Video: June Squibb on Feeling Beautiful and Forever 35

“On stage,” living legend June Squibb says as she blends her foundation. “I always felt beautiful.” Having gotten her start at the Cleveland Play House in the 1950s, Squibb is accustomed to applying her own face before a show. Though looking at herself in show makeup took some getting used to, the overwhelming feeling when Squibb took the stage was comfort. “I was ready for it.”

96-year-old June Squibb is beautiful—and she was ready to shoot, arriving 30 minutes early to the Playbill Studio to get ready for a performance of Marjorie Prime on Broadway. In person, Squibb's skin is a pinky porcelain, lined by a lifetime of emotion, but possessing an evenness and brightness that piques my curiosity for her full beauty routine. Surely someone who has spent more than six decades on stage and screen has a treasure trove of tips, has tried every trick, has dabbed on every lotion, and has dabbled in every potion. Surely, she must know how to capture luminosity in a bottle.

“Soap,” Squibb says unassumingly of her skincare regiment. I am shocked. My medicine cabinet is shocked. “Soap and water.”

To hear Squibb’s memories of Ethel Merman, which Playbills she’d pull from the Vault, and what Squibb has in common with Elizabeth Taylor, watch the episode of Playbill’s Getting Ready above.

When my jaw drops, Squibb adds that whenever she’s in Los Angeles, she gets regular facials. But her ultimate beauty hack is sleep, for her skin and for her overall longevity.

“It helps you,” she says. “Just to be around longer.”

Longevity is the hot button issue of Marjorie Prime, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated family drama by Jordan Harrison, in which Squibb is currently starring on Broadway. As the titular Marjorie, Squibb embodies an octogenarian whose memory—for better or worse—is failing her. Then her well-meaning son-in-law John (Danny Burstein) introduces Marjorie and her tech-skeptic daughter Tess (Cynthia Nixon) to a new kind of technology, called “Prime.” The Prime, an artificially intelligent hologram modeled after Marjorie’s late husband Walter (Christopher Lowell), is meant to mimic the appearance and voice of a deceased loved one, jogging and cataloguing memories, an interactive time capsule. Love, loss, and legacy are familiar themes in the family drama, but for Squibb, making the audience laugh is just as important as making them cry.

“Even the most dramatic dramas I know,” Squibb says, “any good script has humor in it. We do [this] in our lives, we laugh at things. If I'm going to do a script, I like to feel that it's real, that it's life. Jordan has done that.”

For all its grief, its tears shed, Marjorie Prime is not a morbid play. It has the lightness of an open-ended question: What do we do with ever-expanding technology? How can we retain what is so miraculous about our humanity? Squibb shares that John Kander (with whom she worked on the original production of Gypsy, her Broadway debut) described Marjorie Prime as “magical” and asked her if she (and her costars) knew what they had created on stage. When I ask her to answer Kander’s question, Squibb is somewhat taken aback.

“I don’t think any of the four of us have even thought of it,” she replies. “All four of us are still working our butts off because we want to keep it up.”

Squibb says that before every performance, she settles into a chair in the wings of the stage that Nixon has dubbed “the Squibb crib.” Just before the show begins, Danny Burstein tells Squibb a dirty joke (a pre-show tradition that began between Squibb and Merman). Then all four actors put their hands together in a celebratory circle—they’re not only members of the same family, but they’re also members of the same team.

And for all the talk about her age (she is one of the oldest people to act on Broadway), Squibb says she feels forever 35. It’s the age her mother was when Squibb found her “very attractive.” Talking with Squibb, laughing and holding her hand, I don’t feel the more than six decades that stretch between us. Maybe it's her forever 35 philosophy (were she 35, Squibb would only be three years my senior). Maybe it's the ease she feels performing in New York, the way she reminisces about the "perfect" '50s,' 60s, and '70s when she was part of the late-night cabaret scene. 

"I always say that the minute I hit New York," Squibb says with a warm smile. "I breathed easier than I'd ever breathed in my entire life. I really thrive here." 

At the top of this episode of Getting Ready, an emotion sprung up in my welcome that surprised me almost as much as Squibb’s sparse soap and water routine. Gratitude that someone so storied might share with me the secret to living well, and gracefully. By the episode’s end, having delighted in our matching sponge holders and shared loyalty to Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty, Squibb had imbued me with her joy—for the many facets of my life still to catch light, for a joke so dirty it eludes even the sharpest of memories, and for friendship and sisterhood at any age.