'A liberation comes with age': Rita Wilson on motherhood, cancer, and reclaiming creativity later in life

An actor, producer, singer-songwriter, mother, and breast cancer survivor, Rita Wilson has a wealth of experiences to draw on for her latest album. The Hollywood star talks to Kathy Donaghy about how ageing has given her the freedom to find her voice

Rita Wilson brings her music to Dublin for a live show this month.

The characters Rita Wilson has played have won her a legion of fans. In her new album Sound of a Woman, she sheds a skin to stand in her own truth about being a woman in the world today.

The word multihyphenate could have been invented to describe Rita Wilson: She’s appeared in a multitude of movies including It’s Complicated, Sleepless in Seattle and Runaway Bride; produced major franchises including Mamma Mia! and My Big Fat Greek Wedding and is set to reprise her role as Marnie Michael’s eccentric mother Evie Michaels in a Girls reboot (more of which later).

But she’s also an accomplished singer-songwriter and since 2012 she’s released music: Sound of a Woman is her sixth studio album.

It may not have been the wisest decision to sit down to listen to her new album before logging on for our zoom interview. I found myself unable to hold back the tears as I listened to the heartrending Your Mother, an ode to her own mother and to motherhood itself.

In the lines: “I know it’s hard for you to see / There was someone else she used to be”, she speaks to a universal truth that is at the heart of all children’s relationships with their mothers.

I am lucky to have a close relationship with my mother, who is in her 70s.

Rita’s own mother, Dorothy, died at the age of 93 in 2014 after living with Alzheimer’s disease. She has described her as her best friend.

“You know, the things that I wish I had asked her were things that I thought I knew. But you don’t know sometimes until they’re gone what it was that you would have asked,” says Rita, now 69

Rita Wilson wants people ask questions while you still have your mother

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Her advice, shaped by her own lived experience, is to ask the questions while you still have your mother.

“And I highly encourage you to start taking notes of anything that comes into your mind that you want to ask her and going deep,” she tells me.

“And I will tell you, you will be giving her the hugest gift because she wants to tell you, too. You know, there’s so much left unsaid. So definitely ask her those questions and she will be so grateful for it,” she says.

For herself and her own unasked questions, there are some regrets. There are gaps in her mother’s life that she can no longer ask about, like when her mother came to America as a young woman after leaving her village on the border of Greece and Albania.

“There was that period of time from 19 till she married my dad that I don’t know much about. And I don’t know why she didn’t talk about that period of time in New York that much.

“And you think about it, she was quite old in that period of time to have gotten married at like 30 or 31; what was that about? Why hadn’t she met somebody? What was it? Why wasn’t there a relationship there? And I still can’t fill in that gap,” says Rita.

As a mother herself — she shares her sons Chet, 35, and Truman, 30, with her husband Tom Hanks and is a proud stepmother to his children Colin, 48, and Elizabeth, 43 — the song also serves as a reminder that before your children came along, you had a life.

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson

“If you have children, you’re also trying to tell them, I was a fully formed person before you even came into this world and I had a life before you and I had emotions and dreams and doubts and fears and mistakes. And I would love to tell my children all of that. And sometimes they are very funny because they’re like, oh, wow, mom, did you really have to tell that story?”

But Rita says she wants her kids to know her fully, not just as the mom who set boundaries and kept them safe but as the human being who made mistakes and sometimes got it wrong as well as right.

Her latest album has been described as ‘unfiltered’ and in Sound of a Woman she’s embracing these different identities that women have throughout their lives. It’s also a celebration of the women in her own life that have brought so much richness to her everyday.

“I have such an enormous community of incredibly smart, funny, courageous women in my life, and of all ages. And some of that, which I think is so important, is this desire on my part, and also on younger women’s parts, to have this extended community of a multi-generational group,” she says.

“I’m half Greek, half Bulgarian, culturally. And there was so much to be learned from the people who went before us, these women who went before us, who have that experience. And I feel in some ways we’ve lost that,” she adds.

For Rita, while she says it’s taken her a while to find her own voice, there’s a freedom that comes with getting older.

