A
WOMAN OF CHARACTER
The Daily
Telegraph - December 31st, 2002
By Daisy Garnett
In her new films Miranda Richardson plays a tart, a
saintly housewife,a psychopathic housekeeper and Virginia
Woolf's sister. No wonder there's talk of an Oscar
nomination. Daisy Garnett meets the actress in New York
What the hell happened to Miranda Richardson? She was
often - always - acclaimed as the best, most interesting
actress of her generation.
She became famous all at once in 1985 for her astonishing
performance as Ruth Ellis in Mike Newell's Dance
With a Stranger, which she made when she was
just 25 (after seeing it Steven Spielberg immediately
hired her for his next film, Empire of the Sun).
And of course she is well known and much loved for her
inspired comic performances, most notably as Queenie in Blackadder
II. She has been nominated for two Oscars: one
for her role as Jeremy Irons's wife in Damage
(1992) - a film in which she was the only true thing -
and the second for her performance as TS Eliot's wife
Vivien in Tom and Viv (1994).
In the year that Damage came out
Richardson also starred in Neil Jordan's The
Crying Game and Mike Newell's Enchanted
April. In one she played a lying, cheating,
anger-fuelled, sexually predatory IRA terrorist, and in
the other she played dear Rose Arbuthnot, who was none of
those things at all. At the time, defending her choice to
make quality work (back in the late 1980s she turned down
the Glenn Close role in Fatal Attraction,
and has had to account for it in interviews ever since),
she said, 'The most important thing to me is that people
love my work. I have nothing against being in films that
make money. If I can combine doing the work I like with
making enough money to have a nice lifestyle, that's the
best possible thing. And to tell you the truth, I think
I've got that combination right now. These films were
satisfying to do, and they're doing well at the box
office.'
Why couldn't Miranda Richardson have been able to say
that every year since the early 1990s? Over the past
decade she has made respectable choices, appearing in
films of great quality and working with people such as
Robert Altman, Tim Burton, Mike Nichols, Wallace Shawn,
Robert Duvall, Shirley MacLaine, Jennifer Jason Leigh and
Jim Broadbent. But she has been in a lot of films - some
of them potentially good ones that didn't quite get it
right: Kansas City (1996) for example,
and Sleepy Hollow (1999) - that not too
many people saw, and more's the pity.
Now, at long last, she is again in a film that an awful
lot of people will want to see: The Hours.
The dream team that made it (Stephen Daldry directing a
screenplay by David Hare, adapted from a best-selling,
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham that
was inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and is
partly about Woolf herself) guarantees an audience, never
mind the quality of the finished product. In case that
isn't enough, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole
Kidman star, and the supporting cast includes Ed Harris,
Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Stephen
Dillane and Eileen Atkins. Richardson plays Woolf's
sister, the painter Vanessa Bell.
I speak to Richardson in New York, where she is busy
doing television and press interviews to promote The
Hours, while on her way to Canada to begin
making a smaller film, Falling Angels.
We meet, however, on Richardson's own time in her hotel
room high over Central Park. We are to talk not only
about The Hours but also about Spider,
David Cronenberg's adaptation of Patrick McGrath's novel
about murder, paranoia and memory.
In the film Richardson plays three characters, all
recalled, often in confusion, by Ralph Fiennes's lone and
unstable Spider, who spends his days writing down
fractured recollections while marooned in a London
halfway house. Richardson is, as always, remarkable in Spider,
which is a difficult film, and unlikely to be a
mainstream hit. Still, Richardson is proud of it, and
justly so. Word is she will be nominated again for an
Oscar. Wouldn't it be fabulous if she won? 'I did enjoy
doing it. I really did,' she says brightly. 'You know,
you feel like you are flexing your muscles. Stuff to do.
Plus, David is a lovely director because he is so calm.
