“The legs were out the whole time!” June Squibb talks about starring in Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut – and the original Broadway hit Gypsy | film

IIt’s certainly comforting for anyone still waiting for her big break to know that June Squibb was in her mid-80s before she hit her big time. Her role as a foul-mouthed mother in 2013’s Nebraska earned her an Oscar nomination, and she landed her first leading role in the action comedy Thelma last year. Now she stars again in the new film Eleanor the Great and She is currently in rehearsals for a Broadway show. Is Squibb, who has just turned 96, tired of talking about her late success? “I think people are interested, so no, it’s not a bad thing,” she says. “But it’s funny, because when I first came to New York — in the 1950s — I did a musical called The Boy Friend, and it was a huge hit.” But it was a play, she admits. “In the movie it’s completely different.”

In Eleanor the Great, Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Squibb plays Eleanor Morgenstein, a 94-year-old woman who moves from Florida to New York to be near her daughter, mourning the loss of her best friend Bessie. Encouraged to make new friends, Eleanor goes to the local Jewish community center to join a choir, but the woman accompanying Stephen Sondheim is enough to make anyone run for the door. “Oh my God,” Eleanor murmurs as she steps back, before being picked up by a group of Holocaust survivors, who are meeting at the same time, and who mistakenly assume she is one of them. Alone and sad, American-born Eleanor finds herself passing off Bessie’s survival story as her own.

“I loved it from the beginning,” she says, speaking via Zoom from the rented New York apartment where she is staying for theater rehearsals. “All the quirks. It’s full of everything. I mean it’s not very nice sometimes, and I like that because it gives you something.” Eleanor’s outrageous lie spirals dangerously out of control when Nina – the young journalism student she befriends and played by British actress Erin Keleman – wants to get her story to a wider audience.

“It was a great shoot,” says Squibb. Johansson was “amazing. She’s so honest and so open.” Squibb and Keleman became real friends, staying in the same apartment building during production. Squibb would invite Kelleyman to dinner at her house, or to dinner parties Squibb gave at Joe Allen’s Brasserie, founder of the Theater District. “Erin met a lot of my friends from New York, people I’ve known for years.” Does Squib have a lot of younger friends too? “I do,” she says. “Well, at my age, everyone’s pretty much younger.”

Squibb is great company, funny and wise, the kind of person you can ask anything about: sex, politics and religion are not off limits. “Everyone thinks old people aren’t sexual, but I’m thinking about sex,” Eleanor tells Irene. What about Squib? “I think so, for sure,” she says with a smile. “If I see a handsome young man, I know he’s a handsome young man. I don’t think I would think about it maybe the way I did when I was younger, but we still think about it.”

How does she feel about the political situation in the United States and other parts of the world? “It worries me — and I’ve been through a lot. I’ve seen a lot. I think the world is in a really scary place. I’m just terrified. Now people are brazenly showing swastikas everywhere. I mean, it’s scary.”

Johansson selected real-life Holocaust survivors for the support group, including Sammy Stegman, a prominent speaker and educator. Rita Zohar, who plays Bessie, was born in a concentration camp in what is now Ukraine. Stegman in particular “was very dear. He would welcome me, rather than say, ‘I’m here and you’re coming,'” Squibb says. [to my film].’ Which I loved. It was a great experience, and not at all what I thought it would be. There is no doom and gloom. “We were there, we worked together and we did our job.”

Squibb was a teenager when World War II ended. She remembers seeing pictures in news magazines of concentration camps being liberated. They will stay with her all her life. “It was terrifying.”

Some critics feel that faking the Holocaust experience is a horrific and morally irredeemable form of lying. Squib is more understanding. “I think Eleanor’s need was to be close to Bessie and… [the support group is] Where you need to do it. I can understand that. “It brings it closer.” And the idea seems to have its critics in the film industry, too — Johansson said this week that one of the project’s financial backers pulled out when she refused to drop Holocaust elements.

Grief is a big theme in the film, not just Eleanor’s grief, but also Irene’s, who recently lost her mother. At 96, Squibb has had a lot to learn about how to deal with grief, not only the loss of friends and colleagues, but also her husband of 40 years. “Well, I’m looking forward to the future great,” she says. “I always think: What will happen tomorrow? I’m not saying it’s easy. I don’t mean it at all, but I guess that’s what I do. When my husband died, I was more concerned with protecting my son, who was in his 20s. He was not a child, but it affected him greatly. So, instead of struggling with grief, I was trying to help him get through it.

Squibb grew up in Vandalia, a small town in Illinois, where her father ran a clothing store, before joining the Navy during the war and later founding a successful insurance company. Her mother played the piano in a movie theater showing silent films, then stayed home to care for Squibb, an only child. She says she felt, “Ever since I had any thoughts, I was an actress. It never occurred to me that I was anything else. I have no idea where that came from.” She took no drama or dance classes, and then joined the Cleveland Play House. Her parents weren’t that happy. “My father was rather proud of me, but my mother always hated it. I think she would have liked it if I had stayed in Vandalia all my life and done the usual things, gotten married, had kids. That’s what she wanted.”

Squibb married in her early 20s and converted to Judaism — something she says was important to her, not because her new Jewish husband or his family expected it to be. It was a “wonderful experience.” The marriage lasted only seven years, but Squibb’s faith remained even though her second husband, Charles Kakatsakis, an acting teacher, was not Jewish. “I am very happy and proud that I can say that I am Jewish.”

By her late twenties, she moved to New York and worked in theater, including the 1959 Broadway play Gypsy, in which she played the stripper Elektra. “I saw it early on, and it knocked me out. I loved Ethel Merman in it. She was a force of nature. I loved the show, I loved being in it — wow! That number, you should get a gimmick, every night he would blow the house away.”

She earned extra money modeling for commercial shows. “Like car shows – I’ll be the hostess in shorts, a low-cut top and fishnet hose.” She also took pictures of real-life confessions in magazines, she says with a laugh. This looks quite racy. “Well, it was. It was funny. I remember one day me and this guy spent the whole day in bed together and we started laughing. We didn’t even know each other.”

For a young working woman in the 1950s and 1960s, sexual harassment was more or less inevitable. “But I was also fairly naive, and I guess I didn’t see a lot of that. But of course, it was there. I was a dancer too, so it wasn’t always no clothes on — just my legs out all the time!” When the #MeToo movement started, she remembers talking to a friend who was a dancer at the same time. I said: How did we deal with it? “We agreed that we – and the other women we know – knew where the line was, and she didn’t cross it.”

Squibb was in her early 60s when she got her first film role in Woody Allen’s Alice, and she soon began taking small roles in big films — working with Martin Scorsese in The Age of Innocence, with Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, and with Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt. Did she feel nervous going to film sets with these names? “No, it was always just work,” she says. “I had the script. I learned it and I was ready to go.” “It helps that I always feel like my role is the lead, no matter what it is. I have this ego that makes me feel like everything I do is the important thing in this movie,” she laughs.

Now Squibb is in the lead roles in the movie, and may he continue for a long time. She seems to have the flexibility of a theater company and a work ethic ingrained from her early training. During the filming of Eleanor the Great, Squibb fell ill with bronchitis, but, in Johansson’s words, he “recovered.” “I’ve always had stamina and energy, and I don’t think I’ve lost that, not completely anyway,” she says. “When I was working out, I always managed to find the stamina to keep going, whether it was in the evening or something else.” She adds that she always felt “that I could do anything.”