Rita Wilson: ‘My body turned on me – but it was also there to heal me’

We are a couple of minutes into a video call when Rita Wilson starts to well up. Just a few days ago, Wilson – Hollywood royalty, actor, producer, wife of Tom Hanks, and latterly, a singer-songwriter of some acclaim – turned 70. She enjoyed herself. “I’m a big believer in celebrating the birthday week, month, you know, bring it.” But it was a poignant occasion. Not because of reaching a milestone age – “All birthdays are significant,” she smiles – but because all of her birthdays have been that way since the death of her mother, Dorothy Wilson, in 2014. “My mum was my best friend,” she says. “I have been thinking so much of my mother, or anyone’s mother, on a birthday. I’m celebrating the person who gave birth.” It made her think of her grandmother, she says, and a story her mother once told her about a dream she had. “She was crying in a dream and saw her mother and said, ‘Mom, I don’t know what to do now that you’re gone. Who’s gonna watch the kids?’ And my grandmother said to her, ‘Don’t worry, I’m always watching them.’ There was something very beautiful about the continuation of that conversation that we are always having with our loved ones after they leave.” She wipes away the tears. “I didn’t expect that we were going to talk about that,” Wilson says of the dream. “But I’m glad that we did, because it ties in.” It ties in, she means, to the themes of her latest album, the emotionally raw, quietly moving and rather lovely Sound of a Woman – particularly its highlight, “Your Mother”, a song that reflects on the role of a parent, and by extension the identity of a woman beyond motherhood. From the title track onwards, Wilson’s sixth album is a semi-conceptual suite of country-flavoured songs that centre a woman’s life arc: from young love to loss and ageing, battling body standards and self-doubt to reach self-acceptance having found your own voice. “I wanted to explore different experiences that women have over the course of their lives. I mean, there probably could be a hundred volumes of Sound of a Woman. This is the tip of the iceberg.” Rita Wilson did not pursue music until she reached her 50s (Photo: DawBell) But above all, the album represents an account of becoming the woman – and artist – she always wanted to be. The album’s “Michelangelo” was inspired by a quote she had pinned on her bulletin board. “Someone asked Michelangelo, ‘How do you make these beautiful sculptures?’ And he said, ‘I see the angel in the marble, and I carve until I set him free.’ And to me, that was such a beautiful metaphor for what it’s like to become yourself as a woman. You have a vision for yourself. You know there’s something in there that you’re trying to get to. It’s a shaping of yourself.” For Wilson, that meant having the fortitude to pursue her passion for music in her fifties. Wilson – as warm and open and fun as she always seems – is instantly recognisable as a star actor in both film (Sleepless in Seattle, Jingle All the Way, It’s Complicated) and TV (Frasier, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Girls), as well as a producer of hugely successful franchises (Mamma Mia!, My Big Fat Greek Wedding) alongside her husband. A beloved Hollywood power couple, Wilson and Hanks share two sons, Chet and Truman, as well as Colin and Elizabeth from Hanks’s first marriage. But Wilson had always wanted to make music. “The motivator was always there.” As a young kid growing up in Hollywood, Wilson would love to sing at family gatherings; “Ode to Billie Joe” by Bobby Gentry, a southern gothic song about cruel indifference to a murky death, was her go-to favourite. “That is maybe one of the darkest songs for a kid,” she smiles. Her first gig as a fan was Led Zeppelin; thanks to her job at the ticket office at the outdoor venue at Universal Studios, Wilson saw all her early favourites in concert; Joni Mitchell, Carol King, Elton John. Wilson in 1993’s ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ But acting soon superseded everything. At 15 in 1972, Wilson made her screen debut as a cheerleader on an episode of The Brady Brunch, having been spotted by a producer after going along to an audition to support a friend. “At some point I thought, ‘Well, this is my job.’ I didn’t know that it was a real job. It was just something that I landed into.” But the much-delayed pivot to music was as much down to her circumstances as it was her own ambitions. “It was in some ways a result of being dissatisfied creatively with the roles that I had been offered,” Wilson says: by the end of the noughties, she was being typecast as the nurturing, good-mannered mother, wife, auntie, best friend. “It felt stagnant. It felt like repetition. It didn’t feel challenging.” Hollywood’s issue with creating meaningful roles and screen time for older women is longstanding and institutional. “Our business is ageist,” she says. “I wouldn’t say society so much – perhaps – but it’s still a very youth-oriented business.” Wilson says to counter it, she shot some independent films that are yet to see the light of day. “Because that’s not what people think of when they think of me,” she says. In the end, she says, “there was a period of time where I just said no to everything.” The exception was to Lena Dunham; Wilson jumped at the chance to join the cast of Girls to play the brilliantly overbearing, critical mother to Allison Williams’s spoilt Marnie. “She writes women as fully formed, eccentric, complicated, flawed people. And I’m so grateful to her because of that.” Wilson says she expects to reprise the role in next year’s much anticipated Girls reboot. “Lena says so,” she smiles. “I don’t think she’d be making that up.” In 2012, Wilson took her first steps into a music career, encouraged by the songwriter Kara DioGuardi (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera). “She asked me, ‘What do you want to do?’ No one had ever asked me that question.” The answer was to write songs, but Wilson told her she couldn’t play an instrument or read music. “And she said, ‘Do you have something you want to say?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’” After her first album of covers, 2012’s AM/FM, DioGuardi helped write Wilson’s 2016 self-titled album of original material, a personally vulnerable set of songs about grief, strength and grace in adversity. “There was a liberation, creatively, and a tentative process to speaking my voice. I felt that I could say things in songwriting that I wasn’t being asked to or given the opportunity to say in the acting roles that I had been given.” Wilson with husband Tom Hanks earlier this year (Photo: Amy Sussman/Getty Images for LACMA) Does she mean off-camera, too? As in opportunities would be further limited if she was deemed to be speaking out of turn? “Absolutely,” she says. “I’ve always been, and I continue to be, a very private person in a very public profession, and so I haven’t really had a comfort level of just saying what I want to say. A year ago, I would have been afraid to say something like ‘our business is ageist’. And I’m not alone in that. I have yet to see the template or the model for somebody who’s taking any kind of risk in this area, relative to people of a certain age.” Sound of a Woman has moments of levity: the uplifting “No Matter What” celebrates female friendship; “Marriage” is a tongue-in-cheek look at the evolution of a long-term relationship and what it takes to keep it on track. Wilson and Hanks have been married for 38 years now – so what does it take? “Well, I like to say it’s a shared bathroom.” Why? “That’s where everything happens! You get up in the morning, you’re talking about your day, you’re saying what’s going on, you’re brushing your teeth. ‘Oh, that looks good on you.’ Then you get home at night and you’re having the review of the day. We laugh so much during those periods, and I think that’s really, really important.” I love that answer, I say. “The smaller the bathroom, the better!” But elsewhere there is a serious tone. “Jury of One” tackles the needless guilt women feel; “Whose Body Is This?” is an ode to the female body and how it changes, and thrives, with age and after child birth and illness; Wilson underwent a bilateral mastectomy after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015. “For me, the song is acceptance and gratitude for what this body has been through, that your body was there to heal you, to get you through it, even though in some ways, it turned on you.” But perhaps the album’s most important song is “Spare Keys (Coming Home to Me)”, a track about Wilson confidently growing into her power late in life. When she played an early version to co-producer Dave Cobb, he asked if it was a break-up song. “I guess in a way, yes, it’s a break-up song, but breaking up with your old self and empowering a new person to emerge,” Wilson says. “You’re at a point where you’re saying, ‘I don’t have to accept certain things anymore.’ What if I allowed myself to really live in a way that felt aligned with the person that I am,” she says, “as opposed to the person other people want me to be?” ‘Sound of a Woman’ is out now. Rita Wilson performs in London on 13 and 14 November, and in Glasgow on 16 November (ritawilson.com/tour)