The image of her in American Beauty — a naked, ivory-skinned, blonde teenager, smiling knowingly at the desire she is provoking as she lies on a bed of rose petals — is as unsettling as it is iconic.
It is surely as powerful a depiction of forbidden lust as has ever been committed to film.
But behind the striking pose by actress Mena Suvari lies a story every bit as disturbing according to her new memoir, one of the most extraordinary and depressing to have emerged from Hollywood.
In The Great Peace, published this week, she reveals that by the time the Oscar-winning film was released, she had survived eight years of physical and sexual abuse — an horrific ordeal which she says destroyed her life for decades afterwards.
She details what happened to her with a frankness so unsparing that it makes deeply uncomfortable reading. It was, she says, ‘my secret world of embarrassment, shame and guilt’.
Suvari, 42, says she was raped aged 12 by her 16-year-old boyfriend, who went on to give her a bladder infection and dump her the day after her 13th birthday.
At 16, her acting manager, who was in his 30s, was having sex and smoking pot with her.
The image of her in American Beauty — a naked, ivory-skinned, blonde teenager, smiling knowingly at the desire she is provoking as she lies on a bed of rose petals — is as unsettling as it is iconic
That was the year she wrote a suicide note.
A subsequent boyfriend encouraged her descent into daily drug abuse and gave her herpes.
He would take her shopping for sex toys and when he insisted she used them it made her feel ‘violated’ and ‘dead inside’.
He also forced her to pick up other women for threesomes on a regular basis.
Much of this was going on when she played teenager Angela Hayes on screen in American Beauty, which came out in 1999. She said that going on set, where she was treated with politeness and respect by British director Sam Mendes and his crew, offered her a holiday from her intolerable life. At the time she was just 19.
‘The whole time I worked on American Beauty I was grinding on empty: working to perfect my part, submitting to [my boyfriend] Tyler’s demands for kinky threesomes at least three or four times a week, and pretending in both cases that everything was okay.
‘Except it wasn’t.’
Despite her starring role in the film alongside the now disgraced Kevin Spacey, Suvari says she never actually wanted to act, and should have had some other career such as astronaut or archaeologist — although in High School she did not get the grades because she was drinking and taking drugs at break times.
It did not start like this. She was born into a wealthy family in Rhode Island, when her father Ando, an Estonian psychiatrist, was in his early 60s and her mother Candice 30 years younger.
By her own account, she was a prodigy at junior school who taught herself to read and was so ahead of the class that she was given ‘Mena’s corner’ in the library so that she could teach herself while the rest plodded along. She was also a great beauty, she says immodestly. Indeed, she claims her looks set her apart from the crowd and meant she had few friends.
One person who did take an interest in her, however, was a friend of her brother’s who was three years older than her. This was after the family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, and she was only 12. He started writing her love letters and spending time alone with her in her bedroom.
She is angry now that no one was concerned by this turn of events — not least because their kissing sessions led to the devastating incident where he took her virginity despite her protests. ‘The most precious piece of me was taken against my will,’ she says. The sexual relationship continued and she ended up with a bladder infection and being prescribed the contraceptive pill by a doctor who failed to inquire into the circumstances.
When the teen dumped her and called her a ‘whore’, he told everyone in town about the relationship. She was devastated. It was, she says, his way ‘trying to rationalise away the reality of raping me’.
By this time her modelling career was taking off and she was winning competitions. Even though she was a petite 5ft 2in, she was soon being cast in television adverts.
Although she is none too complimentary about her parents in the book, they made considerable sacrifices for her. In order for her to launch her film career, they moved to a small apartment in Los Angeles and she was sent to an expensive private school there where she claims she was insecure and misunderstood.
This was when she developed an enthusiasm for drink and drugs. Meth, she says, made her feel as if her brain had melted.
‘My days moved with a frantic mix of meth and marijuana,’ she writes. ‘I took drugs to numb myself from the pain. Alcohol. Pot. Coke. Crystal meth. Acid. Ecstasy. Mushrooms. Mescaline. It was my way of detaching from the hell of my existence — and surviving.’
Meanwhile, her family life fell apart as her mother left her father and he then had a stroke. Suvari took refuge in even more drugs and ever more relationships with men.
One was Tyler, a lighting engineer and sex and drug addict. She moved in with him.
He was 26, she was 17. They slept on a soiled mattress on the floor and smoked pot daily in a relationship that lasted for three years. ‘In retrospect, it was abuse,’ she says now.
Her self-esteem was whittled away. She stored her clothes in piles on the floor of the wardrobe and cooked for him and his friends.
She also submitted to his sexual demands. ‘I don’t think he ever asked what I wanted or what would make me feel good or happy, she writes. ‘It didn’t involve my consent. I was not being loved, I was just a body, a receptacle for his desires.’
Faithfulness on his part was out of the question. ‘He was a sex addict and wanted to get laid the way I wanted to get high.’
Inevitably, perhaps, she ended up with herpes.
Tyler then started to suggest threesomes. She recalls weeping while he
