Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Sun 10 May 2026 19:45, UK
The great thing about being an actor, I can only imagine, is getting to experience things that you might not otherwise get to do.
Whether that’s scaling an incredibly high building, would Tom Cruise enact his daredevil sensibilities if he wasn’t an actor… or getting to kiss a star whom you’ve long admired, acting allows stars to get up to the kinds of things that some of us can only dream of. Meryl Streep will be the first to tell you how great the perks of acting can be, like when she made many audiences across the world jealous in Out of Africa.
She was lucky enough to get a rather sensual, romantic hair-washing from Hollywood icon Robert Redford, an iconic scene that has surely inspired many women to ask their husbands to wash their hair in the bath, although I’m sure the results have never been quite the same, never quite as cinematic.
Directed by Sydney Pollack, the film won seven Academy Awards, although Streep actually missed out on a ‘Best Actress’ win this time around – she played the author Karen Blixen, who runs a coffee plantation in Kenya on her own, only to fall for the game hunter Denys, played by Redford, the romantic epic was highly praised upon its release, and the hair-washing scene remains its most memorable.
Watching the clip back for a segment with Vanity Fair, Streep exclaimed, “Look at Bob Redford. Was he the most divine man in the world?” The scene is an intimate one, with Denys massaging shampoo into Karen’s hair before carefully pouring a jug of water over it, and she sighs, basking in the intensity of being in a rather vulnerable state, him looming over her as she surrenders herself to the hair washing.
“It’s not a sex scene, it’s a love scene. And basically, he didn’t know how to – he’d never, of course, washed anyone’s hair except his own. Maybe even not his own… But he had to be taught,” Streep explained. So, her makeup man, J Roy Helland, showed Redford how it was done, and “he really got into it”.
The actor got to bask in having a nice head massage from one of Hollywood’s most charming men, and according to her, “He was really amazing,” and, unsurprisingly, she “didn’t want that scene to end. It felt so good”.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Luckily for the star, the scene actually required several takes, “because just over on that side of the thing, there were hippos in the water, in the river, and they’re the most dangerous animals in Africa – they’re the ones who most often attack people.”
She continued, “There was a moment where we had to stop because one of them came and opened his mouth, and we beat a hasty retreat to lunch. But it was a great morning, I remember it well.”
There are so many indelible sex scenes out there, but this sequence is arguably just as sensual, just as erotic – the intimacy of the scene is really what does it, arguably evoking much more seductive power.
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