Where other young actresses of the moment might have in tow a brooding boyfriend or a flapping agent, Felicity Jones travels alone, merely pulling a bulky black suitcase behind her, all ready and neatly packed (you just know it) for her journey to Stoke-on-Trent. This trek to the Midlands and back to London has shaped her life for the past three weeks while she is shooting a northern-soul love story called Souled Out in Stoke’s Kings Hall, which still keeps the faith with revival nights. The original temple, the Wigan Casino, burnt down in 1982. “That was tragic,” she says with feeling. “It was where people came at weekends to live their whole lives.”
Conservatively – almost primly – dressed in high-necked jumper and black trousers, she is an unlikely girl to be bemoaning the end of a working-class youth culture. Right now, however, she is in flight from her own rounded vowels, and Shimmy Marcus’s film is a temporary passport to a different sort of performance. “You can get trapped in middle-class drama,” she says. “Actually, it’s a shame that all the gritty stories seem to be about the working class. There’s not that much contemporary stuff about middle-class life.” What she likes about the movie – apart from the fact that the really gruelling dance moves were reserved for the boys – is that her character, Mandy, falls for the brilliant dancer, rather than the other way round. “He takes on that traditional feminine role of being the desired object, and she is just watching him.”
Jones talks like any 24-year-old about the new Duffy and Moloko videos featuring northern soul – though, with her precise diction and unusual poise, you can’t imagine her twirling on a talc-strewn dancefloor (twirling a parasol, maybe), wired on American dance music and ampheta-mines. Then again, to millions she is the scarlet woman of Ambridge, Emma Grundy (or Emmurrr, as she calls her, sliding into her rural burr), so she’s more than capable of it. “I was never extrovert as a child,” she says, never a performer or a show-off, and still isn’t. She has the startling prettiness of a girl not trying: long straight hair, elfin features, leaf-green, almond-shaped eyes, just the sort of beauty to have made those clodhopping Grundy boys fools for love.
In person, she seems knowing and smart, mature beyond her years, even while looking as fresh as a child; she has often been cast as younger characters brimming with teenage passions and ideals. In last year’s ITV Northanger Abbey she played Catherine Morland, the shy romantic country girl unleashed on Bath society; and in Julian Jar-rold’s new film of Brideshead Revisited she is batty Lady Cordelia Flyte, pious as a morning prayer. Andrew Davies, who scripted both projects (the latter with Jeremy Brock), has fallen under her spell, though he jokes that he was disappointed by her educated sophistication, her unusual grown-upness, when they met.
As the scheming Edmee in Stephen Frears’s new film of Colette’s 1920 demimonde novel, Cheri, she plays the woman the eponymous hero marries while still obsessed with the older courtesan Lea (Michelle Pfeiffer). “She’s not terribly likeable, really. But I admire the way she subtly takes this man and undermines his relationship with the older woman.” Was she thrilled to work with Frears? “The great thing about Stephen is his humility. He spends a lot of time saying, ‘I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing’, when of course he does really.” And Pfeiffer is recalled only as “a very nice sort of woman” with whom she shared a scene and a restroom in Paris where they filmed, and where Jones plans to move one day.
But it is as Emma that 4m Archers fans love and loathe her, a young woman the Horlicks brigade wrote in to denounce as a strumpet. “That was quite hard to take,” she smiles. For the uninitiated, Emma married decent Will the gamekeeper, having slept with his wild-child brother Ed on her hen night, then ditched Will, then Ed, then won Ed back. She laughs. “You never know what’s going to happen next to Emma. I like her.” Jones was picked for the role as a schoolgirl – auditioning and chatting to the producers in a bumpkin accent that fooled them – and continued while an undergraduate at Wadham College, Oxford. She turned down parties to rise at dawn and travel to the BBC’s Birmingham studios, but never let it interfere with her Bodleian assignations. “My friends would be going out, but I’d have to say, ‘Sorry, guys, I have to get up early tomorrow.’ It wasn’t a problem.” Were they impressed? “Not really – but their parents were.”