He doesn't like rehearsal, he's just excited to see what
you are going to do.' That must be stimulating for
someone like her, I say, a blank canvas. 'It is,' she
says. 'From the age of four I've always thought I was
supposed to know everything. I was always shy about
asking questions. So I suppose his way of working felt
very normal for me.' She pauses. 'I'm learning to ask
more questions.'
This is typical of Miranda Richardson. She speaks in
clipped sentences, cutting herself off short, not minding
about making herself clear or simplifying her statements.
I had read that she practises the art of biting the heads
off journalists when they come to interview her, but she
is not ratty or cross with me. On the one hand, she is
relaxed: dressed in black trousers and trainers, she sits
with her feet up on the sofa, and immediately asks me
about myself with an easy and curious intimacy. Nor does
she have any nervous twitches, at least not physically.
No, she sits languidly, leaning back, radiantly beautiful
and blond, with that famous skin, those cheekbones and
those intense pale blue eyes. But on the other, there are
her answers: always concise, sometimes to the point of
being meaningless and incomplete, sometimes searingly
honest - and also incomplete. Many of her answers are
accompanied by laughter, which is high-pitched, frequent
and disconcerting.
For example: I ask her how she came to play Queenie in Blackadder
II. Was it simply a matter of wowing Ben Elton
and Richard Curtis, the show's writers, at an audition?
'Two times in my life people have made connections and
I've no idea why,' she says. 'But I'm incredibly grateful
to them. I had just done Dance With a Stranger,
and somebody called me to audition for Queen Elizabeth.
Why? Weird. So that's that.' That's that? That's all I
get? I try for more. Did she come up with Queenie's
high-pitched, infantile voice of steel in the audition, I
ask her, or was it something she worked out with her
collaborators on set? 'I remember feeling a little wacky
in the audition, so I probably tried something,' she
says, trying to be helpful. 'I also added a line and I
remember Richard Curtis sitting there saying, "I
don't remember that." And that was sort of that.'
See: it is information all right, but it is not very
informative information. But she can be candid if she
tries. She tells me about the second 'connection'
straightforwardly enough, which was when the American
sketch show Saturday Night Live asked
her to host one of its episodes, after seeing her work in
Damage. 'I thought, "Sorry? I don't
get the connection" - but what a relief. They pitch
skits to you and they gave me a song and I went,
"OK," and then you realise just how much you've
got to achieve in three days rehearsal and one night of
live filming. Still,' she says, 'it was a pretty classy
episode. It was when Mike Myers was working there and
Adam Sandler.' Is it hard in general, I ask her, finding
people to work with who are up to her speed? 'I think I'm
always worried that I'm going to come across as stupid or
ill equipped,' she says. Really? 'Yes, yes,' she says
briskly, and as an afterthought adds, 'Maybe that's what
you have to do to make yourself better or something.'
Well, I say, her standards are very high. 'Yeah,' she
says. 'Yeah.'
It is, of course, not so easy to have and retain high
standards if you are a female actor of any age, but
particularly if you are over 40. Richardson is 44. I ask
her how she deals with the work being so limiting, the
offers less and less enticing or forthcoming the older
and more experienced she becomes. Because, after all, she
can do pretty much anything, and is well known for being
something of a chameleon. One critic described her face
as being like an 'English sky' because of the way it
could express so many mood shifts, and as Richard Eyre -
who directed Richardson a number of times at the National
Theatre - once put it, 'she has a capacity for being
possessed by a character. Even her features change.'
'It is something that affects me, yes, certainly,' she
says about the general lack of good roles for women.
'That's why, though I don't want to make a habit of it,
I'm more likely to take a smaller role, as long as it is
incredibly high quality and the rest of the actors are
good.' Like accepting the part of Bell in The
Hours? It must be hard to watch Nicole Kidman, a
brazen, redheaded Australian playing Virginia Woolf, if
she knows that the part should be hers. 'It would have
been nice to have been approached, at least, for one of
the leads,' Richardson says ruefully. 'I didn't manage to
feel settled on that set, really. I was on the back foot
for it. I told Stephen how frustrated I was by that. I
felt uneasy on the shoot and I wish I'd been on it for
three weeks [she was hired for eight days], because it
felt pressurised and a bit strange. It wasn't Stephen's
fault, because he was cheery on set. It's just I felt
not-connected.'
