My rollercoaster marriage to the crazy genius behind Avatar
James Cameron may be in line for nine Oscars for his record-breaking movie Avatar, to add to the 11 he won for Titanic, but will they make him happy?
Actress Linda Hamilton, one of his four ex-wives, says the trouble with Cameron is that he always wants what he can't have - at least as far as women are concerned.
'The woman he can't get is always his dream girl,' she says. 'Work and women go hand in hand for Jimbo, and I should know.'
While he was making Titanic, and living with Linda, he fell for Suzy Amis, who had a small part in the movie. Later, torn between the two, he left Amis, went back to Hamilton and married her.
The marriage lasted just eight months before he went back to Amis; she is still with him and they have a son and two daughters.
But now, 11 years after they split, Linda - whose new film Holy Water is released today - believes she's got him exactly where she wants him.
'It's interesting because while he was making Titanic, Suzy at that time was the gargoyle on the end of my bed, waiting to swoop in.
Now I'm the gargoyle on her bed because for Jim, the one who doesn't end up with him is always the one he wants. I'm the one who got away, and she has to live with that.'
Of course, there is, too, the ever-present shadow of his third wife, director Kathryn Bigelow, whose nine Oscar nominations this week for the Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker include a direct challenge to him for the best director award.
'Yes,' squeals Linda, now 53, in her sexy gravelly voice. 'Don't forget Kathryn!'
The first thing that Kathryn did after being asked to direct The Hurt Locker was to show her ex-husband the script. He urged her to go for it - although it's doubtful that he envisaged they would end up competing head to head for the same Oscars.
As a workaholic with a vision of perfection, the mercurial Cameron never hesitates to push his cast and crew to extremes. Not for nothing is he known as the scariest man in Hollywood. On the set of True Lies, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis, he warned that taking lavatory breaks was a sackable offence.
While making The Abyss, actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio ran from the set crying 'we are not animals' when he told the cast in a water scene to relieve themselves in their wet suits to save time.
Kate Winslet was so traumatised by working for Cameron on Titanic that she vowed never to make another film with him.
Cameron often likes to say: 'I eat pressure for breakfast.' In this way, he drove Titanic to worldwide box-office takings of more than $1.84 billion.
Since then, he has lived and breathed Avatar while he waited for technology to catch up with his vision of an alien world populated by a long-limbed, blue-bodied race called the Na'vi.
With this single-minded drive, it's inevitable that few of Cameron's women have been able to handle him in the long-term, though he is attracted to strong women.
But feisty women at work and at home rarely make the best bed-partners, hence five marriages, with his break-ups usually coinciding with the times he has been working on a movie.
'Titanic was the most painful thing in the world,' says Linda. 'But this wasn't because Jim was cheating on me. Jim went off with Suzy because we were taking a break from each other and he was free to go with her.
'It was a painful time because we'd had a relationship where I'd push him away, then he'd push me away. Frankly, most of our relationship was us taking a big break.
'It was a crazy time, too, because we clashed as I was prepared to stand up to him. I'd say: "I'm never going to consider going back with you, plus I'm going to tell my friends all about you."
'Then when he got together with Suzy I changed my mind and he came back to me and we got married. Then he felt terrible about what he'd done to her and went back to her. Yes, there was a period when he did sort of cross over because he was confused.'
Does it still rankle because Linda was the loser? 'One does want to win, of course, but I've known for many years that this was the very best way to work it. I'm the one that got away and she has to live with that and share him with me.'
It's a fact that Cameron himself has an extraordinary capacity for remaining on good terms with his ex-wives. There are still family Christmases with Cameron at Linda's Malibu home where all the ex-wives and extra children gather.
Does Suzy cope well with this? Linda, anxious not to be indiscreet but irreverent enough to say it anyway, silently mouths a big 'no-no' and indicates that Suzy clearly dislikes her.
'But she doesn't have the option of not having me in her life, so we all have to manage,' she says, her voice rising in passion.
