The Australian Women’s Weekly
Bette Midler to star in a love story of the ‘sixties
Wednesday 28 December 1977
“IT’S FABULOUS for me to be compared with Streisand and Minnelli,” grinned Bette Midler. “But it might hurt them a little bit!”
The diminutive Bette Midler, as famous for her driving ambition as for her robust, cult-worshipped voice and wisecracks, wants to be a movie star.
And true to her gutsy flamboyance, having zero acting experience means nothing. After all, she didn’t even realize she was in the music business “until three albums later,” and nixed the opportunity to star with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson in “The Fortune” … “I didn’t want to be the bologna (Italian sausage) in the sandwich.”
Casually dressed in jeans, a tweed riding jacket and no lipstick, Midler announced her upcoming film debut in “The Rose” to the Press recently.
Midler will play “a singing star in a musical love story set against the background of the late ’60s.” Shooting begins in March. The male lead hasn’t been cast yet, and Oscar-winning Bob Goldman (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest“) is still busy rewriting the original screenplay.
“No, it’s not a thinly veiled movie about Janis Joplin,” Midler insisted, even though “there will be drinks, drugs, love, and destruction.” Her character of Rose, she said, “is a composite of all kinds of people trying to survive that decade.”
“That period was so full of ideas and energy.” she en- thused. “I saw Jimi (Hendrix), Tina Turner, the (Rolling) Stones, Janis … it was fabulous.
“I used to tell people to slow down, but nobody ever listened. The ’70s have been singularly boring.”
JAN SHORT
