Queen of hearts
"Meg Ryan" is a stage name, and with good reason: 60 years ago, Margaret Mary Emily Anne Hyra was born. Good luck learning her full name. Her parents, a former actress turned English teacher and a math teacher encouraged her to do journalism, which at that time still had outlets. To get an extra salary, Ryan dedicated himself to acting in some commercials or soap operas like 'As the world turns' (which lasted, by the way, 54 years on the air).
In 1981, at the age of twenty, the legendary George Cukor ('My fair lady') was directing what would be his last film, 'Rich and Famous', and he needed an actress to play an 18-year-old girl: Ryan, who At that time, she had only appeared in one advertisement, she went to the casting with 117 other actresses and got the role. She would only need two more movies to rise to international fame alongside Tom Cruise in 'Top Gun'. And she took the breath away of many.
In 1989, Meg Ryan's life (and, incidentally, the history of romantic comedy) would change forever thanks to 'When Harry Met Sally', in which she would come up with a small idea for a scene: Why? instead of that scene about faking orgasms, her character didn't fake an orgasm in the middle of a restaurant? That's right: one of the most famous scenes in movie history came from the mind of Ryan herself. Almost nothing.
A race to remember
Meg Ryan's career is one of the most unfairly forgotten by modern cinema: 'Something to Remember', 'Spell of a Kiss', 'Joe Against the Volcano', 'When a man loves a Woman', 'Addicted to Love', 'You Have an E-mail'... The '90s of the actress are to frame. There is no bad choice, there is no badly chosen role: she was the queen of romantic comedies and one of Tom Hanks's inseparable companions on the big screen. And suddenly, doubts came.
There have been plenty of jokes about turning forty in Hollywood for women, but in the early 2000s, it was a real debacle: the roles stopped coming out, the production companies stopped calling, and basically your career went limp. Even more so if you dedicated yourself to romantic comedies: according to the archaic mind of the producers of the time (and which, luckily, has been savagely refuted by real life), once you pass the age of 39, nobody can see you attractive.
In addition to this decline in the production companies, he had an emotional decline: his marriage to Dennis Quaid, one of the most solid in the industry, blew up, and Ryan ended up getting involved with Russell Crowe during the filming of 'Proof of Life', where the story of their love affair became much more important and bigger than the movie itself, which ended up being a critical and box office flop. With her affair, Meg Ryan had become "the bad guy" in the relationship, and it was the first time that the public saw her as something more than an angelic being. It was just the first of two decisions that would completely destroy her career.