Avatar, released in the UK in December, is the highest-earning film in cinema history, with global box office takings already passing $1.85 billion. Before it opened, it was rumoured that the film - nicknamed Dancing With Smurfs - was likely to be the most expensive flop in cinematic history.
But now Avatar is set to sweep the Oscars. This comes as a bit of a surprise even to Linda because she couldn't share his vision when they pored over the script together 14 years ago.
'I read Avatar while we were married and I said nothing. I didn't think it was rubbish, and I'd say to him: "Oh, that's good, honey."
But it's not like I thought it was amazing, because clearly Jimbo had a vision and I couldn't translate the depth and scale to foresee it. This movie is above and beyond.'
Linda and Cameron first got to know each other on the set of the first two Terminator movies - she starred alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger as the cyborgfighting Sarah Connor.
Her toning and muscles brought her the title Body Of The Nineties, and her character became a byword for invincibility.
She has described working with Cameron as 'clashing like positive and negative', adding: 'We fought so much we were amazed with ourselves when we did get together.'
Strains in their marriage showed after a few months, when Titanic won 11 Oscars. Asked after the ceremony if success had changed her husband, she said: 'He was always a jerk, so there is no way to tell.'
Later, she wrote him a fulsome letter of apology, saying, 'I love you terribly, Jim, and I'll try to love you less terribly from now on.' But the damage was done and a year later they divorced, with Suzy Amis now back in his life.
'It had been a fraught relationship,' she recalls, 'because we were both pretty strong personalities. I loved him unconditionally, though, because he's a brilliant and talented man.'
However, the greatest attraction between Linda and Cameron was their meeting of minds. 'I had no problem understanding Jim's mind,' she tells me. 'We were two of a kind. It was the intellect and humour which got us going - we were zinging off each other's brain power all the time.
'He loved my quickness and toughness. But that doesn't make a marriage, so we related to each other in some very theoretical way. But in terms of living a life together, no way.'
Cameron's first wife was Sharon Williams, whom he met when she worked as a waitress in a truckers' bar and he was still an 18-year-old lorry driver.
They were married for 12 years, but they split when he started making The Terminator after the idea came to him in a dream, and he got together with his second wife, Terminator producer Gale Anne Hurd.
Together they made Aliens, but the marriage imploded when they worked on The Abyss together. Within months, he had fallen for Kathryn Bigelow when he went scouting for actors on a film she was working on.
They married in August 1989, but by the time he had starting producing Terminator 2 a year later, the marriage had soured and he was rumoured to be involved with the film's leading lady, Linda.
Hamilton's first marriage, to actor Bruce Abbott, lasted seven years and ended in 1989 when he walked out on her while she was pregnant with their son, Dalton, now 21. When Cameron's divorce from Kathryn came through in 1991, Linda moved into his Malibu house. A year later she was pregnant with his first child, Josephine, now 17.
'Jimbo is a sexy guy when he's working,' admits Linda. 'I'd known him from the first Terminator film and we did not particularly like each other or get along. I am probably the only actress in the history of James Cameron to have stood up to him.
'Oh my god, he made me so mad on the first Terminator film where he was on the side of the technology, not the people. Just after we shot the film's memorable moment - "You're terminated f****r", where I had a 250lb arm that grabbed my throat and was exhausted from working the ninth day in a row stuck in a machine - I asked to look at the playback of the scene.
'But Jim said: "No time, got to move on." I went bonkers and I took him off the set to shout at him. But there was no ceiling, so everybody could hear us anyhow. I screamed at him: "If you want to see a human being on that set, treat me like a f*****g human being."
He tried to calm me down, apologised, gave me a bottle of Champagne and got me back on set.
'Then he told the crew that he'd made me work up that rage to get a better performance from me. Bull! So the apology didn't mean a thing. I thought: "You creep!"
'I took the Champagne home and just outside my front door the bottle spontaneously exploded. It must have had such bad vibes in it because I later cut my foot on the broken glass and thought: "Oh, God, he's even got the last word!"'
