Daryl Hannah says “Steel Magnolias” director originally wanted her to play Julia Roberts' Shelby

Herbert Ross said he could "absolutely not" see Hannah in the role of Annelle, but she won the part anyway.

Daryl Hannah was pitch perfect as the shy cosmetologist-in-training Annelle Dupuy-DeSoto in Herbert Ross' Steel Magnolias. But if it was up to Ross alone, she'd have played the part that helped transform Julia Roberts into a superstar.

"He was like, 'No, absolutely not, I don't see it,'" Hannah recently told PEOPLE, recalling Ross' insistence she could not play Annelle in the 1989 film. Hannah explained that she saw herself as far more suited to the slowly unfurling wallflower than Shelby Eatenton-Latcherie, the headstrong bride with an intense form of type 1 diabetes.

Hannah asked Ross to "'please let me'" audition for Annelle, and when she came in wearing her own oversized glasses, with hair teased up to the sky, "he didn't recognize me... I love that feeling where you really turn into somebody else."

Hannah was a much bigger star than Roberts when the call went out for Steel Magnolias auditions. After making her film debut in Brian De Palma's The Fury in 1978, Hannah turned in acclaimed performances in Blade Runner, Roxanne, and the enduringly charming mermaid romcom Splash. Roberts, meanwhile, made a huge impression in Mystic Pizza the year before Magnolias, but hadn't landed many other opportunities to show off her confidence and charisma.

Though Steel Magnolias is packed with grade-A performances from a string of accomplished talents, including Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, and the late Olympia Dukakis, it's what happens to Roberts' character in the film's final act that makes her performance among the most memorable. An argument could be made that Hannah's Annelle is the film's true protagonist, however, as her arrival to Louisiana's Chinquapin Parish opens the film, and the birth of her child marks the finale.

Related: Eric Roberts disses Julia Roberts' Steel Magnolias: 'Nobody’s great in that movie'

Hannah remembers the film as "the first time I'd ever really experienced women," saying that "competitive and vicious" actresses on preceding films who "wanted me to basically die" had left a sour taste in her mouth. "Everyone talks about, now, 'Women supporting women!' Well, in my day, it was not like that," she explained.

But on the Steel Magnolias set, "it was really wonderful to have those women be so supportive and encouraging. I just never had experienced that before."

Related: Friends director recalls Julia Roberts' nerves shooting Super Bowl episode: 'Stage fright in real life'

It's just as well that Ross didn't get his wish, and Hannah played Annelle after all. In a interview with Vulture back in February, Sally Field recalled that Ross was "very, very, very hard on Julia. If you ever talk to Julia, she’ll tell you." Roberts was "sort of the newcomer. And she was wonderful, and he just picked on her. It was awful."

When asked why Ross might have treated Roberts that way, Field responded plainly that it's "because he could be a real son of a bitch, that’s why... Some people just need to have somebody they pick on. But we all came to her aid."

Roberts earned her first Academy Award nomination for her trouble, and won the first major award of her career at that year's Golden Globes.

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