Dree Hemingway on shrugging off the family demons and stepping into the limelight

She grew up in one of America’s most legendary dynasties, now she’s conquering the silver screen. Dree Hemingway talks to Richard Godwin about her ‘ball-buster’ great-grandfather and making it on her own terms
COACH jacket, £2,675, 203-206 Regent Street, W1
Nick Hudson
By Richard Godwin20 January 2017

If you were going to create a deck of It Girl Top Trumps (2017 Edition), Dree Hemingway would be a strong card to hold. The 29-year-old model and actress scores highly on all vectors crucial to success in the modern age. She has the looks: one part Scandi elf, one part 1980s power player, another part Kurt Cobain (or maybe that’s just the grandad jumper and shades she’s worn to the shoot). She has the connects: a ‘friend’ of Coach, a face of Chloé, film roles as Adam Driver’s roommate etc. And she has the Bohemian pedigree that appears a prerequisite these days: her mother is Mariel Hemingway, who played Woody Allen’s teenage love interest in Manhattan. Her aunt was Margaux Hemingway, the first model to win a $1m cosmetics contract. Her great-grandfather? Only bloody Ernest Hemingway.

And as she poses at a hideaway house in Topanga Canyon, California, she displays a rare lightness of being. She’s constantly mobile, agile, flirtatious, dancing. So many models claim that they’re doing this under duress — they’d sooner be playing bass in their band, or working on their script. But Hemingway has an actual relish for it. ‘I love modelling,’ she says when she settles in a pool of sunlight, sucking on an American Spirit cigarette, drawing her legs under her baggy green knit. ‘I got into this job because I was a ballet dancer for years and I studied acting beforehand. I wanted something that could explore movement and character. It’s often harder to create a photo that has real feeling behind it than it is to do that in a movie. So it upsets me when girls just say they’re modelling for the money. That’s not what I like about it. I like giving emotion.’

There’s an indefinable nowness to Dree — her languorous grungy vibe, her kinda goofy voice, her luxey laid-back appeal — that has designers, directors and stylists increasingly enraptured. She’s pretty on it, fashion-wise, name-dropping the zeitgeisty Russian ladwear designer, Gosha Rubchinskiy, and cult London skate brand, Palace: ‘I actually feel that London has managed to make something new recently. It’s like the equivalent of punk.’ She briefly attended Rada and has a strong London crew still. But for all this, she insists she was ‘NOT a cool kid’.

She was born in Sun Valley, Idaho, and spent most of her childhood on film sets. Manhattan brought her mother, Mariel, fame and she went on to appear in movies throughout the 1980s. Dree’s father, Stephen Crisman, made documentaries and travelled constantly. ‘I resented my family a lot because I never had friends in one place,’ she reflects. ‘It’s funny, until about four years ago, I never felt like I really got on with people my age. I’d always been around adults. I guess I grew up much faster than I should have done.’

COACH dress, £550, shoes, £750 (020 7734 8472). Jumper, vintage
Nick Hudson

She says she must have been ‘the most annoying child’ on film sets, desperate to be involved: ‘You get paid to play as an actor. Ideal. That’s kind of the number-one dream.’ Her mother worked with John Candy on the 1991 comedy Delirious and the Canadian actor was one of various stars who became an uncle figure to her. ‘He was amazing. He was like the sweetest, funniest person ever. Michael Keaton always used to be at our house the whole time and I used to call him my godfather — and then I’d yell at him for being a bad godfather. But what I liked was this family vibe of being on the set. I was desperate to be stable and settle in a normal house with neighbours and all that.’ Her favourite director is Wes Anderson, whose films carry that semi-functional, we’re-all-in-this-together vibe onto the screen.

It sounds like a chaotic upbringing. Dree’s mother, like many of the Hemingway dynasty, suffered from mental-health issues — her documentary on life as a Hemingway was called Running from Crazy. Mariel divorced Stephen when Dree was 20, but Dree was already begging them to split when she was 12.

‘I just knew they weren’t in love. It’s sad when I think about it, but I’ve always been this great observer my whole life. I’ve seen so many people just stay in relationships because they’re too scared to get out. I don’t believe in settling in life.’ No? ‘I have no filter for bullshit. Anyone I date, I’m like: “Do not even think about bullshitting me.”’ (She is currently single.)

