Summer Phoenix - actress, nascent style icon, hip kid - launched her first and only mission to change the world, to make it a more loving, more free-wheeling, more vegan place, when she was almost three years old. She did this in association with her four older brothers and sisters, River and Liberty, Rain and Joaquin (then 'Leaf'), through the medium of the Phoenix Family, the band they formed and toured round the upmarket affluence of Beverly Hills, in the mid-Eighties. In its original incarnation, the Phoenix Family was a creative and ideological power base, the Osmonds with Utopian dreams and very specific dietary requirements. It was the intensely tight-knit family unit that Summer's one remaining elder brother, Academy Award nominee Joaquin, has fondly referred to on more than one occasion as 'Team Phoenix'.
'It's true,' Summer says, and only her dry, wry delivery, her low-pitched, sardonic voice stops her from sounding desperately earnest. 'That's how it all started. We went to LA as a family, with a sort of vision that we were going to "make it", whatever that meant.' Now, Summer Phoenix is 26 years old, an established feature on the edgy, indie flick scene, a pianist, a purveyor of vintage fashions,fiancee of Casey Affleck (the cooler brother of Ben), whose child she's expecting in May, and most famously of all, younger sister of Joaquin and the man who the Hollywood establishment routinely refers to as the 'tragic' and/or 'late' River Phoenix . Along with Joaquin, Rain and Liberty, she has since abandoned all hopes of orchestrating a social revolution. 'Nah, it's not about that now,' she says. 'Now, I just want to act.'
When we first meet, in early spring 2003, Summer is in London to apply the finishing touches to her latest project, a low-budget Brit flick called Suzie Gold. She isn't yet pregnant. She is, however, sweet, good-humoured, accommodating, sleepy. She poses for pictures, spread-eagled and feline, on the tiled hallway floor of a vast, empty mansion.'Whoa, this house!' she keeps saying, delightedly, of the decayed and decadent five-storey almost-palace on the fringes of Regent's Park.
Summer Phoenix is gorgeous, in a very wild, untamed and un-Hollywood fashion: high drama eyebrows and translucent tanned skin, and dark, shadow-smudged eyes. Her looks also hint at an indeterminate ethnicity, which makes her thoroughly well suited to her latest on-screen incarnation. Phoenix plays Suzie Gold's eponymous lead, a north London-dwelling Jewish girl in her early twenties, who is struggling to reconcile her heritage with her modern-girl aspirations, to find her own identity without destroying the links with her sometimes claustrophobic but loving family, and other cliches. When Phoenix talks about the film, she makes vague statements, like: 'The film? It's about, for me, it's about a girl who's learning how to respect where she comes from without letting it be who she is. And I think it's a pretty normal sort of coming of age story, almost. Am I proud of it? I don't know... ah... sure. I worked really hard on it... but it was a labour of love for the people who worked on it, and I'm incredibly proud of them. But I haven't actually seen the whole thing yet.'
As this might suggest, Suzie Gold is not a great film. Summer, however, is defiantly good in it. Because she is good - her talent is low-key, subtle, shifting. She's that most hackneyed of good-actor cliches: 'versatile', to the point, often, that she's unrecognisable from one film to the next. She acted as a teenager, but was never a Teen Actress: never fodder for the slasher movie, or the gross-out movie, or the titillating post-Porkies spring break movie. She was too discerning for all that.
In the right hands, Summer Phoenix's life story could be marketed as a crash course in how to be extraordinary, eccentric and cool, without even trying. Her parents, John and Arlyne, were progressive and nomadic and vegan; her childhood was a blissful, stimulating romp through the US, and Central and South America: 'We had no money. All we had was each other. It's all you need.'
When Summer wasn't being home-schooled, she was educated in establishments that she remembers fondly: 'It was totally chill. There were only 23 kids for four different grades, and we had different animals - peacocks, lambs, dogs. We didn't start till 10am, and we had a morning meeting where we'd "share stuff". I loved it.'
Summer was discovered, as a toddler, along with River, Joaquin, Liberty and Rain. An agent stumbled upon the Phoenix family as they busked for their tofu-based supper on the streets of LA. 'It was a blast,' she remembers. 'My dad and my brother wrote the songs, they were all original. We could do little choreographed dances in banana yellow outfits.' The agent put them in touch with a director, who made a documentary about the family, which must, I suggest, have played out like a hippy-fied, liberal version of The Waltons.
'Of the what?'
The Waltons.
'Were they on TV? We didn't have a TV.'
Of course you didn't.
