A young Natascha McElhone in Surviving Picasso (1996)
Natascha McElhone really turns me on, as much as any other woman, especially in that first season of Californication, when she had the long blond hair and had by then grown into the irregular angles of her face.
“So why would that be?” you think. Sure she’s a great-lookin’ woman, but she’s not in the same league as some of the great beauties that appear here and in the Fun House. Oh, how we are shaped by our experiences. You know that many guys think that Katie Holmes in The Gift was the greatest nude scene of all time, while I just kind of think it was “fine.” This has a lot to do with them growing up with Katie as their imaginary girlfriend from her Dawson’s Creek days.
My story with McElhone is very similar. I have only one romantic regret, one woman that I consider “the one that got away.” She is a Hungarian woman I dated when I lived in Budapest, and she didn’t just kinda-sorta look like Natascha McElhone. If you saw her walking down the street, you’d think she was McElhone (Californication era, not the younger version shown here) – same irregular nose, same tall, lanky frame, same smile, same everything. I still think about her and communicate with her, and she obviously has some regrets of her own that it didn’t work out between us, even though we both had great lives separately. So that pretty much explains why I go ga-ga for a scene that others find merely appealing, certainly not best in show.
As Jim Croce wrote in “One Less Footstep”:
After all, it’s what we’ve done
That makes us what we are.
Sounds like there’s a movie script there….