Nick Hudson

Ballet became her focus as a girl. ‘I liked the strictness of it, having to please the ballet teacher — there was always another level to get to.’ She trained with the School of American Ballet in New York and could have turned professional — but was put off by ‘how ballet dancers were just obsessed with ballet. It was a closed world.’ In the end, she followed her mother and aunt’s paths — film, fashion — but ballet has gifted her wonderful posture and limpid grace. It also came in handy when she ‘came out’ as a debutante in Paris. ‘I had to dance with this Belgian prince in this ridiculous Christian Dior gown.’ She lost an expensive piece of jewellery lent to her by a brand — which no longer hands out jewellery to 14-year-olds. ‘People were really upset about that...’

As for her illustrious great-grandfather’s influence (Ernest shot himself in Ketchum, Idaho, back in 1961): ‘In elementary school, people don’t really give a shit who your great-grandfather was. It was only much later that I met all these deep fans and realised how much influence he’d had on people’s lives.’ In the US, Hemingway is on every school curriculum and his daiquiri-downing, marlin-spearing personality looms large over every budding writer. ‘I went through this huge rebellion for a while where I said, “I’m not reading his books”. I made this stupid mistake years ago where I said

Dree Hemingway: in pictures

1/5

I preferred F Scott Fitzgerald over Hemingway.’ Now, she says, she’s proud of him and prefers his ‘whole super-macho vibe’ to the ‘feminine’ Fitzgerald. ‘I enjoy the stories that people tell about Ernest because he was such an interesting person and I think I resemble him in some way. He was so fascinated by people. And he just loved the sea and loved to be a ball-buster. I guess I get where this family thing of ours comes from. But people expect me to tell them stories that they’ve never heard before and I can’t tell them. My aunt, Margaux, on the other hand, I could talk about for days...’

Margaux was a face of the 1970s who appeared on covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Time. She also had a brief film career beginning with the sexploitation flick Lipstick in 1976. ‘She’s my style icon. She’s one of those people who spoke like a trucker. There was nothing feminine about her and yet she was the most feminine thing in a room, she could literally walk in and take people’s breath away. She’s the reason I wanted to start modelling. She was a little crazy with men but that’s OK.’

Margaux’s career foundered in the 1980s; she made B-movies, posed for Playboy and dabbled in psychic self-help before dying of a barbiturates overdose in Santa Monica in 1996. Dree was eight at the time and devastated. ‘There’s not many of us Hemingways left,’ she says. ‘My aunt Joan [aka Muffet Hemingway] lives in her own world now. She’s a little kooky, we love her. I don’t see my grandfather’s brother at all. I guess my mom is the last living Hemingway. Except for me and my sister.’ That’s Langley Fox, her younger sister by 21 months. She’s a designer and model and ‘the one person who understands me more than anyone’.

‘It’s a weird thing to be a “daughter of”,’ she reflects. ‘It does open doors but it’s harder to get yourself taken seriously. I’m completely aware that I’m following in everyone’s footsteps and the Hemingway name has got me into every door — but because of that, I’m so much harder on myself. I want to work for things.’ She feels she takes more after her dad — an old hippie who is apparently part responsible for the Hard Rock Café in Piccadilly. ‘He and a few friends opened it in the Sixties as a way to get laid. He used to get his hair permed with Cream [Eric Clapton’s band]. And I have these great pictures of him taking acid on the beach that his mother took.’

She divides her time between New York and her new home in Laurel Canyon, the old hippie enclave in the hills above Hollywood. ‘This is so embarrassing but I read this amazing article about Laurel Canyon in the Seventies in Vanity Fair a year ago and I was like, “I have to live there”. It was like Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills & Nash and it was so inspirational. I really wanted to have that influence around me. That time was way more inspiring than now.’ I’d have thought there was plenty to be getting on with right now for her. ‘It was a time of discovery... people were exploring boundaries. Kids today have more anxiety and depression because they have too much access to too much knowledge.’

COACH T-shirt, £155; jacket, £1,895 (020 7734 8472)
Nick Hudson

For all her family history, she seems happy and less plugged in to the nexus of anxiety than many of her generation. ‘I am not a hater of social media — I have 115,000 followers on Instagram, which is exciting! — but I use it to show who I really I am. I’m a goofball and a nerd and I’m vain and I can make fun of myself because of that. It bothers me that people get jobs because of how many followers they have. Your talent shouldn’t be based on that. Modelling used to be about enjoying beauty.’ As for film, her highest-profile credit was in Noah Baumbach’s comedy While We’re Young (2014) but there are indie leads coming up. ‘I’m still green in the acting world, which is funny to me: it’s kind of nice. I’m trying to make it in a world where nobody knows who I am.’ Is she happy? She looks around her. ‘How could I not be?’

My last image of her is in my rear-view mirror. She jumps into her red 1980s Mercedes-Benz convertible and speeds out through the Canyons, taking perilous bends under the endless American sun.

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