Hannah’s ongoing role is aplomb

With her glittery flip-flops, baggy pants, T-shirt and maybe just a little lipstick, Daryl Hannah is looking very West Coast Girl at the moment. Not in that nipped, tucked, collagen-pouffed way, but that way that brings to mind, oh, an updated “For the Roses”-era Joni Mitchell, and that description still fits when her costume shifts to something slightly more West than coast for a subsequent photo session.

Her escort, a snaggle-toothed brown stray (one of several she has adopted over the years) named Toto, greets with a wary warmth visitors to the sofa he and his mistress have commandeered in the parlor of the Chateau Marmont.

Toto keeps his eye on Mom. When she relaxes, he does. He also becomes something of a ham himself, standing up on his hind legs, pawing at a visitor as if to say, “Me! ME! Look at me!”

Hannah chides him softly, “Toto? Down. All the way.” Hannah should conduct seminars in the art of the gentle reprimand.

At 43, Hannah could also conduct a seminar in the art of negotiating the twists and turns of Hollywood -- and celebrity -- with aplomb.

She started acting in movies and television when she was still in high school in Chicago (starting with Brian De Palma’s “The Fury” in 1978). But the most distinguishing aspect of her career has been a strange inconsistency. For every “Blade Runner,” “Splash” and “Roxanne,” there’s been a “Summer Lovers” (an ’82 menage/romp with Peter Gallagher set in the Greek Isles) and some unremarkable straight-to-videos and a Turkish bank heist flick.

“I like to work,” Hannah explains. “I work a lot when I can, especially when good stuff comes along.”

As for when not-so-good stuff comes along, she says, “I wasn’t getting any good movie offers, so I took what I could find to keep working.” And now, at an age when many actresses have trouble finding satisfying film work, Hannah is experiencing a renaissance.

The first salvo in the Daryl Hannah rebirth is “Northfork,” the third installment in the Polish brothers’ cinematic meditation on the American West, which opened Friday. Outfitted in a robe and a ratty wig complete with bobby pins, Hannah turns in a sweetly haunting performance (alongside Nick Nolte, James Woods and Anthony Edwards) as one of several angels sent to reclaim a young angel separated from his flock and on the verge of death.

In John Sayles’ “Casa de los Babys,” which opens mid-September, she gives a deft performance as one of a group of women (Marcia Gay Harden, Lili Taylor, Susan Lynch, Mary Steenburgen and Maggie Gyllenhaal) killing time in a South American hotel (run by Rita Moreno) while they wait for the local government to process their adoption of local infants.

Mid-October, she’s in a fight to the finish with Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s latest blood-spattered romp, “Kill Bill.”

All three roles were written for Hannah.

“She has a connection to the arts,” says Michael Polish. “Which you wouldn’t know by how she’s perceived.”

Polish and his brother Mark started the script for “Northfork” about 10 years ago when he and the woman who is now his wife, makeup artist Jo Strettel were living in Hannah’s Malibu guesthouse.

“She had this enormous house,” Polish says. “And she was known to support artists. There were painters, musicians, filmmakers, always people around. And she had every single script Hollywood had to offer, so you could really get an idea of what was out there.”

Hannah went all out in “Northfork,” Polish reports.

“She brought in her own wig. All the characters have pins, like morticians, like they were being nipped and tucked. She allowed us to put a bald cap on her, she had no problems playing with her look.”

“I kind of pictured her as Prince Charming and Joan of Arc,” Hannah offers. Onscreen, the effect is one of divine decrepitude.

A matter of looks

John Sayles concurs with Polish’s contention that Hollywood’s response to Hannah’s looks have resulted in her being underestimated.

“In her early stuff, they couldn’t get past the blond thing,” a perception Sayles used to his advantage in “Casa de los Babys” in which “none of the other characters could get past her looks -- blond and tall seems to have it all together.”

Sayles, like Polish, was eager to exploit what he saw as Hannah’s more substantial attributes.

“I’ve seen some of the smaller movies Daryl’s done where the parts have been written more deeply, so I knew she had that depth as an actor.”

“Now, she’s starting to get some really nice dramatic roles. Several times she’s been cast as someone ‘more than human’ -- to great effect,” he says. “She’s been getting to do that stuff which a lot of women don’t get to do.”

In the Tarantino movie, women get to do all kinds of things women never get to do. And her blondness turned out to be part of her appeal as Elle Driver, one of several female assassins.

“I was playing with these feminine roles,” Tarantino says. “I wanted to have fun with ‘types.’ I have Lucy [Liu], she’s small, black hair; Vivica [Fox], ghetto black, medium build, Uma, tall, blond. I’d written half the script with Elle Driver, I wanted to figure out who I wanted for that role.

“The prose of the script was like, ‘the blonde does this, the blonde does that,’ and the subtext is that blondes are like whole other race of people, they’re not white, they’re blonde!”

