Allure (US) - May 2004
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When it comes to taking it all off in front of strangers, six brave actresses prove that their courage and humour are a hell of a lot more important than crash diets and self-tanner.
It's a year that kicked off with Janet Jackson's accidentally-on-purpose wardrobe malfunction, followed by Mary-Louise Parker's Golden Globes speech crediting her newborn son for "making my boobs look so good in this dress." If anyone thought for a moment that Americans had outgrown their puerile attitude toward nudity, then these brief incidents would set them straight. Every television viewer seemed to be transformed at once into an adolescent boy, snickering and gawking over a pair of boobs.
It's quite a contrast to the role - and it's nudity - for which Parker earned the award. In Angels in America, she stands naked before her homosexual husband and forces him to look at her. There was no snickering or gawking at that scene. Sometimes nudity exposes more than just a breast (or a nipple ring).
Perhaps falling somewhere between these extremes is the disrobing by six women for Allure. In facing the camera, they confronted their feelings about their bodies and bravely revealed something elemental about themseleves - not just a fictional character. As Kyra Sedgewick put it, "This is you. Very much you. All you." But before everything got too Lifetime TV, Samantha Mathis lightened the mood. "Once you take your top off," she pointed out, "everyone else is wildly more uncomfortable than you are." Just like, say, a bunch of adolescent boys?
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Rose McGowan
This isn't the first time the world has seen Rose McGowan practically naked, thanks to the dress she wore to the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards. " That was like a prank that will live forever," she says with a sigh. (She was inspired by Carole Lombard who once pulled into a movie premiere in an ambulance, on a stretcher, under a sheet.) "I knew it would cause a stir, but turthfully, I didn't understand how long things stay around. Plus, I had a 103-degree fever, so I can't say my decision making process was at an all-time high."
McGowan's head seems clear, despite the fact that she had a nasty flu and a few bruises from the Charmed set. "And I have PMS - so it's a great time to be photographed," she says dryly. "You wish the entire crew was gay and naked."
On a normal day, she doesn't have body issues. "This sounds like one of those fake interview things," she says, "but I had two pieces of pizza and a chocolate cupcake before I got here."
Hair, Serge Normant; Makeup, Scott Andrew; Manicure, Lisa Postma.
Prop Stylist: Bill Doig.
