Andie MacDowell isn’t like most movie stars. With her big curly mane, gentle South Carolina twang, and that full-barreled laugh that sounds a second away from breaking into a snort, MacDowell has never, despite her more than three decades as an American icon, quite managed to stop seeming gracious and down to earth.
This theory is put to the unfortunate test when I, having plugged in the wrong address into my Lyft app (right Hollywood studio, wrong location), showed up 57 minutes late for our interview.
Many celebrities would have been long gone, but I find MacDowell waiting in a featureless room with no windows. Her back is turned to me, and the slant of her body lets me know that she is exhausted from a full day of being poked and asked for the photographs accompanying this article. Here is a woman ready to go home. She is wearing comfy off-duty attire of cream knits and tobacco-colored clogs. Her newly salt and pepper hair hangs over the back of her chair in waves that catch the light like polished silver. And then she turns around. There she is, with the same high forehead and arrowhead chin, no matter the role, making her look like the subject of a John Singer Sargent painting. She glows, not in the manner of a rosy-cheeked ingenue but a majestic being who has just descended from Mount Olympus.
Fresh off my first full-blown L.A. traffic panic attack, I fumble an apology. She’s the one who’s supposed to keep me waiting. Her eyebrows pitch in that way they sometimes do in the movies, like a roof in a child’s drawing of a house. “You’re growing your silver out,” she says. “It looks really good.” Her tone suggests that we’re old friends; In fact, many of my old friends have not had the nerve to bring up my no-longer-raven hair in conversation.
“How old are you?” MacDowell asks and calculates that it took her 20 years beyond my age to break up with her dye bottle. “But I’ve been selling hair color for a long time,” she says, letting loose a dark cackle.
MacDowell, who is 63 and has been a L’Oréal brand ambassador for an impressive 35 years, didn’t start coloring her hair until she was about 40, when she caught a journalist clocking her silvers during an interview. It made her feel uncomfortable — and so began what would balloon into an every-three-weeks coloring habit. “I’d been wanting to do it for a few years,” she says of embracing her natural salt and pepper. “And then when COVID happened and I saw the roots coming in, I thought it suited me.”
Her manager was apprehensive. MacDowell works in an industry that puts a premium on beauty, and by beauty I mean youth, and she was jeopardizing her livelihood. Determined, the actor booked an appointment with Jack Martin, the famous Tustin, California, colorist. His daylong, trompe l’oeil technique of painting silver onto older sections of dyed hair enabled the transitions of Jane Fonda and Sharon Osbourne (and whose work inspired my own jump). Last August, MacDowell joined their ranks.
“Men get old and we keep loving them. And I want to be like a man.”
She waited nearly a full year, until July 2021, to debut her new look, on the Cannes red carpet. “I was scared that people would be mean,” she said, her voice filling with vulnerability. Unlike some actors who shield themselves from the internet chat, MacDowell can’t help but tune in. “I read all the comments.”
The reaction, much to her surprise, was nothing short of glorious. Hordes of women rallied around her, ready to anoint MacDowell a new torchbearer for their cohort — women who came of age being told they’d be over the hill at 40. Now that they’ve reached the top of the hill, this pack of silver foxes is surveying the landscape and ready to rewrite the rules. Aging need not be a source of embarrassment. What’s embarrassing is forever trying to look like a version of yourself that you’ve outgrown. And when the pandemic hit, cutting us off from society and salon chairs, many women who’d long been curious about a life not lived in slavery devoted to an expensive and time-sucking habit took the leap toward self-acceptance and let their roots come in.