The documentary led to other opportunities, and by the age of three, Summer was appearing in adverts and sitcoms she'd never see, on account of the Phoenix family no-TV policy, but that was pretty much her only foray into mainstream acting. Once she hit her teens, she began specialising in the kinds of roles that are officially referred to as 'gritty and complex' in offbeat indie flicks. She played a neo-fascist in The Believer, a heroin addict in MTV's Wasted and an artist/waitress in a diner in Dinner Rush. In 2001, she took to the London stage, co-starring alongside Matt Damon and (conveniently enough) Casey Affleck, in Kenneth Lonergan's acclaimed This Is Our Youth. 'I loved it,' she says. 'The instant gratification of theatre!' But after her three-month stint at the Garrick, she returned to films, pausing only to open Some Odd Rubies, a shop which peddles artfully customised vintage finds to the terminally fashionable, in downtown Manhattan. In her spare time, she flies out to far-flung destinations to play the piano, in her sister Rain's band.
Predictably, Summer Phoenix's multifaceted career is not the result of planning and scheming and long-term, hard-bitten ambition. That kind of thing would surely be frowned upon by Team Phoenix. It is instead the result of haphazard opportunities and hard work and a weird kind of self-belief that never begins to feel like arrogance. She's spoken often and fiercely in the past about how little her family name has helped her establish herself in the industry, how she's been largely hindered by it. And while this is a touch naive, it's nothing she's traded on as rampantly as she could have done. And so, Summer refers to herself, cheerfully, as a C-list actress. 'That's exactly what I am! There's the big lines and the little lines...'
And to get the big lines, you have to be a bit more grasping?
'I think you must. Either that, or it's like the turtle that wins the race. And that's what I'd like to see myself as.' Ambition, therefore, doesn't really come into it. 'It's not precisely that I'm not ambitious,' she continues. 'I love what I do, and I love doing it, and I love getting better at it. I just am not willing to risk... much... to go on to the next level. I don't want to risk my personal sanity or happiness, or my family, or the love of my life. That's a mistake. And I think a lot of people make that mistake, they're always kind of, like, seeking out the next thing that's gonna happen.' She says, however, that there's very little she wouldn't do for a role if she really wanted it. 'I wouldn't eat meat, I wouldn't have sex. And that's probably about it.' But she is vehement that she doesn't want to be hugely famous.
'No. Never. I mean, what need would that fulfil? Ever? In anybody?'
It's difficult to know whether Summer Phoenix is referring obliquely to her brother River - to his giddying ascent to premier league fame and his subsequent, very public death - when she makes statements like this. River, the ethereally beautiful, intensely talented, highest profile of the Phoenixes, who died 11 years ago of a drugs overdose on the pavement outside Johnny Depp's LA nightclub, the Viper Room, seems to be the subtext of a lot of the things Summer says. Yet she'll never talk about him directly. She skirts around the issue. She refers, for example, to her decision to take a break from acting shortly after his death: 'Movies and I just equally avoided each other at certain times in my life, you know?' And she has said, in the past, of her decision to play a heroin addict in Wasted: 'My mother would have disowned me had [my character] died. It's all too close to reality.' But she tenses palpably whenever our conversation veers too close to what her publicist calls 'the whole River thing'.
Perhaps as a diversionary tactic, perhaps because she is naturally very open, Summer is remarkably candid about other aspects of her life - most notably, her relationship with Casey Affleck. They first met through Joaquin, who had become close friends with Casey on the set of To Die For, though the precise circumstances of their introduction are open to debate. 'I don't recall that much, actually,' says Summer, 'but he's got the story that I ran into him on the street when I was with my brother. And my brother was like,' (she adopts a Neanderthal teen male voice) '"Uh, yeah, this is my sister..." and I was awestruck. And then, for, I swear it was eight years, we hung around in the same circles, sometimes, but he was at school, and he was pretty mysterious: "Yeah, I'm in school all the time, I don't have time to come out, I don't smoke, I don't drink, I'm not partying". And he would just make fun of me all the time, like a big brother would.'
But eventually, after eight years of veiled flirting, they worked it out.
'My brother was staying at Casey's apartment in New York when Casey was out of town, and I joined him for a few days. Casey called and asked to speak to me. We talked for a time and I said: "You have a beautiful apartment". He said: "The only thing missing is you. Be there for me when I get back." So I stayed.'
The next time Summer Phoenix and I speak, she's in Florida, visiting her parents, avoiding the brutal cold snap enveloping New York, and she is, at this point, 'so chubby and fat and [four months] pregnant, but so maternal. It's amazing how the maternal instinct overwhelms you.' She's also engaged. Affleck proposed at the beginning of this year.
'I've never had a diamond before, and now I've got a diamond surrounded by other diamonds and diamonds in places where, frankly, you don't need diamonds at all, and I would have been happy with a piece of twine. So yes, of course I said yes.'
Her acting career is, accordingly, on hold for a little while. The future roles that she hinted at when we first met have been redistributed among her edgy indie flick-frequenting peers.
But sure, Summer Phoenix has every intention of acting again, because 'it's my first love,' she says. And also because, Team Phoenix ethics notwithstanding, Summer would quite like an Oscar. 'I mean, officially I hate it and I think it's a popularity contest, it's all those things. But, oh, if I ever won one, I'd probably get up there and cry and thank God and my family. Of course I would.'
· Suzie Gold is released on 5 March.