Alors c'est une interview incroyable où Emily reçoit le journaliste chez elle et le fait même monter dans sa chambre pour lui faire voir sa collection de chaussures!!!
Je vais la traduire en priorité!!
Emily Procter throws open the front door of her
Los Angeleshome and apologizes for the strands of white hair covering her silky
blue pants and matching blouse. “My cat, Kevin, was all over me this
morning while I was doing a photo shoot,” she says cheerfully as she
leads me into her kitchen, where she offers me a plate of fried chicken
and another plate of chocolate cookies. “Or, if you want, I can make
you a sandwich. Hey, and how about some iced tea -- sweet tea, all full
of sugar -- exactly like the tea I grew up drinking?”
Procter’s manager, Scott Fedro, standing nearby, notices me raising my
eyebrows, and he laughs out loud. “Believe me, this is no joke,” Fedro
says. “Emily acts this way with everybody -- and I mean everybody.”
Procter truly is about as unique a Hollywood celebrity as you’ll find.
The fact that she lets a reporter into her home is amazing in itself.
(In this paparazzi-crazed age, famous actors and actresses usually
refuse to let anyone but their closest friends know where they live.)
To find fried chicken in her refrigerator is equally surprising. “I
know, I know,” says the petite blonde, who is all of five feet three
inches tall. “I’m supposed to starve myself and eat lettuce.”
But as anyone who watches network television already knows, what is
most distinctive about Procter is the way she talks. Her thick-as-syrup
accent is straight out of her hometown of
Raleigh,
North Carolina,
and she makes no apologies for it. “It’s who I am, and it’s who I
always will be,” she says with another shrug as she sets out a third
plate of food: croissants from a nearby bakery. “I realized long ago
that if I tried to hide my accent, I was just trying to hide myself.
And that is something I’m not willing to do.”
In Hollywood circles, 39-year-old Procter is known as the Southern
actress. While almost all actresses who come from the South spend years
working with dialect coaches, desperately trying to rid themselves of
their drawls, Procter has made a name for herself by playing, well,
herself -- “a genuinely modern Southern woman,” as TV legend
Aaron Sorkin once put it. In 2000, for his hit
NBC show
The West Wing,
Sorkin adapted a role especially for Procter. He turned her into
Ainsley Hayes, a spunky, highly opinionated, and spectacularly
beautiful attorney from North Carolina who had come to Washington,
D.C., to be an assistant
White House counsel. And for the last six years, she has been one of the stars on
CSI: Miami,
playing, yes, another Southern woman: the brainy but fashion-forward
ballistics expert Calleigh Duquesne, who handles bullets and guns (not
to mention difficult men) with ease.
CSI: Miami, which is entering
its seventh season, is now one of the top-rated shows on television,
drawing as many as 16 million viewers a week. According to
viewer-opinion polls, Procter has become one of television’s most
popular actresses. She has fan clubs in the
United States and
Europe, and she is especially admired by men. In one of its “Women We Love” issues,
Esquiremagazine couldn’t stop gushing over her spectacular beauty and equally
spectacular speaking style. “She is a different beast altogether:
passionate, convinced, ready to rumble,”
Esquireconcluded. “She makes you wish that the women who slice you up at work
did it with that same glint in their eye, the hint that arguments can
be fun, even sexy.”
“People love her,” says Rex Linn, who plays detective Frank Tripp on
CSI: Miami.
“They love her accent and they love the smile -- a warm Southern smile
that makes you melt. When she hits you with that smile and then that
accent, it’s all over. She can say to me, ‘Rex, will you go stand in
front of that truck and get run over?’ and I’ll say, ‘Sure.’ ”
“It’s still hard to believe what’s happened,” Procter says, walking into her living room and
curlingup on a couch. “At one point, I really did believe I was going to go
nowhere. And now, I sometimes just want to say, ‘Holy cow. Holy, holy
cow.’ ”
Procter didn’t have any particular desire to become an actress until
she reached the end of college. An eighth-generation North Carolinian
and the daughter of a doctor and a hospice worker in Raleigh, she
initially studied Spanish at East Carolina University and then switched
to dance and journalism, which led her to a part-time job as a weather
anchor for a local TV station. On a lark, she also tried to get into
the school’s drama program, but the head of the theater department
didn’t think she was qualified to be in the kinds of plays he was
producing. “I was, apparently, too much the Southern belle,” she says
with a sigh. “Just another smiling sorority girl.”
