefe painting. Same diff, really.


Actress Madeleine Martin is 16, going on 17. Innocent as a rose. Eager young lads and grueways and cads will offer her fruit and wine.


It's simply not fair that Blake Lively should be able to pull off embellished Gibson Girl with short-shorts.


Keanu Reeves needs a shoe-shine. That is all.


Shannon Elizabeth: take from her, her lace.


Robin Wright Penn continues the CPR-couture trend.


I guess this is what theatrical royalty like auteur Rebecca Miller wears. Traditional imperial garments for state occasions are allowed to be over-the-top, to our modern eyes.


Olivia Palermo, as a ladymag would have it, "models this season's trends." Perhaps with a random male model.


Helen Lee Schifter, a Best-Dresses List fixture, clearly likes the "statement necklace." What say you?


Zoe Kazan rocks my favorite frock of the evening. That's right: frock.


Although Marion Cotillard (quel surprise) is a serious contender, too! Avert your eyes - although from the combined force of the beauty or the sheen of Penelope Cruz's boots, is open to interpretation!

[Images via Getty]

Miller, whom Cadwalladr describes as "vaguely expensive looking," wrote the recently released film The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, about a woman who responds to her much older husband's affair by running away with Keanu Reeves. Of Pippa, Cadwalladr writes, "she's the ultimate artist's wife, one of the characters says in the opening scene; the last of a dying breed, somebody who has given her whole self over to others, and who suddenly decides that she has to escape." Miller draws a parallel with her own life:

I think I've always been an escape artist. But here I am, deep in family life, and totally committed to it. Escape for me is writing. That's where all the negativity and everything goes. I think it would be easy to go mad if you don't have some sort of release. When you have children and live a family life, the demands on you - to subsume what you want or what you're thinking, or who you are - are huge. There's this thing that Pippa says about how she has ceased to be the protagonist of her own life. And it's the same with me. When I had a family I stepped aside and let other people be the centre. I think that's part of being a woman: you can't remember how to be the centre any more.

But Cadwalladr seems to be forcing Miller from the center. Time and again, the interview leaves Miller herself behind to focus on her famous father or husband. Cadwalladr writes,

[...] there's so much material in Miller's life that it's no wonder she's a writer. The complications and pressures of her familial life are so richly novelistic. Such as meeting Daniel Day-Lewis at a screening of the film that her half-brother, Robert, made of her father's most famous work, The Crucible. "There's something about Arthur," Day-Lewis said at the time, "that makes you wish he was your father. I'd like to turn up on his doorstep with adoption papers."

Here Cadwalladr neatly exscripts Miller from her own life. Her family — not her own decisions — apparently made her into a writer, and in the course of the paragraph even this family seems to exclude her. If Day-Lewis just wanted to be Arthur Miller's son, where does that leave his wife?

Of course, the life that Cadwalladr constructs for Miller isn't quite her real life — Miller hastens to point out, for instance, that Daniel Day Lewis doesn't bring his method acting home to their children. However, Cadwalladr's focus on said method acting (she actually wonders if he was in character at home before they had kids), on Arthur Miller's marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his later relationship with a much younger woman, on every aspect of Rebecca Miller's life that is not Rebecca Miller, reveals why it may be hard for a woman to be the "protagonist of her own life." Other people — even other women — simply won't let her.

Though Miller is an artist in her own right — she also writes fiction and has acted in several films — Cadwalladr seems intent on making her, like Pippa, into an artist's wife. But why isn't Daniel Day-Lewis an artist's husband? Why is no one asking him how he "remembers to be the center" in the face of his wife's creative process? Perhaps because male artists — whether they act, paint, or write plays — are still seen as difficult, unusual people who need the tender ministrations of a tolerant woman, whereas female artists are just women who happen to also do art. How come a man's greatness can excuse all manner of domestic foibles, but a woman is still defined by her family? How come Carole Cadwalladr, a female journalist, is perpetuating this double standard? It's enough to make anyone want to run off with Keanu Reeves.

Interview: Rebecca Miller [Guardian]

The Good:

The Bad:

The Ugly:

[Los Angeles, CA; February 24. Image via AP.]