What was steel magnolias about

It was never like any of us thought we were doing jokes. We thought we were just talking like the people from that part of the country talk. That was a statement, not a joke. But when you put it in a theatrical situation, people respond to the honesty of it. As the years have gone by, there are a lot of lines that get quoted back to me. We were literally going into performance. It stopped the show. If there is one moment of joy to be gained out of this experience, you cannot deny them that. They came to New York to visit a week before we went into rehearsal, and I got up some courage.

Mama and Susan locked horns. But you never know how people are going to react having that kind of personal information up there onstage. I could visibly see his chest rise up. From that point on, the cathartic experience of Steel Magnolias started in our family.

It helped us grieve. We were basically grieving with the world. But I was mostly feeling good, proud. It was a memorial to my daughter. It only ran for four weeks at the WPA, and we all wanted to figure out how to keep it going.

We moved the play to the Lucille Lortel. Shortly after the play moved, Hollywood came calling with offers for a movie, and every big-name actress turned up at the theater to see if there might be a screen role for her. It became a nightly thing to see who was the huge star in the audience. It made the nightly news. When the producer Ray Stark made an offer to buy the rights, Harling was thrilled.

Ross was hired as director. I was seeing if I could get away with saying what I negatively felt and still be funny. But when Olympia came down, all the women in town thought she had the most accurate accent. She was one of the great goddesses of cinema [Hannah had already starred in Splash and Roxanne ].

She will jump at the chance to wear a bad wig and glasses. All that was left was Shelby. She smiled that smile. She was the essence of the great Southern gal: spicy, witty, smart, with a layer of compassion underneath. During the casting, Stark also made the decision that the movie would be filmed on location, an extraordinary move at the time.

It helped that Natchitoches is gorgeous. It has a sense of history you could never capture in Pasadena. But first a lot of stuff had to happen.

Or at least a good laugh-until-you-cry. Sometimes, you just want to watch a flick that will cue all the waterworks, and this one practically comes with a tears guarantee.

If you're one of those people who claims "not to be a crier," well, you just haven't seen Steel Magnolias yet. When the story's main setting is a beauty parlor unlike the movie, the entire play was set entirely in Truvy's salon , it's no surprise that the women's hair is almost as much a character in the movie as the women themselves. A story like this one couldn't happen anywhere but a small Southern town. Whether you've been to Natchitoches or you just grew up in a place that's just like it, with its own host of characters and traditions, you know there's nothing quite like a small Southern town: Nobody knows a stranger, and everybody knows your secrets.

Because nothing is more memorable than that cake. You know the one: The armadillo cake that graces the reception at Shelby's wedding and looks like instant roadkill the second it's cut to reveal a red velvet interior.

So it made sense to me that in Steel Magnolias , a film revolving around six small-town Louisiana women who gather regularly at a local beauty salon to gossip about the latest goings-on, there might be more happening beneath the surface.

The story begins on the wedding day of spirited young Shelby, played exquisitely by a pre-Pretty Woman Julia Roberts. With a foreshadowing of the tragedy to come, Shelby almost faints when she sees herself in the salon mirror. She falls into a hypoglycaemic state and can only be brought around by her mother forcing her to drink a glass of juice. She wants Shelby to have everything she dreams of and more, but knows she could die in childbirth because of her illness and turns to the ladies in the salon for advice.

Time passes and Shelby successfully delivers a baby boy, Jackson Jr, but begins showing signs of kidney failure and starts dialysis shortly after his first birthday. She does so, and Shelby seemingly resumes a normal life. But upon her return home from the hospital, while the others are busy planning a wedding shower for Annelle the beautician, she is found unconscious on the porch of her house, and dies later that evening.

In an otherwise chaotic universe, their primping and styling remains the constant to which they can always turn. Their lives are dominated by challenges in their marriages, their jobs, and in their health. The beauty salon is a place of frivolity to where they can briefly escape and put the world to rights before returning home at the end of the day with a fresh perspective and a bouncier perm.