Ironically, the professor’s outright rejection inspired Procter to
pursue acting. In 1991, she moved to Los Angeles, and though talent
scouts and agents loved her looks, finding work proved challenging.
“They only sent me out to audition for sitcom roles as the ditzy
Southern secretary who tosses her ponytail around,” she says. “And
then, when I did those auditions, one of the casting people would often
say, ‘Is that really your accent, or are you faking it?’ They were so
used to non-Southerners doing Southern accents that they didn’t know
what the real thing sounded like.”
Procter eventually broke down and took a few speech lessons, hoping to
erase at least some of her accent. “The coach would have me read
something, and then he’d say, ‘Do you hear how you sound Southern?’ I’d
say, ‘No,’ and he’d throw up his hands in exasperation and say if I
didn’t learn to talk like everyone else, I was going nowhere.” Still,
she continued to get some small roles: blink-and-you-missed-her parts
in
Leaving Las Vegas and
Jerry Maguire, as well as guest appearances on
Just Shoot Me and
Friends. In the 1997 HBO movie
Breast Men, about a group of plastic surgeons in
Houston, she was cast as a young
Texaswoman whose health was tragically ruined by implants. “It was my first
chance to play a Southern character with real depth, and I loved it,”
she says. “The problem, of course, was that there just weren’t many
roles calling for a Southern actress who showed depth.”
By 2000, Procter was, for all practical purposes, out of acting and
spending her time volunteering with charities (she especially enjoyed
working with the homeless-ministry meal team at All Saints’ Parish
Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills). “I told people in the industry I
was taking an extended break,” she says with a chuckle. Then, her agent
called saying that Sorkin was holding auditions for a new female
character for
The West Wing.
Originally, Sorkin had wanted his character to be a lawyer from
Montana.
“But when I read the script, I saw the character as being completely
Southern, complicated in the way all Southern women I know are
complicated,” Procter recalls. “Everybody I knew said I was crazy to go
in there and audition with my normal accent, but at that point, I was
thinking,
If you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
A few days after the audition, I got a call. Aaron said he had decided
to have Ainsley come from North Carolina, and he wanted me for the
part. Needless to say, I was in shock.”
Although Procter appeared only periodically on
The West Wing, she quickly developed a huge following. Executives at
CBS were so taken with her that they created a role for her on
CSI: Miami.
Invariably dressed in tight pants, a tight blouse, and very high heels,
Procter’s character not only studies crime scenes but often chases down
criminals herself. (“There are two ways this goes down, and either way,
you’re dropping the gun,” Calleigh Duquesne snaps at a killer in one
episode, her eyes narrowing.) “Calleigh is sort of intense,” Procter
says. “But viewers don’t seem to be complaining.” No, they don’t.
According to a survey published recently in
TV Guide,
American males would prefer to have a romance with Procter’s character
than with any of the female characters who appear on any of CBS’s other
CSI shows (besides
CSI: Miami, there’s also the original,
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, set in
Las Vegas, and
CSI: NY).
According to Linn, Procter’s longtime costar and friend, part of her
appeal might stem from her being the perfect combination of tomcat and
tomboy.
