Miranda Richardson is telling me how relaxed she
recently has become, how optimistic she now is.
She enumerates the things she is going to do from now on:
"Not get so frazzled about things. Look after my
health. Assume everything's going to be all right. Assume
I will get work." Her high, clear voice is clipped
smaller with each item. "Trusting," she says.
"Trusting to life. That's the thing." At this
point something flips. She switches to a squeaky,
comic-cartoon voice with all the stresses in the wrong
place: " It sounds wankEEE. I kno-ow." Then
embarrassment gives way to superstitious dread. She
starts talking at double speed. "Probably something
dreadful will happen tomorrow, and I'll wish I never said
it." Pause. Sudden flatness. "So that's kind of
it, really." Then comes the urge to flee. "I'm
going to have to go," she says, puts on her coat and
bolts.
Miranda Richardson is not a scatterbrain. She is an
actress of formidable intelligence and power. The
skittishness and vague, nervous chatter she exhibits to
journalists are indications not of feeble-mindedness but
of her revulsion against the whole meretricious - but,
for actors, inescapable - business of putting one's
personality on show. "Good luck!" she said to
me as I got out my tape recorder, as though I were a
surgeon and she the patient on whom I was about to
conduct a difficult and rather disgusting operation of
which the outcome was uncertain.
On her own ground, a stage or a filmset, she knows
exactly what she's doing and she does it with a sureness
and intensity that her audiences and colleagues alike
find breathtaking: Neil Jordan, in whose film The
Crying Game she played a IRA terrorist, found
himself actually frightened watching her act a scene in
which she pistol-whips a hostage. "It shocked me.
The way she did it was so rapid and callous." In
Louis Malle's film, Damage, her
character breaks down - for once the phrase is exact - on
hearing of her son's death and husband's betrayal.
Previously a secure and self-satisfied upper-middle-class
wife, she is reduced to a state of grovelling misery,
self-mutilating, howling. "Everybody came in
prepared to work and work," says Richardson.
"They were thinking, 'This is difficult. We've got a
difficult day.' But in fact it was the most fluid part of
the film." How it came so easily she can't or won't
explain. "Don't know. Lap of the gods."
The gods' gift to her have been lavish. Bill Nicholson -
in whose television play Sweet As You Are she
played the wife of a man diagnosed with HIV - compares
her to Anthony Hopkins. "She's an incredibly
exiting, dangerous actress, not somebody who operates
within conventional limits." Richare Eyre, who has
directed her on stage in David Mamet's Edmond
and in The Changeling, she resembles
Maggie Smith. "She has her seriousness, her
fastidiousness, her sense of privacy and her ability to
transform herself." To Neil Jordan, she is "
one of the best actresses working in England, or
anywhere". Stephen Poliakoff, in whose new film, Century,
she plays the heroine, sees her as having "the
sensuality of Helen Mirren, and the formidable quality of
Bette Davies - and that's a pretty pungent mixture."
To Richard Curtis, co-writer of Blackadder,
she is, quite simply, "a genius".
She is, sometimes, ravishingly beautiful. She has a wide
face and a high brow, large pale eyes and exquisitely
fine fair skin which, when she is performing, seems
almost transparent. Every emotion shows through. But she
is also a chameleon. When I met her she was heavily
made-up - armoured, perhaps, against journalistic
intrusion - and looked, for all the little-girl pigtails,
glamorous in a disappointingly ordinary way. Her ability
to change herself is notorious. Some time after she had
starred in his play, Bill Nicholson, watching an episode
of Blackadder, found himself riveted by
the Dadaist comic violence of the actress playing Queen
Elizabeth I. It was only when the credits came up that he
realised it was Richardson. At the premiere of The
Crying Game, Neil Jordan failed to recognise
her. I have always thought of her as being thin-lipped,
my mental image of her founded on Simon Gray's dazzling
black comedy After Pilkington, in which
her entire face and body seemed consumed and etiolated by
homicidal battiness. Meeting her I was surprised to
notice that her mouth is, in fact, seductively large and
full. "She has a capacity for being possessed by a
character," says Richard Eyre. "Even her
features change."
She grew up in Southport, a seaside town in Lancashire.
Her paternal grandfather had once been known for singing
"West Country ditties" on the radio. Her mother
belonged to an amateur opera group. While she was still
at school she discovered that acting was "something
I could do, it had an effect". She went to the
Bristol Old Vic drama school and worked in provincial rep
until Dance with a Stranger made her, at
the age of twenty-five, an instant star.
Mike Newell, the film's director, was looking for an
unknown actress to play Ruth Ellis, the nightclub hostess
who shot her lover and hung for it. "We'd seen a
great many people, all of whom were wonderful, and none
of whom was right. People kept telling me there was this
girl in rep somewhere. We arranged to see her. She walked
in. She had a very highly charged sexual presence. She
could act. She was it." Newell gave her her big
break but he insists, "nobody has any right in
Miranda. Nobody made her; she made herself."
