Parenting & Family Quote by Mariel Hemingway

A movie role almost never gets described as "very real" by the person who benefited from the illusion. Hemingway does it anyway, and the honesty lands because it refuses the usual actorly polish. She frames Lipstick not as a breakout moment but as a survival exercise: enjoyment and fear braided together, with "scared me" arriving like a blunt correction to any nostalgic mythmaking.

The intent is protective as much as reflective. By stressing "I was very nervous" and "I couldn't wait for it to be over", she quietly reclaims authority over an experience the industry might prefer to package as daring or glamorous. The repetition of simple sentences does the work of a witness statement; it sounds less like publicity and more like someone still measuring what that set took from her. "It was very real" carries the sharpest subtext: the emotional stakes weren't simulated. Whatever the camera captured, she felt it as life, not craft.

Context matters here because Lipstick (1976) is entangled with controversy and exploitation narratives, and Hemingway was, as she underlines, "just a kid". That last clause is the moral fulcrum. It reframes risk as asymmetry: adults running a production, a teenager absorbing consequences. She isn't asking for pity; she's puncturing the cultural habit of treating young actresses' discomfort as an acceptable cost for "edgy" art. The quote works because it demotes the performance and elevates the human being who had to live through it.