Daryl Hannah’s offbeat life

last updated 8 January 2015

Daryl Hannah can never be accused of being conventional, says Gaby Wood in the London Observer. The 48-year-old actress grows her own food, keeps bees, wears recycled necklaces made of melted shotgun casings, and drives a car that runs on grease left over from fast-food restaurants. Hannah says she’s been a free spirit ever since growing up in Chicago. “I always felt like nothing made sense, you know? Like I was kind of an alien.” When she was a young girl, her parents sent her to a psychiatrist to see if she was crazy. “They gave me this Rorschach test. One was this picture of a guy sitting over a creek. He was holding a fishing pole, and on the end of the fishing line was a boot. They said, ‘What is he feeling?’ And you’re supposed to give an answer like, ‘He’s disappointed.’ I said he was thrilled. To me, he lost his boot the week before and now he’d found it! But they didn’t ask me why, they just thought, That’s the wrong answer. They wanted to institutionalize me.” Now Hannah divides her time between Colorado and Malibu, Calif., where her one-room cabin is so small, she built a couple of yurts to house friends who have fallen on hard times. “I’m at the edge of civilization, and that’s just where I feel comfortable.”