All Richardson's colleagues praise her intelligence, her
attention to detail. "I've got a reasonable brain,
which I think is important," she says. "But
hopefully I'm dealing with instincts as well."
Richard Eyre describes how she works like a novelist,
taking the clues a script provides to build up a
complete, autonomous character, sometimes one
considerably more complex and interesting than its writer
intended. "It's all in the script," says
Richardson. " That's the base line you keep coming
back to. But it's between the lines as well as what the
lines actually say." Bill Nicholson was as surprised
as he was gratified to see what she made of her role in Sweet
As You Are. "I thought I'd just written a
nice wife." In Richardson's performance that
"nice wife" went on a journey through the
valley of the shadow of death - her husband is HIV
positive, she is waiting for the result of her own test -
which is mesmerisingly painful to watch. In Damage
she took another nice-wife role and made something tragic
out of almost nothing. "You should have seen the
script," says Leslie Caron, who was also in the
cast. "All she had was 'Pass the salt' and 'Have you
brushed your teeth, darling?" From such banal
material she managed to create the most vital and
emotionally persuasive character in the whole film, a
feat that won her an Oscar nomination.
"I never know how to talk about how I work,"
she says. She appears to enter into a character - or
allow a character to enter into her - to an extraordinary
extent. Making Dance with a Stranger -
nine weeks of filming during which she worked every day,
learning how to act for the cameras as she went along -
would have been gruelling for anyone, but it affected her
doubly, as though she felt not only her own exhaustion
but also Ruth Ellis's pain. "I'd moved to a strange
flat to be near where we were filming. I was quite
isolated. Afterwards I was completely run down,
physically, mentally, everything. I did the publicity
tour feeling as if I were on another planet."
Sometimes this capacity for entering another
consciousness can be liberating. On the set of an Italian
film where everything was going wrong, a very famous
lighting-cameraman got taken by the throat. My character
wore a red wig and that gave me the right to be
angry." But it is also perilous, not something to be
lightly discussed. "Nobody knows how she does
it," says Mike Newell. "She translates her
material into something incredibly private and
secret." It's a process she herself feels to be
dangerous. "You need a core from which to work.
Otherwise you might as well be a drug addict, really.
You'll overdose."
That core is very carefully guarded. "I don't answer
questions about my private life," she says, and that
applies to everyone, not just journalists. "She an
extraordinary elusive person," says Richard Eyre,
and he is one of her close friends. Her transparency in
performance, her capacity for allowing every emotion to
register on her face, is balanced by an extreme reticence
offstage, She lives alone in an outer-London maisonette
bought with the money she earned from Dance with
a Stranger, and keeps cats. She doesn't deny
that she has a love life but she makes it plain that it
is none of my business - or yours. Richard Eyre reports
that she can be "quite larky. She's witty, she
laughs a lot. She's a joiner-in, not a wallflower at
all," But those who know her less well find her
almost alarmingly reserved. She's not a temperamental
grande dame. On set she is workmanlike and supportive of
her fellow actors, "A good sport", as Leslie
Caron reports. But there is not a lot of chitchat,
perhaps because she is too clever and too charged up to
submit patiently to the time-wasting flimflam of everyday
social intercourse.
Stephen Poliakoff ridicules "the cliché about
Miranda being 'a very private person'", but even he
concedes that she can be formidable. "She has her
own way of coping with the world. She'll bark out a
question: 'who's your best friend?' or 'How old are you?'
and it's not just gallantry that stops one asking 'Well,
how old are you?'. You just don't do that to
Miranda." When he did once ask her,
conversationally, what her next job would be, she
snapped, "is this an interview?" - a stinging
snub, coming from her. "That combustible feel she
has on screen isn't manufactured," he says.
"It's in her. You never quite know what's going to
come out."
Not all her pleasures are secret. She likes pottering at
home and eating buttered muffins. She is an intermittent
shop-aholic, "then I get sick of myself. There's a
puritanical side to me which says there really isn't
anything I need, and if I'm in town I'll go straight
home." She an enthusiastic and talented gardener, an
amateur falconer and an occasional bird-watcher. On
holiday with Richard Eyre in Scotland once she decamped
day after day to watch an osprey which has settled in a
nearby nature reserve. She is also an avid reader. Her
taste is for the gothic, the mystical and the poetic. Sam
Shepard's The Lie of the Mind - which
ran at the Royal Court - is her favourite among the plays
in which she has appeared. For pleasure she reads William
Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Michael Ondaatje - her
latest find - Patrick White and Margaret Atwood. Her
musical tastes are catholic, but again she has a
recognisable preference for the intellectual and
aesthetic refinement. She adores Benjamin Britten. She
also litstens to Gregorian chant, jazz - especially Chet
Baker - and Steely Dan.