Richardson, though, is a working actor, and her job, to
hear her talk about it, does not seem glamorous. When
asked about working on location, for example, she laughs.
'It can be very isolating doing this business,' she says.
'I'm not moaning about it, but it is a fact. You swap
stories of times spent in ghastly little apartments in
parts of the globe going, "Where am I?" It's
quite tragic really,' she says cheerfully. 'Like trying
to open a can of soup with a penknife. I don't know.
That's just one story. But you have not to dwell on it.
You have to make the best of it.'
Richardson grew up in southport, Lancashire. Her father
was a marketing executive, her mother a housewife and she
has a sister eight years her senior. As a child she
wanted to be a farmer or a vet, but she knew she'd only
cry at an animal's distress, rather than being able to
husband it calmly or help it.
Later, when she was 14, a good English teacher encouraged
her in her reading and writing, and that led her to study
drama at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, but until then
she did not burn to act. She nearly went to university to
study English, is still a voracious reader and 'dabbles'
in writing herself. Is acting enough? Will it sustain her
for another ten, 20, 30 years? 'I think so now,' she
replies. 'But I was very, very restless a few years ago.'
Why? 'I think because I always want more, or something. I
don't know. I'm on a quest somehow. Something more and
different.' Did something change to make her less
restless? 'I just sort of gradually realised that I'm
lucky to be doing what I'm doing. It came to me. It's
coming to me. That you can change having a negative
attitude towards yourself, and the way you do that is by
changing your position - shifting the molecules. It's as
simple as that.'
Perhaps I am making Richardson sound too gloomy. She is
not. She is so luminous she couldn't be. Nothing she says
is delivered with self-pity. She doesn't act in an
interview at all, doesn't turn on any charm. She is
thoughtful and interesting and often funny and she
doesn't assume a thing. We are strangers and so when talk
gets personal she is perhaps spiky, but when she is on
other subjects she is warm and responsive and generous.
'Oh look,' she says, jumping up from the sofa and running
to the window. 'These might be peregrines.' A bird of
prey is swooping over Central Park. 'I think it is a
falcon,' she says. 'Though it feels a bit loose, its
flight. They are incredibly muscular, peregrines. Oh
please come back,' she begs, before sitting down again.
Richardson practises falconry and loves birds and animals
of all kinds. 'If I wasn't acting,' she says, 'I would
want to be involved in wildlife of some shape or form.'
She has a house in the West Country, where her parents
are originally from, to which she goes when she is not in
London, and where she lives with her two cats, her dog
and an axolotl, which is an animal a bit like a big newt,
and which is kept in a cold-water tank. She lives alone.
I ask her whether she'd like to have children. 'I'm just
now getting the point of it all,' she says. 'Completely
behind!' Well, I say, it's not like there is a timetable.
'Well,' she says, 'there is. There is.' And of course she
is right. She is 44. 'Still, it is getting better now,'
she adds with more cheer, though it is not entirely clear
to what she is referring.
It is getting better now. After the past few restless
years, with luck we will see more of Richardson in the
next many. She can be seen in The Hours,
playing the sunniest character in the film: 'One in the
eye,' she says laughing, 'for everyone who says,
"Oh, you're so dark."' And she can be seen
three times over in Spider, as a
platinum-blond black-toothed tart, as an angelic,
victimised wife and mother, and as a Mrs Danvers-type
housekeeper.
She is mesmerising as all. What would she like to do
next? 'A stomping, big, fabulously written romantic
comedy,' she says with conviction. 'Let's put that out
into the ether.' Let's.
Return to Articles index
Return to Main Page
Created by Clive
Sarney
e-mail to webmaster
This page created July
30th, 2003; last modified August 01, 2003
|