For the Terminator sequel, though, Linda was ready for Cameron. 'We'd collaborated on the script and I knew there was no room for weakness.
It's hard to get Jim's attention. He shouts "Take a number, take a number," which means get in the 15-strong queue of people waiting to see him because he likes to control every second. Jim can do everyone's job.'
Cameron's power was clearly an aphrodisiac for Linda and others.
'Knowing he's so controlling, I just got really strong. What really helped me open my heart to Jimbo was suddenly seeing him as a kid having a temper tantrum. But seeing him control everything on set was really sexy. However, what's sexy on the set is not necessarily sexy at home.'
It didn't help that Linda, whose father died in a car crash when she was five, was suffering from longterm manic depression, later diagnosed as a bipolar disorder.
'My first husband had talked me out of it. He loved me when I was the life and soul of the party and even when I was the tragic lost girl. But I was a bully and would throw plates at him. If I was down he would have to be miserable, too. Eventually it became too much and he left me, though he's my best friend now.'
But Cameron was hardly going to have the patience to deal with this.
'There was a time when I'd left Jim, moved out on my own and was playing a multiple personality in a film. I'd just lost my 12th nanny in a row, I was dragging James Cameron along in a relationship and he was furious I'd moved out. I was trying to reinvent our relationship and I really went down. So much that I truly felt like I might have died.'
It was made worse by their ongoing power struggle. 'A decision should be made by two, but Jimbo decided that we would never get married, because he'd been married three times before and he'd made up his mind never to do it again.
'So we did nothing but fight over marriage for seven years. It wasn't so much that I wanted to get married, but I wanted to have a say in whether or not we got married.
There's a big difference. These sorts of rows kept everything alive.'
They also argued over Cameron controlling their home's interior design. 'I am a designer, I love the home, but Jim wouldn't let me have any freedom to do anything. He would come home with things he'd insist on having.
'Then he banned a close male friend of mine from staying. But in those days Jimbo would even put his own family up in a hotel - that's just Jim.
'I threw all his things out of the door more times than I can remember. He never threw things back at me, but he would storm off and, even worse, have his assistant collect his things for him and move them out. Ouch! That hurt.
'Then he'd move back and it'd all happen again. I've lost count of how many times his gymnasium was moved in and out of our house. It got to the stage where I said: "Let me at least keep your gym because this is really getting expensive."'
Did the birth of their daughter, Josephine, make for calmer waters? 'No, there was just more for us to war about,' laughs Linda, who now tries to see the comic side of life.
'We had very different parenting styles. Actually, he's a fabulous dad, he's extremely hands-on, as you might imagine, but this might be considered to be a little smothering and you'd have to be a strong child to cope with that.
'Our daughter has grown so incredibly strong. That said, she adores him like a daughter loves her daddy and there's not one complaint.
'But in those days Jim would go away for three years to do a movie then come back and treat her like a one-year-old and think she was going to be stolen in the playground.
Meanwhile, Josephine and I had our rules and knew how things worked. He argued over that, of course.'
Linda also found herself having to join Cameron on adventure weekends in the desert.
'Jimbo had a love of fast cars, but as the warrior bride I was on the back of a motorcycle,' she recalls. 'He used to say to me: 'Anybody can be a father or a husband. There are only five people in the world who can do what I do, and I'm going for that.'
Clearly, nothing has changed for Cameron nor for Linda, except that she prefers a comedy, not a tragedy, these days. Her latest film Holy Water is a comedy about a group of men living in a remote Irish village who are so desperate to break the boredom that they hijack a shipment of Viagra then suffer the complicated consequences.
Linda plays the stony-faced leader of the American military company hired by the pharmaceutical giant who want their Viagra back.
'I loved Holy Water because I've now vowed to only have levity in my life.' With this in mind, she's not sure who she's backing in the Oscars. 'I have torn loyalties, but that's all right because that's just like real life.'
:lol