These are sophisticated preferences. There is nothing
facile about Miranda Richardson. As an actress she never
takes the easy way out. "She has no clichés,"
says Richard Curtis. "We saw about 100 people when
we were casting Queenie and every one was a version of a
cliché except for her." "She is literally
incapable of playing a generalised emotion," says
Richard Eyre. "Everything she does is extraordinary
detailed. That's what gives it its clarity." Her
first leading role, back in her days in rep, was Sophia
Western, the sweet, pretty heroine of Tom Jones.
Looking back, she reflects that it was almost the only
time she has played a straightforward, good-girls sort of
role. "Maybe I can't do the ordinary. I don't know
what you need. Longer hair? Bigger tits? A gravely
voice?" And less subtlety, perhaps. As she says,
"Maybe to do those people what you ought to do is
not think so hard."
She never tries to ingratiate herself. "Most people,
especially women, especially in this profession, are out
to please," says Bill Nicholson. "With her
that's not the deal. She doesn't seem in the least bit
interested in whether you like her or not. It's quite
intimidating. And I've not idea whether it's a sign of
strength or a great big defence." Similarly, as an
actress she has plenty of proper pride, but no vanity. In
Damage she stripped off her nightdress
to display her naked body - a courageous gesture, not so
much because her figure is a little less than perfect as
because she was asking at it, not - a in the case in
ninety-nine per cent of the nude scenes - as an object of
desire, but as something rejected, pathetic. When I asked
her whether she has had any hesitation over accepting the
part of a woman some ten years older than herself, she
answered entirely in terms of the technical challenge
such a role presented, as though looking youthful and
lovely is just something she does when the job requires
it.
She has chosen roles with an eye more to extending her
range than to promoting her career. "I've tried to
achieve the versatility of theatre on film," she
says. She likes black comedy. "I see comic elements
in all sorts of things - makes me a sick person I
suppose." And she enjoys playing multiple
personalities, such as the hit-woman-cum-disguise-artist
in The Crying Game. This may have
something to do with her own psychological make-up.
"When I walk down the street I never feel alone. I
don't mean that people are noticing me. They may or they
may not. I'm just not alone. Divided self or something.
Sometimes it's comforting. Sometimes it isn't."
The one time she did a film just for the money she was
miserable: "It's like the finger of the Lord, It was
a horrible experience," Though she doesn't name the
film, I deduce it must have been The Bachelor,
directed by Roberto Fienze, an Italian period-production
in which Richardson played opposite Keith Carradine. She
is chary of labelling herself a feminist but she turned
down the offer of the role in Fatal Attraction
eventually played by Glenn Close because "it was a
deeply regressive film. I do make political choices in my
work. And in the work place if I feel condescended to I
react against that." She is also said to have turned
down the female lead in David Mamet's Oleanna
- which ran to rave reviews in New York and opens next
month at the Royal Court - because she felt it to be
misogynistic.
She has played a victim of brain damage, a boil encrusted
mutant, a comically demented queen, two civilian
murderesses, one terrorist and a long line of snappish,
difficult women. Even in Die Kinder, the
television series in which she was a mother desperate to
retrieve her kidnapped children, she avoided easy
softness, recognising that a woman under such a strain
would be as much the irritable shrew as the grieving
madonna. Her performances are compelling, not because she
sets out to attract us, but - on the contrary - because
of their rigorous integrity.
In Century, for almost the first time
since she did Sophia Western in rep, she plays a proper
heroine. She has had plenty of leading roles, and few
would argue with Stephen Poliakoff's assertion that in Dance
with a Stranger and After Pilkington
she gave "two of the best screen performances of the
Eighties" but, for all her beauty, she has seldom
been cast as a romantic attraction. Her character in Century
is by no means all big tits, long hair and a gravelly
voice. She is a medical researcher, an emancipated woman
who, in 1900 when such things were not done, has had an
illegitimate child and is determined that her love affair
- with a young doctor played by Clive Owen - should be
conducted on her own terms. But for once Richardson has
been given the opportunity to display a warmth and a
sensuality for which there has been little place in her
previous roles. "I get the impression Miranda's
feeling very confident now," says Poliakoff,
"There's a real zing around the studio whenever
she's there. It's as though she feels ready to take her
rightful place at last." That place, he believes -
and I agree - is at the top of her profession:
"Britain's answer to Glenn Close and Meryl
Streep". She's a real movie star," says Leslie
Caron, who should know. All of a sudden a lot of people
are discovering that they feel just the way Mike Newell
felt when, eight years after Dance with a
Stranger, he worked with her again on Enchanted
April. "She was full of authority, She knew
just what she was doing. Best of all," he says,
"I found I adored looking at her,"
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