Chloë Sevigny's laugh is deep and honking, like a seal drunk on punch. Once I've heard it, I'm slightly preoccupied with the thought of hearing it again. First laugh: at the image of the "right man" eventually falling into her lap, "Like: 'Whoops!'" Second laugh: the thought of asking sex advice from her mother, Janine. Third: remembering Jay McInerney following her round Manhattan like a smell, researching the seven-page New Yorker profile of Sevigny, then 19, where he wrote that she was "the coolest girl in the world", the phrase that was, in turn, to follow her round for the rest of her life.
Now 35, she was 20 when she first acted on screen, playing a 14-year-old with Aids in Larry Clark's controversial 1995 film Kids – think Skins crossed with Rita, Sue and Bob Too!, but watched through a dirty car window. She was lovely in it, luminous and wide-eyed, already a face on the New York "scene", a model who'd appeared in videos for Sonic Youth and the Lemonheads since moving at 18 from the suburbs of Connecticut, a place called Darien. "Aryan Darien," Sevigny likes to call it, where everyone was white, where it was frowned upon to sell a house to Jews, and where nothing ever happened. When she goes home to see her mother (her father died of cancer in 1996), she says it makes her melancholy. "There are so many memories there for me," she explains, her voice, like her laugh, deep and odd. "So many memories. I know every rock, every tree. I always feel… despondent when I arrive, like the place has an aura of sadness."
Read more at www.guardian.co.uk
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