Mischa Barton, all American gal, is more British than you think
Mischa Barton, 23, the essence of the all American girl in The OC, is actually British, she told the UK newspaper The Daily Mail. She was born in Hammersmith and raised in New York.
Speaking in Soho recently, she said: “I’m British, though everyone thinks I’m American. I haven’t lived here since I was tiny, but my entire family is British and I’ve been raised as a Brit. My sister lives and works in London as a barrister, but nobody can get their head round the fact I’m anything but a Hollywood girl. In the US, nobody thinks of me as American, and here, nobody believes I’m British.”
Barton said she was embarrassed to admit it, but she consciously tried to lose her English accent. “When I lived in New York, I tried really hard to ditch the British accent to fit in. I went to classes and everything. I ended up putting on this terrible ‘Nu Yawk’ accent and hid behind that for a while. Now I don’t try to hide it so much, but my accent slips all over the place. It’s a mess – I don’t sound like I’m from anywhere any more.”
She also revealed that she was once physically attacked by a fan in Milan. “This guy just jumped on me. It totally freaked me out. I don’t think he meant it badly, but it was still scary. Men come up to me a lot, but it’s never to chat me up. I don’t know if they’re intimidated by me or what. It’s like they’re not doing it to hit on me. They just want a picture with me on their camera phone because they’ve seen me in a movie. It’s wild because they think they know you – guys talk to me like I’ve known them for years, when we’ve only just met.”
Barton says she is not part of the Paris Hilton set. “People think I’m part of that whole Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan set and it’s frustrating. I’m not like that; I have a pretty normal life. People always seem to write lots of untrue things about me. I’ve just learned to laugh at it and move on. I also surround myself with people who are nothing like the Hollywood set – my family are really intelligent and academic, so they keep me grounded no matter what.”
She also said she has posed partly nude and has been arrested for drunk driving.
“I took my top off for Cosmopolitan. I’d never do a fully nude shoot, though. I was shot from my chest up and everyone speaks about it like I was naked. I really wasn’t. I’d never do a naked shoot – that’s just not me,” she said.
Leaving the OC was difficult: “When I left The OC there were a lot of mixed emotions. It was an extreme four years of my life, so it was kind of bittersweet.
Source: Splash News
Tags: Cosmopolitan, Mischa Barton, The OC