Jones was brought up in Birmingham. She started acting at 11 at the suggestion of her father. “The choice was that or going to football with him and my brother.” At 12 she was cast in The Treasure Seekers, an ITV adaptation of E Nesbit’s sequel to The Railway Children, and over the next five years the idea of acting “crept up” on her, encouraged by the example of her uncle, the actor Michael Hadley. What advice had he given her? “Try not to please other people with your decisions about what you do. It’s the hardest thing.”
She is not actually as posh as she seems. She attended a local comprehensive, then grammar school for sixth form, but took long breaks for filming, which must have nurtured her fierce independence; she was also tutored on set, cramming between shooting scenes of the children’s series The Worst Witch, in which she played Ethel Hallow, the spoilt goody-goody. In the run-up to her A-levels, she was living in a flat in Richmond – “I was 17, old enough to look after myself” – filming its sequel, Weirdsister College, and relying on a tutor. Such scenarios rarely lead to academic distinction, but Jones describes her “strange diligence”, her determination that she would do well in both arenas. “I don’t know why I’m like that,” she laughs, “nobody else in my family is.” Nor does she understand why acting became so important: “It’s a complex thing why I want to spend my Brideshead Revisited opens on Friday life being other people. I think about it. I just don’t know.”
Certainly, Waugh’s tale of unhinged Catholic aristocrats is far from the West Midlands professional classes: Jones is perfect as the deeply good Cordelia, with her plaits and earnest questions about the modern world, and doesn’t mind a bit that she appears only glancingly in her first film. “It was nice to do something so small, to have a ‘dip-your-toe-in’ experience.” The novel’s atmosphere of languorous picnics on the banks of the Cherwell filled her with “a quite horrid nostalgia for Oxford”, where she read English and nobody vomited through her study window. Who would dare? “The nugget of Waugh’s Oxford is still there. It’s so beautiful, you have to pinch yourself. I remember one morning, walking through the snow past one of the chapels, I was so happy, so lucky, to be there. It was my Oxford moment.” But her real literary heroes are the Russians, especially Tolstoy, for the huge sweep of history and politics. Would she like to play Anna Karenina? No, she replies, precisely: too passive.
Despite her friendliness, there is something distant about the charming Miss Jones. Maybe it’s not having arrived with a drama-school group for company. “If you don’t go to one,” she agrees, “I guess you are a bit on your own.” But I think her self-reliance goes deeper. Her parents divorced when she was young, involving a sadness that has made her, as an actress, more than just a talented, clever girl who has enjoyed good looks and better luck. “When you have an experience like parents splitting up, it stops your life developing in the normal ways. You see things differently when you don’t have the security of two parents, even though mine have been totally committed and loving. Not having the most secure childhood makes you aware of – it sounds a bit grandiose – a sadness in human experience.”
In her real life, which doesn’t sound remotely sad, she shares a London flat with “nonactors”; at weekends she pulls on her wellies and strolls across Hampstead Heath with her artist boyfriend. “It’s quite a London thing to do, isn’t it?” she smiles, as if still enchanted by the idea of living in the big city. And she has confidence. When the Don-mar’s director, Michael Grandage, auditioned her to play the precocious 16-year-old Laurel in last summer’s hit revival of The Chalk Garden, he simply asked if she had it “in her” to do a part driven by complex, intricate language and requiring expert timing. She looked him straight in the eye and in her quiet voice – she gulps in recollection of the nerve it took – replied that, yes, she did, absolutely.
Working so closely with the two veteran actresses Marga-ret Tyzack (who proclaimed Jones a “ripe” young star) and Penelope Wilton was like being at a particularly elite and exacting drama school. “It felt like a two-year course crammed into two and a half weeks. Maggie Tyzack would come offstage and say, ‘Now wait, just give it an extra beat before you deliver the next line. It’ll give it an extra push.’ She was always right.” In the past, Jones has claimed her heroine is the consummate fragile beauty Vivien Leigh, whom she rather resembles, except that she is the sanest actor you ever met. But today she picks another inspiration, Julianne Moore, whom she has been studying closely in Boogie Nights. “I just love her... it’s the quietness.” And for the younger, equally restrained and thoughtful actress, you can see just where the attraction lies.
Source:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article4820290.ece
Thanks for the article! The media loves to hail the English Roses, but very insightful all the same!
