Tuesday Weld

There were rumours of dalliances with men three times her age, and she drip-fed the press with hints of addiction, sexual activity and family discord. This was, after all, a 16-year-old who marched into the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and demanded to be allowed into Elvis Presley’s room. She succeeded. Things took a turn for the curious when it came to Weld’s career. Consider the movies she turned down: True Grit and Lolita, to name just two. She was also in the running for Rosemary’s Baby. Instead, she opted for B-fare that verged on Grindhouse, like 1968’s Pretty Poison. Such was her wild persona by 1971 that when her performance in A Safe Place was criticised by a punter at the New York Film Festival, she lobbed one of her heels at him. Who throws a shoe? Honestly.

A year later there was talk of her being nominated for an Academy Award for the lead role in the adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays. She would finally be nominated for her turn as Diane Keaton’s awry sister in Looking For Mr. Goodbar, but by then she seemed over Tinseltown and its attendant mirages. We are, after all, dealing with a woman who in 1971 told Roman Polanski he could shove his nude sleepwalking scene for Macbeth up his own lens. She would muster a similar level of enthusiasm for screen-testing for the role of Daisy Buchanan in the 1974 production of The Great Gatsby. “I do not ever want to be a huge star,” she said. “I refused Bonnie and Clyde because I was nursing at the time but also because, deep down, I knew that it was going to be a huge success. The same was true of Bob and Carol and Fred and Sue, or whatever it was called (she was referring to the 1969 hit Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice). It reeked of success.”

Despite this outward rejection of standard operating procedure, she managed to stick to the La-La script with three marriages: to screenwriter Claude Harz, musician Pinchas Zukerman, and how- the-fuck-was-he-a-sex-symbol Dudley Moore. Still, for the actress who seemed, according to one scribe, to be “sweet little 16 for 16 years”, there was some verdigris of reward in the work. There were rare appearances, such as the 1984 Mafia series Once Upon a Time in America and 1993’s Falling Down, opposite Robert Duvall and Michael Douglas.

Despite her self-imposed absence from the spotlight, Weld has maintained an appropriately niche allure in the pop culture psyche. She featured on the cover of Matthew Sweet’s 1999 album, Girlfriend; there is a British band called The Real Tuesday Weld; and she is name-checked by Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen in the song New Frontier. She is under no illusion about the charmingly tarnished place she holds in many a contemporary heart. “I may be self- destructive,butIliketakingchanceswithmovies,”shesaid.“Ilike challenges, and I also like the particular position I’ve been in all these years, with people wanting to save me from the awful films I’ve been in ... I think the Tuesday Weld cult is a very nice thing.”

Even as she aged and made a life in the mountains of Colorado, she retained a coltish allure offset by the snappiest of tongues. Asked by a reporter what drove her to isolation in the 1970s, she responded: “I think it was a Buick.”