Artwork Title: Family Portrait

Family Portrait

Claudio Edinger

early 1980s. Gaby Hoffmann, being held by her mother, Viva; her half-sister, Alexandra; and her father, the actor Anthony Herrera (on the TV). According to family legend, there was a snowstorm on the night in 1982 when Gabrielle Mary Antonia Hoffmann — Gaby — was taken home from the hospital to her mother’s apartment at the Chelsea Hotel. Of course Hoffmann did not yet know she had been born into downtown New York artistic royalty. Her mother, Viva (née Janet Sue Hoffmann), is an actress who appeared in Andy Warhol’s movies and who lived at the Chelsea with Gaby’s 11-year-old half-sister, Alexandra, her daughter with her ex-husband, Michel Auder, the French video artist who later married the photographer Cindy Sherman. Later, Hoffmann came to call Auder her dad and Sherman her stepmother. Hoffmann’s actual father was the actor Anthony Herrera, best known for playing the “As the World Turns” villainus majoris, the kind of bad guy who died over and over, only to re-emerge a year or so later. Her family once sat for a portrait taken by the photographer Claudio Edinger. In it, a naked, chubby infant Gaby is standing on the lap of her unsmiling, beautiful mother. Alexandra stands behind a TV. On the TV screen is Hoffmann’s father, Herrera, acting in his “As the World Turns” role. He was never really a part of Hoffmann’s life; she doesn’t remember meeting him until she was 5. She does remember that she found him intimidating and never liked spending time with him. Her mother co-wrote a book, as yet unpublished, called “Gaby at the Chelsea,” a riff on “Eloise” at the Plaza. Instead of making rich-girl mischief like Eloise, the Gaby in the storybook would undertake uniquely downtown adventures, like finding a vial of crack in the stairwell. In Hoffmann’s real life, she grew up in a bohemian demimonde filled with writers and photographers and experimental artists. Viva and her daughters led a scrappy existence in the Chelsea; Gaby remembers how, on her way to school every morning, the hotel manager would pull her into his office and give her the same speech: “ ‘I don’t want to have to kick you out, but tell your mother she needs to come up with the rent.’ ” Of her childhood, Hoffmann says now: “We lived in a classless society. We’d spend a summer at Gore Vidal’s house in Italy, but we were on and off welfare” when she was a baby. That ended for good, though, when Hoffmann became an actress at age 5 and, a year later, a 6-year-old movie star. A family friend who worked in advertising had suggested that Gaby try to get some commercial work, and she was immediately successful. She later moved on to roles in films like “Field of Dreams,” “Uncle Buck” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” becoming one of the most recognizable child stars of the time. A precocious actress (and adorable talk-show guest), Hoffmann possessed the kind of arresting vivaciousness and cheerful, un-self-conscious moxie that acting coaches can’t teach. With “Now and Then” (1995), she sealed herself in the coming-of-age movie canon; to this day weepy women approach her to tell her how much that movie meant to them.... (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/magazine/gaby-hoffmann-the-eloise-of-the-chelsea-hotel.html)
Uploaded on Aug 5, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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