It is surely a comfort to anyone still awaiting mega-success to know that June Squibb was in her mid-80s before she hit the big time. Her role as a foul-mouthed matriarch in the 2013 film Nebraska brought her an Oscar nomination, and she had her first leading role in last year\u2019s action comedy, Thelma. Now she\u2019s playing the lead again, in the new film Eleanor the Great and she\u2019s currently in rehearsals for a show on Broadway. Is Squibb, who has just turned 96, sick of talking about her late-peaking success? \u201cI think people are interested, so no, it\u2019s not a bad thing,\u201d she says. \u201cBut it is funny, because when I first came to New York \u2013 it was the 50s \u2013 I did The Boy Friend, a musical, and I was a big hit.\u201d But it was theatre, she concedes. \u201cThe film thing is so different.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Eleanor the Great, Scarlett Johansson\u2019s directorial debut, Squibb plays Eleanor Morgenstein, a 94-year-old woman who, mourning the loss of her best friend Bessie, moves from Florida to New York to be near her daughter. Encouraged to make new friends, Eleanor goes to the local Jewish community centre to join a choir, but the woman belting out Stephen Sondheim is enough to make anyone rush for the door. \u201cOh god,\u201d mutters Eleanor, backing away, before being scooped up by the Holocaust survivors group, meeting at the same time, who erroneously assume she\u2019s one of them. Lonely and grieving, US-born Eleanor finds herself passing off Bessie\u2019s survival story as her own.<\/p>\n
I spent a whole day in bed with a guy. We started laughing. We didn\u2019t even know each other!<\/p>\n
\u201cI just loved her from the beginning,\u201d she says, speaking via Zoom from the rented New York apartment she stays in for theatre rehearsals. \u201cAll the quirks. She\u2019s just so full of everything. I mean, she\u2019s not very nice sometimes, and I like that because it gives you something.\u201d Eleanor\u2019s awful lie gets dangerously out of control when Nina \u2013 a young journalism student she befriends, played by British actor Erin Kellyman \u2013 wants to bring her story to a wider audience.<\/p>\n
\u2018She\u2019s wonderful, very honest, very open\u2019 \u2026 with Scarlett Johansson at Cannes this year. Photograph: Samir Hussein\/WireImage<\/p>\n
It was a lovely shoot, says Squibb. Johansson was \u201cwonderful. She\u2019s very honest, very open.\u201d Squibb and Kellyman became real-life friends, put up in the same apartment building by the production. Squibb would invite Kellyman to dinner at her place, or to dinner parties Squibb gave at the Joe Allen brasserie, the theatre district institution. \u201cErin met a lot of my friends from New York, people that I\u2019ve known for years.\u201d Does Squibb have lots of younger friends too? \u201cI do,\u201d she says. \u201cWell, at my age, everybody\u2019s pretty much younger.\u201d<\/p>\n
Squibb is great company, funny and wise, the sort of person you could ask anything: sex, politics and religion are not off-limits. \u201cEveryone thinks older people aren\u2019t sexual but I think about sex,\u201d Eleanor tells Erin. What about Squibb? \u201cI think so, sure,\u201d she says with a smile. \u201cIf I see a handsome young man, I recognise that this is a handsome young man. I don\u2019t think I dwell on it maybe the way I did when I was younger, but we\u2019re still thinking about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
How does she feel about the political situation in the US, and other parts of the world? \u201cIt worries me \u2013 and I\u2019ve been through a lot. I\u2019ve seen a lot. I think the world is in a really scary place. I\u2019m just appalled. Now people are brazenly showing the swastika all over. I mean, that\u2019s scary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johansson cast real-life Holocaust<\/a> survivors in the support group, including Sami Steigmann, a prominent speaker and educator. And Rita Zohar, who plays Bessie, was born in a concentration camp in what is now Ukraine. Steigmann especially, Squibb says, \u201cwas so dear. He was welcoming me, rather than me saying, \u2018I\u2019m here and you\u2019re coming in [to my film].\u2019 That I loved. It was a wonderful experience, not at all what I thought it would be. There\u2019s no doom and gloom. We were there, we worked together and did our jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n Squibb was a teenager when the second world war ended. She remembers seeing photographs in news magazines of concentration camps being liberated. They would stay with her all her life. \u201cIt was horrifying.\u201d<\/p>\n Some critics feel that to fake a Holocaust experience is an especially dreadful kind of lie and morally irredeemable. Squibb is more understanding. \u201cI do think that Eleanor\u2019s need was to be close to Bessie and [the support group is] where she needs to do this. I can understand that. It does bring her closer.\u201d The idea would seem to have its critics in the film industry too \u2013 Johansson said this week that one of the project\u2019s financial backers pulled out when she refused to drop the Holocaust elements<\/a>.<\/p>\n Grief is a big theme of the film \u2013 not just Eleanor\u2019s, but also that of Erin, who has recently lost her mother. At the age of 96, Squibb must have had to learn a lot about dealing with grief, not just the loss of friends and colleagues, but her husband of 40 years. \u201cWell, I am a great looker-ahead,\u201d she says. \u201cI always think, \u2018What\u2019s going to happen tomorrow?\u2019 I don\u2019t say it\u2019s easy. I don\u2019t mean that at all, but I think that\u2019s what I do. When my husband died, I was more interested in protecting my son, who was in his 20s. He wasn\u2019t a child, but it affected him tremendously. So rather than suffering grief, I was trying to help him get through it.\u201d<\/p>\n Dinner at her place \u2026 with Erin Kellyman and Chiwetel Ejiofor in Eleanor the Great. Photograph: PR<\/p>\n Squibb grew up in Vandalia, the small city in Illinois, where her father ran a clothing shop, before joining the navy during the war and later setting up a successful insurance company. Her mother had played the piano at a cinema showing silent movies, then stayed at home to look after Squibb, an only child. She felt, she says, \u201cfrom the time I had any thoughts, that I was an actress. It never occurred to me that I was anything else. I have no idea where it came from.\u201d She took any drama or dance classes she could, then joined the Cleveland Play House. Her parents weren\u2019t that happy. \u201cMy father was rather proud of me, but my mother always hated it. I think she would have loved it if I had just stayed in Vandalia my whole life and did the usual, gotten married, had children. That\u2019s what she wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n Theatre trouper \u2026 Squibb in the 1950s. Photograph: Courtesy: June Squibb<\/p>\n