“She’s a guy’s guy,” Linn says. “She likes doing guy things -- wearing a
baseballcap, drinking a beer, eating hot dogs. And she can kick your butt at
the poker table. We’ll have these games and she’ll win a big hand, and
as she gathers all the chips, she’ll say to us in this really sweet
voice, ‘Hey, guys, it’s just a card game.’ ”
Procter insists that she will never again take speech lessons to hide
her lilting accent. Nor, she says, will you ever find her trying to
hide from her heritage. Although the exterior of her home looks like a
typical contemporary two-story
Californiabungalow, she has made sure to fill the inside with numerous family
heirlooms. In her kitchen is a collection of rose-medallion plates she
inherited from her grandmother, and a chaise longue that belonged to
her other grandmother sits in one bedroom. A nineteenth-century
portrait of her great-grandmother dominates the den. There are also
brass candlesticks shaped like cobras, which she purchased at a
Salvation Armythrift store in North Carolina, and a Morris chair that she bought at
another thrift store for $50. On the wall in one hallway are framed
beetles -- that’s right, beetles -- and three stuffed birds and a
stuffed squirrel are perched on a shelf. “When I was a little girl, my
mother and I collected dead bugs and birds,” Procter says. “And I don’t
know why I should stop now.”
A few minutes later, as if right on cue, Procter’s mother,
Barbara,
calls from North Carolina, and the two women start the kind of
conversation only Southern women seem to have. They gossip about
Barbara’s neighbors, they talk about the weather, and they catch up on
the health of Barbara’s turtle, who lives in an aquarium in the
kitchen. Barbara then says that her dog carried a dead crayfish into
the house that morning, and Procter squeals. “Are you going to keep
it?” she asks. “Maybe,” her mother says, perfectly serious.
After they hang up, Procter notices that I’m still not eating. “Oh
dear, how about a sandwich?” she says, looking genuinely concerned.
“When I was growing up, a sandwich consisted of two pieces of white
bread, a bunch of mayonnaise, and just one vegetable in the middle,
like a sliced tomato. You want me to make one of those?”
I say no as I try to keep a polite smile on my face. But I do ask if I
can see her bedroom closet, which reportedly is full of high-heeled
shoes. (“It’s my one true addiction, shoe shopping,” she has said on
more than one occasion.) I assume she’ll say no to my request -- surely
her closet is off-limits to a stranger -- but suddenly she’s leading me
upstairs, straight into the closet, with Kevin the cat following close
behind. The inside of the closet looks like an upscale shoe store; it’s
jammed with shelf after shelf of Jimmy Choos and Manolo Blahniks,
including some that sport heels that must be at least five inches high.
“And here’s my new favorite pair,” Procter exults, holding up a pair of
zebra-print Yves Saint Laurent stilettos. “Except for my running shoes,
the only thing I wear is high heels. I wear high heels everywhere. I
wear heels around the house when I’m by myself. I just don’t like my
feet flat.”
“That’s a little peculiar,” I suggest.
“So what?” she says, smiling sweetly. “I like peculiar.”
What may be most peculiar about Procter, at least by Hollywood
standards, is that she is not particularly obsessed with her career or
constantly worried about what she will be doing next. Nor does she seem
the slightest bit bothered by the fact that roles tend to dry up for
actresses around the age of 40. She is under contract with
CSI: Miamithrough 2009, “and if the show is canceled and everything goes away
after that, then that’s okay with me. It’s been a great run and a
completely unexpected one. Believe me, if I never act [again], I’ll be
fine, perfectly fine. There’s still plenty for a gal like me to do.”
Although Procter just ended what she describes as “a very serious
relationship,” she does say that she’s “always hopeful” about finding
the right man and perhaps someday having a family. She says she might
start a new career as a home decorator. She has already formed her own
rock band, named White Lightning. “I started it completely as a joke --
I mean, a total joke -- so I could stand up at parties and sing really
bad ’80s power ballads and in between songs say really stupid self-help
things about life and love,” she says. “But now, there are people
wanting us to perform like we’re serious musicians. We’ve actually been
asked to be the opening act at real concerts with real bands that make
real albums.” She shrugs her shoulders. “Now, talk about peculiar!”
Procter checks her watch -- she has yet another interview to do this
afternoon -- and walks me to the front door. “Oh, wait just a minute,”
she says and then scurries into the kitchen. She returns with a
decorated paper bag filled with cookies and fried chicken. “It just
isn’t right that I would send you away on an empty stomach,” she says.
“I just know you’re going to get hungry later on.”
I protest, but Procter refuses to take the bag back. “Please, this is
who I am,” she says determinedly. “And I wouldn’t have it any other
way.”