Andie MacDowell is trying to adjust her camera for a Zoom call.
“Doggone it,” she says in her southern accent with a playful sigh as she studies the screen through her glasses. The actress and former model, 66, is home in South Carolina for the holidays, having wrapped season 3 of Hallmark’s hit drama The Way Home.
“I get so excited when I’m walking onto set,” she tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “It’s nice at my age and after all this time to have that feeling of joy. I’m very conscious of it, so I try to share it and tell everybody how lucky we are.”
Despite four decades as an actress, MacDowell is the first to insist she got lucky. “It’s a miracle I made it,” she says. “I’m not going to take anything from me, but I had to overcome some really huge hurdles.”
Raised in South Carolina, MacDowell was already a successful model (she’s L’Oréal’s longest-reigning spokesperson) when she won a breakthrough role as Jane in 1984’s Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, but the critics were harsh. “I could have easily given up,” she says. “This business is really cruel. The things that they wrote about me were just terrible.”
Yet, the naysayers only bolstered MacDowell’s determination to “prove to the casting directors that I was not trash, that I was valuable,” she says. Her career trajectory changed when she won the role of a sexually passive housewife in 1989’s Sex, Lies and Videotape, co-starring James Spader, and the film spawned more unforgettable leading roles in ’90s classics like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Groundhog Day.
In the years since, she’s balanced her career with motherhood, having raised three children she shares with ex-husband Paul Qualley, whom she divorced in 1999. While her son Justin, 38, opted for a life out of the spotlight, daughters Rainey Qualley, 35, and Margaret Qualley, 30, followed in their mom’s footsteps, and Andie costarred with Margaret in 2021’s Maid.
On her own, MacDowell has become an advocate for aging in Hollywood by leaning into her years of wisdom and embracing her silver hair, which she stopped coloring during COVID. Still, she has moments of doubt when she thinks of her chosen career path.
“I still struggle,” she explains. “Sometimes I’m really hard on myself. I’m my absolute worst critic. But sometimes it feels like I’m flying.”
The Way Home is now streaming on Hallmark+ and Peacock.
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