An agent stumbled upon the Phoenix family as they busked for their tofu-based supper on the streets of LA.
Summer was discovered, as a toddler, along with River, Joaquin, Liberty and Rain. We didn't start till 10am, and we had a morning meeting where we'd "share stuff". There were only 23 kids for four different grades, and we had different animals - peacocks, lambs, dogs. When Summer wasn't being home-schooled, she was educated in establishments that she remembers fondly: 'It was totally chill. Her parents, John and Arlyne, were progressive and nomadic and vegan her childhood was a blissful, stimulating romp through the US, and Central and South America: 'We had no money.
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In the right hands, Summer Phoenix's life story could be marketed as a crash course in how to be extraordinary, eccentric and cool, without even trying. She acted as a teenager, but was never a Teen Actress: never fodder for the slasher movie, or the gross-out movie, or the titillating post-Porkies spring break movie.
She's that most hackneyed of good-actor cliches: 'versatile', to the point, often, that she's unrecognisable from one film to the next. Because she is good - her talent is low-key, subtle, shifting. Summer, however, is defiantly good in it. But I haven't actually seen the whole thing yet.'Īs this might suggest, Suzie Gold is not a great film. but it was a labour of love for the people who worked on it, and I'm incredibly proud of them. And I think it's a pretty normal sort of coming of age story, almost. When Phoenix talks about the film, she makes vague statements, like: 'The film? It's about, for me, it's about a girl who's learning how to respect where she comes from without letting it be who she is. Phoenix plays Suzie Gold's eponymous lead, a north London-dwelling Jewish girl in her early twenties, who is struggling to reconcile her heritage with her modern-girl aspirations, to find her own identity without destroying the links with her sometimes claustrophobic but loving family, and other cliches. Her looks also hint at an indeterminate ethnicity, which makes her thoroughly well suited to her latest on-screen incarnation. Summer Phoenix is gorgeous, in a very wild, untamed and un-Hollywood fashion: high drama eyebrows and translucent tanned skin, and dark, shadow-smudged eyes. She poses for pictures, spread-eagled and feline, on the tiled hallway floor of a vast, empty mansion.'Whoa, this house!' she keeps saying, delightedly, of the decayed and decadent five-storey almost-palace on the fringes of Regent's Park. She is, however, sweet, good-humoured, accommodating, sleepy. When we first meet, in early spring 2003, Summer is in London to apply the finishing touches to her latest project, a low-budget Brit flick called Suzie Gold. 'Nah, it's not about that now,' she says. Along with Joaquin, Rain and Liberty, she has since abandoned all hopes of orchestrating a social revolution. We went to LA as a family, with a sort of vision that we were going to "make it", whatever that meant.' Now, Summer Phoenix is 26 years old, an established feature on the edgy, indie flick scene, a pianist, a purveyor of vintage fashions,fiancee of Casey Affleck (the cooler brother of Ben), whose child she's expecting in May, and most famously of all, younger sister of Joaquin and the man who the Hollywood establishment routinely refers to as the 'tragic' and/or 'late' River Phoenix. 'It's true,' Summer says, and only her dry, wry delivery, her low-pitched, sardonic voice stops her from sounding desperately earnest. It was the intensely tight-knit family unit that Summer's one remaining elder brother, Academy Award nominee Joaquin, has fondly referred to on more than one occasion as 'Team Phoenix'. In its original incarnation, the Phoenix Family was a creative and ideological power base, the Osmonds with Utopian dreams and very specific dietary requirements. She did this in association with her four older brothers and sisters, River and Liberty, Rain and Joaquin (then 'Leaf'), through the medium of the Phoenix Family, the band they formed and toured round the upmarket affluence of Beverly Hills, in the mid-Eighties. Summer Phoenix - actress, nascent style icon, hip kid - launched her first and only mission to change the world, to make it a more loving, more free-wheeling, more vegan place, when she was almost three years old.
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