Silver Linings Playbook and Animal Kingdom catapulted her to global stardom after a career stretching back to the 70s. She talks about her ‘renegade life’, her spat with Anjelica Huston and her latest role as a woman running a drag club
Jacki Weaver is thinking about how her life has changed. “To find yourself in bed with Robert De Niro is an extraordinary thing for a woman of my age,” she says, with a distinctive giggle. In 2010, she was living in
Sydney and approaching pensionable age; she had a memoir under her belt and an acting career that had thrived since the 70s, but without making her famous far beyond home. A decade on, she has twice been nominated for an Oscar and is one of Hollywood’s most prolific character actors, having uprooted to
Los Angeles after her unexpected success with the 2010 thriller Animal Kingdom.
As Janine “Smurf” Cody, the deadly, diminutive matriarch of a Melbourne mob family, she froze the blood without once raising her voice. Her performance drew praise from Quentin Tarantino and Pedro Almodóvar and spawned a string of T-shirts emblazoned with the character’s most memorably barbed lines: “You’ve done some bad things, sweetie,” was a favourite. There was also a US TV spin-off, with Ellen Barkin taking over the role of Janine. Most importantly, the movie brought Weaver her first Oscar nomination, at the age of 63. “I was gobsmacked,” she says. She did not even mind when she lost. “You feel a stab of disappointment and then a huge relief that you don’t have to make a speech.”