Miranda Richardson is sitting in a secluded corner in
one of central London's most discreet hotel lounges, but
that does not stop a starstruck fan approaching her. A
well-dressed man in his sixties, he stammers "I
think you're wonderful, spectacular," before
tentatively asking if he can take a photo of her. Casting
her eyes down in embarrassment, she mumbles "No,
sorry, I don't do that".
This is a woman who jealously protects her privacy.
"I don't feel I should be up for grabs," she
says, pointedly. "Nobody should be, unless they
absolutely set themselves up for it. At best what
performers do is a public service, but that still doesn't
mean you're up for grabs."
Some journalists have found this guardedness frustrating.
She doesn't subject herself to many interviews, and it's
clear that she finds the whole ritual about as
comfortable as an hour on a bed of nails. Epithets such
as "difficult", "cranky" and
"dull" have been attached to her. In one
journalist's assessment, "our Miranda does not give
good interview... She is quite the human clam". I
felt particularly nervous about her comment:
"Although I have objected to the occasional thing
that has been written about me, I've never taken a swing
at anyone. Not yet, anyway."
Without resorting to physical violence, Richardson admits
to wariness around journalists. "Sometimes you're
open with them, and you get horribly traduced," she
sighs (she does a lot of sighing). "I'm deeply bored
by that."
But steer away from her private life - she lives alone in
west London with her cats and an axolotl, since you ask -
and on to the subject of her work and she is transformed
into the "wonderful, spectacular" creature the
fan raved about. Then, much as she does on stage, or
screen, she lifts her gaze and her eyes gleam with
passion.
Richardson's greatest gift as an actress is to clothe
herself so seamlessly in a role that you can no longer
see the join. It is not hard to understand why she has
been described as "Britain's answer to Meryl
Streep".
Think of the scary intensity she brought to such roles as
TS Eliot's disintegrating partner in Tom and Viv,
or the bitterly wronged wife in Damage -
both of which earned her Oscar nominations. One critic
gave her the apt title of "the most combustible
actress of her generation". According to Mike
Newell, who directed her in her memorably deranged debut,
Dance With a Stranger: "She is
someone who lives on her nerves a lot of the time. It's
extremely exposed and very subtle, and comes from very
detailed observation. She is like a windchime - she holds
herself up to all the emotions that are blowing."
Currently, Richardson is captivating audiences with a
portrayal of a seductively right-wing woman in Aunt
Dan and Lemon at the Almeida Theatre in London.
Next week she will be enthralling us in a different
medium with her performance as the mischievous Miss
Gilchrist in All For Love, a lavish BBC1
adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's unfinished novel,
St Ives.
When Richard E Grant's inept soldier tries to woo her
with the line, "Miss Gilchrist, may I say that your
beauty maddens the soul like wine?", she replies
quick as a flash: "No, you may not." As he goes
on to inform her that his first name is Farquhar, she
says "how charming" with as much scorn as it is
humanly possible to inject into two words. Nobody does
withering contempt better.
So just how does she "become" someone else?
"You try to get inside someone's thought process or
under their skin," she explains. "It's to do
with compassion - you have to feel what they feel."
Initially, she found it difficult to work her way into
the psyche of the insidious Aunt Dan - "I said to
Wallace Shawn (the playwright), "this is not like
slipping on a comfy jacket" - but she soon located
the key to the character's wardrobe. "I didn't
suddenly lose a lot of friends and become a raving
lunatic at Speakers' Corner," she laughs. "I
just began thinking about the banality of evil. Monsters
are close to home."
Trained at the Bristol Old Vic, Richardson claims there
is no Method in her method. "I haven't got a house
full of dogs and children, so I've got time to let things
float into my head. There's a point where you fall in
love with whatever you're working on. It just gets into
your mind, and you find yourself muttering lines to
yourself."
Nevertheless, she refutes any suggestion that she becomes
immersed to the exclusion of all else. "I don't go
on living these people. There's too much else going on. I
can leave these characters at the theatre or on the film
set. If I was so wrapped up in them, I'd have been run
over by now."
With her blonde hair scraped back to highlight piercing,
blue-grey eyes and exquisite, porcelain features,
Richardson is an austere beauty who could easily have
made it in Hollywood. But although she has appeared in a
number of well-regarded American indy films - Robert
Duvall's The Apostle, say, or Kansas
City by Robert Altman - the 41-year-old actress
has never responded to Hollywood's advances. She famously
turned down the part which Glenn Close eventually took in
Fatal Attraction, succinctly pronouncing it
"crap".
"Those sorts of parts demonise women," she says
in a tone that brooks no contradiction. "I don't
know what it would have taken for me to become mainstream
Hollywood, but I don't think for a moment it would have
suited me. Anyway, where are the scripts? They're usually
pretty disappointing."
Hollywood's demands for a "star persona",
easily recyclable in film after film, would also have
vitiated against the element that distinguishes all
Richardson's performances: surprise. So often her roles
jolt audiences with a short, sharp shock. "I want to
surprise myself," she says. "I'd get bored if I
was always the same thing. There are people who virtually
play themselves every time. They're loved for that, and
that's what people expect. I'm not one of those
people."
Next she is looking to play someone "if not fluffy,
then at least charming - because Aunt Dan is certainly
not charming". A comedy would not go amiss. One of
Richardson's finest hours was as the deliciously batty
Queenie in Richard Curtis and Ben Elton's BBC1 sitcom Blackadder.
"It was just bonkers," she recalls fondly.
"The scripts had a very tight balance between
Richard's gloriously detailed historical almost-truths
and Ben's not-quite toilet humour."
Even in her darkest work, Richardson has always tried to
let in flashes of humour. "That shows a roundness of
experience," she says. "Those moments of
lightness and irony punctuate anyone's existence. In
comedy are the seeds of tragedy, and vice versa."
Zealous about her work, Richardson can make for intense
company. For all that, she possesses a dry-as-dust sense
of humour which every once in a while she allows to seep
through. She reveals, for instance, that the unsettling
nature of Aunt Dan and Lemon has got to
the cast. "Everyone has been having disturbed sleep
and bad dreams. We've all been clobbered by the
weightiness of this play." She pauses before adding
with immaculate timing: "Maybe it's just the
drugs."
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Created by Clive
Sarney
e-mail to sarneyc@senet.com.au
This page created August
21st, 2001; last modified August 21st, 2001
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