Illeana Hesselberg (born July 25, 1961), known professionally as Illeana Douglas, is an American actress and filmmaker. She appeared in three episodes of Six Feet Under, for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination as Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series and won the Best Guest Actress in a Drama Series award from OFTA, the Online Film & Television Association, and in the TV series Action opposite Jay Mohr, for which she won a Satellite Award for Best Actress – Television Series Musical or Comedy. As of 2015, she can be seen on Turner Classic Movies where she hosts specials focused on unheralded women directors from film history.
Early life
Douglas was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, the daughter of Joan Douglas (née Georgescu), a schoolteacher, and Gregory Hesselberg, a painter. Douglas's father was the son of Hollywood actor Melvyn Douglas and his wife, the artist Rosalind Hightower. Douglas had two older brothers, the late Stefan Gregor Hesselberg, a technician in the histology laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also trained racehorses in Verona, Italy, and Erik Hesselberg, a journalist.
Douglas grew up in Connecticut, in the Old Saybrook area, and has said that she was also raised in many other cities, in Massachusetts where her father lived, Connecticut where her mother lived, and New York, where her extended family lived. During her childhood she spent time going back and forth between relatives during the summer. Douglas said that her parents were heavily influenced by the 1970s hippie culture—her father especially by the movie Easy Rider. They had a loose parenting style and did not pressure her to go to college. Comedy albums were popular in her family. They would put on dramatic interpretations and performances.
Douglas's mother's side is Roman Catholic—Italian and Romanian from Astoria, Queens. Her maternal grandmother worked in the restaurant at Gertz department store in Astoria; her maternal grandfather was a welder. Douglas said that her maternal grandmother, a former Rockette, had wanted to be an actor. She instilled in Douglas a love for the movies, which they attended together frequently when she was a child.
As a child she would visit her paternal grandfather, the actor Melvyn Douglas, in his apartment in Manhattan on the Upper West Side as well as at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles. Douglas said that during her summers with her grandfather, he introduced her to his interests, which included theater, elocution, reading, art, and history.
Douglas has said that her grandfather's performance in Being There was influential on her own career. In the 1940s, Douglas' grandfather and Peter Sellers both served in the military during WWII and met in Burma. In the 1960s, the two men reconnected in London and talked about their time together in the war. During high school, Douglas visited the set while they were shooting on location in Asheville, North Carolina and met Sellers, whose work she admired greatly. It was the first time she was on a film set. She graduated from Haddam-Killingworth High School in 1979.
Douglas notes the contrast between her working-class Italian roots and the glamorous Hollywood world of her paternal side of the family. Famous people including Myrna Loy, Gore Vidal, Gloria Steinem, politicians, writers, and others were often present, in a salon-like environment. Douglas has said it took her a long time to reconcile the different lifestyles she was exposed to in her youth. She identifies more with the Italian side of her family, and has said that she developed more of their "rhythms and ways" due to the amount of time she spent with them in Queens.