“There’s something so great about the liberation that comes with age, that there’s an acceptance and a lack of filtering in our voices that allows us to say what we’ve always wanted to say. There’s a courage there that I didn’t have necessarily as a young woman, certainly not publicly.”

Describing how she started songwriting in her 50s, Rita says the experience of finding new ways of expressing yourself is not uncommon for women as they find themselves with more time on their hands as children fly the nest. 

Rita Wilson's album Sound Of A Woman

“I think as women get to that age: If you’ve raised your kids, if they’re out of the house and you now have this time to ask yourself, what do I want to do with my time? What am I good at? What can I be doing? What would I want to do? What would I want to explore? Who am I? That is not uncommon,” she says.

“I think that exploration is so rich and full. And I love when women tell me what they’ve started to do in their lives. And you see it a lot in art, in writing, in poetry, in painting, in sculpting – how women use their voices”.

“And usually it happens after the age of 50. And why is that? Well, it’s because you have gotten to this point where you can do it. You’re asking yourself these questions,” she says.

And yet even as midlife can be a potent and rich time in a woman’s life, I ask Rita about how society can also be incredibly ageist as to how it views a person’s creativity, particularly a woman’s. Rita has spoken in the past about how it was advice from superstar Bruce Springsteen that, in its own way, inspired her second act as a singer/songwriter when he told her that creativity was ‘time independent’. She has said this piece of wisdom was like ‘Christmas morning’.

“There is no clock on creativity. I’m sorry, did I miss the alarm that said I was supposed to do this in 1993 or 2001 or 1974?” she asks, pointing to artist Rose Wiley, who at 92, did her first show at the Royal Academy in London.

“And what is really important is that we aren’t doing this because we want fame. We aren’t doing it because we want money. We are doing it because we need to do it. We have to do it. We have something to say. And if Rose Wiley at 92 years old is getting her first solo show. Bravo,” says Rita.

There’s one song on the album Whose body is this? that speaks of her journey through cancer and survival. In 2015, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and went on to have a bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction. While she says at first it was terrifying, it’s also an experience that she sees as a gift in her life. She talks about how in a woman’s life her body changes so many times from puberty, through childbirth, into menopause and beyond. And just as illnesses can be part of our experience, so too can healing.

Rita Wilson as Natalie Chowdhury in Kimi.

“Modern medicine has allowed me to have implants. I can reconnect with my body in a way that is very different. It becomes almost empowering to understand and to experience that, even with that fear — and that nobody wants to hear you have cancer — there’s still this process of healing that goes on,” she says.

Rita describes the experience of standing in front of the mirror the night before her surgery and having a conversation with herself.

“I don’t talk about it that often in this way, but to say goodbye and say thank you, to say, wow, you really have been an amazing body and I’m looking forward to meeting the new body. You’re getting me there. How beautiful is that?” she asks, her voice cracking with raw emotion. 

Another song on the album, one that many women will resonate with is called Jury of One. It speaks to how often as women we apologise or feel the pressure to ‘do it all’ and are made to feel we are not as good as someone else.

Rita says the expression ‘compare and despair’ comes to mind for the pressures women can be under in society but says her own mother raised her to know that there were always going to be people who were smarter and others not as smart; richer and not as rich.

 “If you start comparing yourself to somebody, there’s always going to be something in that, that there’s a judgment; whether it’s against yourself or towards someone else. So I tried really to stay away from that as a young woman. And I think part of that was that my mom had a really strong identity in her own person. So I felt good about that,” she says.

As our time online comes to an end, I ask her about the news that she will be reprising her role as Marnie Michael’s overbearing mother Evie in Lena Dunham’s hit show Girls once more.

Rita describes herself as ‘so happy’ at the news. “I would do anything for Lena Dunham; I think she’s just incredibly talented and I cannot wait to see what she has in store for these four women 10 years later. For my character, I’m just like, what’s she going to come up with? It’s like a gift,” she says.

“Working with Lena is like Christmas morning and the gifts keep coming,” she adds.

• Rita Wilson will perform live at the Sugar Club in Dublin on Wednesday, November 18, as part of her Sound of a Woman UK and Europe tour.