She has just blown into the mirrored bar of
Manhattan's Halcyon restaurant. At 3 p.m. the place is
nearly empty, but it's impossible to be sure whether the
woman standing in the middle of the room-at once striking
and ethereal-is the British actress who appears in three
movies currently playing across the country.
Miranda Richardson resembles none of her characters: not
Rose, the chronically disappointed Londoner in the
sepia-stained Enchanted April; not Jude, the IRA warrior
in The Crying Game; and certainly not Ingrid, the
middle-aged wife in Damage.
In person, Richardson is softer, younger, more electric
than one expects. There is nothing tentative about her
manner, or about her enormous blue eyes, which search out
and lock on to the object of her gaze. "I like
it," she says of her protean tendency. "Maybe
actors here in America are a bit more concerned with
putting an image out there. You know, 'This is me and
this is what I do.'"
What Richardson has done in these three films has
suddenly made her a ubiquitous screen presence in the
U.S. (After her 1985 debut in Dance With a Stranger,
Richardson seemed to vanish.) It has also earned her this
year's New York Film Critics' Circle award for Best
Supporting Actress, which she has traveled here from
London to accept.
Though she was honored for her roles in all three films,
Richardson is not shy about choosing a favorite. The
Crying Game, she answers, before the question is fully
posed. "Because it was a complete experience. It was
fully satisfying, and I think it's phenomenal."
But it's as Jeremy Irons' 50-something wife in Damage-a
leap for any 34-year-old actress and a part that
Richardson inhabits with graceful, subtle restraint-that
she leaves audiences in awe. She walks away with the
movie in one gut-wrenching scene near the end, which,
because of its high drama, she refers to as "the
Greek scene."
Richardson admits that the Damage shoot often left her
frustrated. She did not always work well with her costar
Irons, who used Josephine Hart's novel as a handbook,
while shefound the book "quite fast-food."
Elbows on the table, hands clasped, Richardson furrows
her brow. "I don't think it really jelled," she
says. "But I don't know if that matters in the end.
It's not a foregone conclusion that a difficult work
process produces a bad movie."
In spite of the difficulties, Damage may prove to be the
biggest boost to Richardson's career. "I'm glad I
did it," she says. "And now I've done it, I
don't have to do it again." True. And now that she's
done it, she can probably do whatever she wants.
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Created by Clive
Sarney
e-mail to sarneyc@senet.com.au
This page created June 14th, 2001;
last modified June 14th, 2001
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