SKETCHING
MIRANDA
Thu Dec
19,12:12 PM ET
By Simon Houpt
She's an intense actress both on screen and off, but
playing Virginia Woolf's sister in the new film The Hours
at last lets Miranda Richardson lighten up, SIMON HOUPT
discovers
NEW YORK -- In the realm of supporting film roles, some
are more supportive than others.
The new star-studded adaptation of Michael Cunningham's
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours boasts a cast so
thick with talent that the word is some of the leading
ladies may be bumped to the supporting category in the
coming Oscar race to relieve the pressure in the main
female acting rank.
It's unlikely, then, that Miranda Richardson will be
nominated for an Academy Award, though her character is
certainly one of the most supportive in the film. She
plays the painter Vanessa Bell, the older sister of
Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) who, in the straits of
frequent depression, casts shadows over all who foolishly
stray into her atmosphere. When Vanessa visits Virginia
at her house outside London she is unnerved by her
sister's brittle, alienating behaviour. For Richardson,
who is usually the one playing alienation, Vanessa
represented the chance to offer something a little more
relaxed on screen.
"The brief, if you like, was to be sunshine and
light," says Richardson, 44, leaning on a hotel
boardroom table and doodling to pass the time. "To
be 'blissful mother, free spirit,' with the same
independence of spirit as Virginia but trying to bring a
shaft of sunlight into this rather dank life. Checking up
on her and then being glad to get away. Sort of like:
There but for the grace of God go we . . . because it's
impossible to fulfill what Virginia needs."
In the film, Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway reaches down
through the 20th century to affect a frustrated housewife
(Julianne Moore) in the 1950s and a successful editor
(Meryl Streep) in the late 1990s.
"I think the brilliance of Virginia Woolf's
writing," begins Richardson, pausing to consider her
answer, "is that actually what you're relating to is
a human condition, the difficulty of existence, which on
any given day can strike you, more or less. Today we
maybe feel fairly good about ourselves, and that we're
doing something which we think is important, and in a
flash it can be undermined by -- who knows what? Failed
synapse in the brain or in [Woolf's] case running
depression, clinical depression."
A conversation with Richardson is a live illustration of
that tentative nature of existence. One moment, she is
happily distracted from the present as she describes the
gardens she maintains, a small one at her home in London
and a much larger, rambling landscape at her rural home.
Then in a flash she seems beset by self-doubt, as if she
has just caught sight of herself in a mirror and can't
believe others might care about anything she has to say.
With a smudge of envy, she speaks of the controlled,
minimalist performance by the child actor who plays
Julianne Moore's young son in The Hours. "He seems
to know more about acting than the rest of us!" she
cries suddenly. "He's got the Zen of acting, how not
to do anything. He doesn't do nothing, but he's got
tremendous restraint. He's just effortless. It's what
you're aiming for, and it takes a lifetime!" She
laughs nervously.
Then there's that odd fact of her slippery accent. Born
in Lancashire and trained in Bristol, Richardson has been
itinerant much of her life, moving not just from role to
role but place to place, including many spots in Canada
to shoot films such as Swann, the creepy new Cronenberg
pic Spider and Fallen Angels, which is currently shooting
in Regina from a script based on the Barbara Gowdy novel.
She slides sideways from one accent to another like
Madonna with a hangover.
Richardson's uncertainty means she comes across as tight,
insecure and fatally unable to laugh at herself. When it
is lightheartedly suggested that her doodles might be
sold on eBay if they were left behind for the hotel staff
or stray reporters to pick up, Richardson snaps,
"No," as she rips a sheet off the pad and
stuffs it into her purse. She doesn't seem to realize
it's a joke.
At one point, she takes personal offence to the
suggestion that she sometimes plays characters who could
be seen as psychologically unbalanced, such as her
blazing feature debut 17 years ago as the murderer Ruth
Ellis in Dance with a Stranger, or Vivienne Haigh-Wood in
Tom and Viv, the wife of T.S. Eliot whose hormonal
imbalance caused her to be moody and often cruel toward
her husband. Are they "mad?" The question is
met with stony silence and more doodling.
Want to see the difficulty of existence in action?
Richardson is talking about her belief in the collective
unconscious as a source of inspiration for her acting.
"It means getting into a state of relaxation where
you allow thoughts to occur, where your imagination can
fly and you can empathize with any given character in any
situation," she explains, now drawing horses asses
on her doodle pad. "If you're in someone's brain, if
they're being given expression, I think it is possible
for them to exist. From the time we've been on the
planet, all human experience should filter through. I
think we all contain everybody."
Her shoulders fall slightly. She is already deflated.
"It's just my naive belief," she says without
sounding like she believes it any more.
A moment later, Richardson is packing up her doodles when
she turns around, half apologetically, with a faint hope
of offering an uplifting close to the conversation.
"I hope you got something halfway decent," she
says.
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