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T W E L V E R E H A B rr IN EVERY FILMMAKER'S LIFE, A 1941 INVARIABLY COMES ALONG. I CAN SEE 1941 MORE AS A CLEANSING EXPERIENCE, THE ONE POSSIBLE WAY I CAN MAKE YOU FORGET ALL THE GOOD THINGS I'VE DONE IN MOTION PICTURES. — S T E V E N S P I E L B E R G , S E P T E M B E R1 M E T a real heartbreaker last night," Spielberg told Julia Phillips while they were working on Close Encounters. The "heartbreaker" was Amy Irving. The twenty-two-year-old actress, whose curly-brown-haired, sloe-eyed, high-cheekboned beauty masked an intense and fiercely ambitious nature, had recently returned to California from dramatic studies in London when she met Spielberg in 1976. The daughter of TVproducer-director Jules Irving, former artistic director of New York's Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, and actress Priscilla Pointer, Amy was of Russian-Jewish ancestry on her father's side and Welsh-Cherokee on her mother's, but she was raised as a Christian Scientist. She was the niece of Universal TV executive producer Richard Irving, who had worked with Spielberg on The Name of the Game. Amy grew up on the stage in San Francisco and New York and felt somewhat alienated when she followed her parents to Hollywood. "When we were in San Francisco, LosAngeles was a dirty word to us," she admitted. "I never in a million years thought I'd ever be in television or films. I always thought I was going to be a struggling stage actress." But with her three-year stint completed at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Amy found herself unexpectedly in demand in HollyJJ 1979 I 2 9 4 S T E V E N S P I E L B E R G wood. After playinga few TVroles, she tried out for the part of Princess Leia in George Lucas's Star Wars. Although she was passed over for the more hard-edged Carrie Fisher, Amy caught the attention of director Brian De Palma, who was conducting the audition jointly with Lucas in order to find actresses for his next movie. De Palma offered Amy her first movie role, as the sweet-natured high school girl Sue Snell in Carrie. Since he "had a feeling Amy and Steven would like each other," De Palma also sent her to audition for the role of Richard Dreyfuss's wife in Close Encounters. "I was much too young [forthe role], and Steven said so right away,"Amy recalled three years later. "We just sat and talked for a while. It was a month before I saw him again. That encouraged me, however. If he'd been one of those directors who immediately asked an actress out for a date I'd be very worried today; in fact, I'd probably insist on sitting in on all his auditions." Their second meeting came at a small dinner party arranged by De Palma during the shooting of Carrie. Steven reminded Amy of her father, who was also a "wonderful, boyish man, a real hard worker—gifted with a silly sense of humor." She soon moved out of her Laurel Canyon house and into Steven 's "bachelor funky" digs nearby. Later described by director RobertMarkowitz as having "an icy exterior but a high degree of sexuality teeming beneath the surface," Amy would spend the next four years living with Spielberg in a passionate but often turbulent relationship. A few months after they began living together, they moved into a lavish new home Steven bought in Coldwater Canyon, close to the Beverly Hills Hotel. "The house that Jaws built," as they called it, marked a considerable step up the social ladder for Spielberg. "Steven had this huge, huge house— eight or nine thousand square feet, it must have been," screenwriter Bob Gale recalls. "He was proud and embarrassed at the same time to have a five- or six-bedroom house. What was he going to do with all this? He said, 'You know, I thought about it. I could either take my money and have it invested and every month I could look at numbers in a book or on a sheet, or I could live in it. So I decided I should live in it.' " Steven and Amy shared the house with a cook and a cocker spaniel, Elmer; two parrots, named Schmuck...

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