“Uma is Uma, Daryl is Daryl. Six-foot legs, 6-foot legs, I’m thinking, ‘Man! That will be really cool when they fight each other!” Which, of course, they do. In a trailer. “They’re like two wild cats, fighting in a bag,” Tarantino reports.

Ironically, in a business where image is everything, it was Hannah’s fondness for work -- whatever work comes along -- that actually landed her Elle Driver.

That and Tarantino’s legendary appetite for anything and everything that has ever been committed to film.

“I was at home, and I turned on the television, Daryl was in this USA TV movie, ‘First Target,’ and she was the head of the Secret Service, protecting the president. and I thought she was terrific in this role.”

Tarantino then caught a flight to London to check out Hannah in the West End production of “The Seven-Year Itch,” and the deal was done.

Polish and Sayles both think Hannah’s “advanced” age will work in her favor as an actress.

Hannah laughs. “Well, there’s really no choice. I’m not 20 years old. I can’t be a starlet. I’ve always wanted to do more substantial work, but I take what is offered to me. Now, Lord knows why, but

“What I love lately about acting is you discover how that person, your character, would respond to those circumstances,” she says, “not your imposition of how that person would respond.”

Part of the issue is simply the way Hollywood works.”When you’re doing big projects, your agents and your managers -- their interest is to keep you making money, which is probably a good idea if you want to build a nest egg,” Hannah says. “But I’ve heard about some interesting stuff I was offered during those years that I never knew about.” “Daryl was a big leading lady in the ‘80s,” Tarantino says, “and unfortunately Daryl’s time of over-the-title happened at a time when there were no good roles for women. Even ‘Roxanne’ was just a great girlfriend role. She’s not the girlfriend anymore, but she’s doing really good roles.”

Hannah has also been trying her hand in production.

Her most notable recent filmmaking project was a documentary she made while researching a role as a stripper for an HBO project called “Dancing at the Blue Iguana.”

What emerges in the documentary, “Strip Notes,” made by Hannah and Tenya Nielsen in researching her role, is a clear-eyed, sympathetic look at the world of the women (and men) who work in L.A.’s live flesh factories and Hannah’s efforts to get inside her character’s skin.

It’s a curious choice for someone who claims not to like attention when it’s directed at her personally.

“I got into acting because I was really shy,” she insists.

“I wanted to live in my imagination. And I couldn’t decide what I wanted to be and acting gave me the opportunity to do a lot of different things. And I wanted to disappear from myself, be in disguise. I’m not an extrovert, I like to watch people, I like to analyze behavior, I don’t like to be watched.”

It may not be not as contradictory as it sounds; Daryl Hannah doesn’t like to be watched when she’s Daryl. She likes to be watched when she’s playing a role (otherwise she’d never work), but she’s not really Daryl in that moment, she’s the character.

When Hannah is courting the spotlight she is literally not herself?

And yet, there are so many pictures of her walking the red carpet in outfits that seem to demand “look at me.” And some eye-catching kitty-cat glasses.

“That wasn’t me trying to be fashionable,” she protests. “Or pretty. It was putting on a costume. I’m putting on a movie star costume, or a Barbarella costume. It’s me, acting. That’s what that is to me,” but in a weird way it also serves to guard her privacy while working in public.

In preparing for “Iguana,” she continues, “Listen, I worked at a strip club. On stage. For five months. And no one knew it was me,” Hannah asserts.

“And I saw people I knew.”

Something to think about next time you belly up to the bar at Crazy Girls.

Intimacy and discretion

Indeed, Hannah remains discreet about her personal relationships, even though two of them were with remarkably high-profile men, singer Jackson Browne and John F. Kennedy Jr.

“People speculate, and come up with unbelievable fiction. You can’t imagine how off-center it is. Those relationships are just like other relationships I’ve had. I just had a seven-year relationship that no one knew about except my friends.

“The nature of an intimate relationship is that it’s intimate, Between you and the person,” she laughs. “And how am I going to describe a 13-year relationship in a one-page article? I can describe and set the record straight. But that kind of cheapens my experience, and there’s something kind of cheap and nasty about airing your personal life for the media, like you’re using it.”

“If I had this very innocuous, [matronly voice] ‘Oh, my husband’s great, blah blah, he likes to wear boxers or jockey shorts.’ I don’t know, maybe then,” she laughs.

She has no plans for husbands, boxers or briefs, any time soon, she says. “I’m in boy detox.”

Instead, she’s focused on finding new projects, especially on finding more work behind the camera, simplifying her life, enjoying her home, a former stage coach stop in Colorado. “Small house, lots of land, solar power, organic garden, really beautiful, really simple.”

One pictures her running through the meadows in a long white dress.

“Nude,” she says, not missing a beat.

“I think she’s gonna keep doing really good stuff now that her career is in the mature stage,” Polish says.

Whether her career is in the mature stage or not, don’t expect her to tout her newfound maturity as a grown-up.

“I know people who are adults,” she says, “and they’re younger than me. I keep waiting.”