Miranda Richardson pale, frail, 29 - will not die
young in a limo collision, wear dark glasses to
restaurants or learn to love Betty Ford: she is not a
star. Nor will she appear on Blankety Blank, attend PR
parties or launch a range of cosmetics: she is not a
celebrity. She will continue, unobtrusively, to gather
reviews, respect and reputation by interpreting other
people's fictions, turning up on time and not confusing
art with life: she is an actress. The sort who liked
Shakespeare at school, trained at the Bristol Old Vic and
did rep in Derby, Lancashire and Leicester. The sort who
specialises in neurotic women overwhelmed with Inner
Life; she has the right look for it - somewhere between
cautious and murderous.
She was picked from the shadows for the lead role in a
film by director Mike Newell (Ruth Ellis in Dance with a
Stranger). She portrayed the high-minded, hanged-for-love
club hostess with a dangerous precision. She played a
hysterical Queen Elizabeth I in BBC television's Black
Adder and a hysterical waitress in David Mamet's Edmond
at London's Royal Court Theatre. She made a terrible
horror movie, Underground, which she hopes you will never
see.
Last week she was rehearsing alongside Geraldine McEwan
and Paul McGann under the direction of the Court's Simon
Curtis in A Lie Of The Mind by Sam Shepard. Richardson
plays Beth, the braindamaged victim of her life-damaged
husband,
Jake, in a painful and stupid story about obsession and
betrayal. Shepard calls his piece 'a little legend about
love'; Richardson, who finds herself 'not much good at
deciphering plays', says, 'It's about love, all types of
it, what people say they will do for it, how far they
will actually go. Beth and Jake are like two terrible
children - everyone is affected by what they do. I don't
find her depressing, she's too strong to be just a
victim. If she was just that, they wouldn't be together.
It's a play that travels ridiculous distances - over land
as the characters travel, and also across the gap between
them.
It's very strong on the feeling of people being cut out -
as Beth says she has been. I know that Shepard is
concerned about that Red Indians and what has happened to
them; they've been turned into Disney. The Lie could very
well refer to the lie of the American dream.'
Whatever. It's a tough part to play and to direct
because, even if Beth has her own logic and sees life
more clearly than the other characters at times, she
lives mainly in her bruised mind. But then Miranda
Richardson is an actress with no interest in easy jobs,
still less in playing herself, on the subject of whom she
can be very hard work. Without cues provided by the play
in hand, she does not opine or contend or seduce or tell
jokes or want to say much. Whether through modesty or
irration (she frequently looked as if she might lean over
and pinch me very hard), she tends to answer questions
with sad little trailing
phrases. Would she describe herself as neurotic? 'Depends
on the situation.'
Was she a fan of Shepard's work before the play? 'Not
really.'
Why was Underground a disaster? 'It just was.'
What does her boyfriend do? 'This and that.'
What has she been doing since we last met? 'Didn't you
receive the biography?'
The facts of the life are simple enough. She was born in
Lancashire; attended Southport Girls Grammar; did a
secretarial course. Her parents never asked her when she
might get a real job. She has one sister, eight years
older, who works as a chiropodist. She buys second-hand
clothes; reads and swims and lives in a Forest Hill
(south-east London) maisonette - a gift from her part as
Ruth Ellis, that and a nice jumper - with her Siamese cat
Pearl. She works on her garden all the time to alleviate
the stress that media attention inflicts.
She loathes to be singled out, prefers theatre because it
means working in a team, hates to be photographed ('how
do models do it? What do they latch on to for the feeling
you need to perform?'), and doesn't much care to see
herself on film. She remains astonished at a story she
heard recently about Meryl Streep who apparently prefers
to be filmed alone when other actors aren't strictly
necessary for the shot. To Richardson, the idea of being
that self-contained, that sure of one's self-image is
anathema. 'Acting has to be about change and fluidity,
about being open to new ways of doing something. What I
like about Lie is that all eight characters have
substantial parts and affect each other.'
She likes to act in the US, but cannot see herself
treading the road to movieland; it's too big, she might
get lost, and besides, an LA agent once told her, 'This
town kills talent quicker than you can say knife.'
Thinking she may have made a criticism, she adds, 'But
they work hard over there because the competition is so
strong. The win thing is inbred.' How ambitiousa is she?
'I'm not good at being a bitch but I can be obsessive, I
get furious that I still can't do this job as well as I
should, and scared that people will stop challenging me.'
Miranda Richardson is also scared of the media turning
against her, of the new wave of young hopefuls creeping
up behind and, escaping back to rehearsal, of forgetting
to say the one thing she wanted to say. 'I hope everyone
will come and see the play.' It sounds strangely naive.
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Created by Clive
Sarney
e-mail to sarneyc@senet.com.au
This page created November
6th, 2001; last modified November 6th, 2001
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