Hollywood can wait
Telegraph
April 14, 2007
At 24, Romola Garai's film career is gathering momentum - so why is she putting it on hold to spend a year with the RSC? Jasper Rees meets her
Hollywood agents are notorious for advising beautiful young actresses to give a wide berth to theatre. "Nothing," they presumably tell clients who are thinking of doing the classics on stage, "will come of 10 per cent of nothing." Oh to have been a fly on the wall, then, when rising star Romola Garai - who has already racked up big-screen roles in I Capture the Castle, Amazing Grace, and Woody Allen's latest film - confessed her desire to spend a year away from the camera.
Period pieces: clockwise from top left, Romola Garai with Ian McKellen in King Lear; with Richard Goulding in rehearsal for The Seagull; in Angel; and as Barbara Wilberforce in Amazing Grace
As part of Trevor Nunn's globetrotting Royal Shakespeare Company double bill, she is playing Cordelia to Ian McKellen's King Lear and Nina to Frances Barber's Arkadina in The Seagull.
"To be fair," she says, "the minute everybody could see the expression on my face, the conversation was over. Even the most materialistic agents want the people they represent to be happy. So I told them, 'This will make me so happy.' "
When we meet in the café of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, The Seagull is still in rehearsal while King Lear is already playing in preview. Owing to an injury to Barber, critics won't see either performance until the end of May but Garai gives a heart-wrenching account of a youngest daughter's rift and reconciliation with her father in King Lear. Yet Cordelia, who is absent for most of the play, was not the role that lured her here.
"The problem with playing Cordelia is that you feel quite alienated from the majority of discussion in the play," she says. "It's very hard to find and establish a character if essentially you have only three scenes. But The Seagull has been by far the best working experience of my life. I probably won't ever do anything as good as playing this part with this director and this cast."
advertisementIt seems premature for Garai to be considering the rest of her career as a downward curve from this point. Though she has been acting since she was 16, when she was plucked from a school casting session to play the sax-blowing younger incarnation of Judi Dench in The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, she is still only 24.
The rapid early flowering of her career no doubt explains her burning desire to play Nina, an actress fired by ambition for acclaim and, when that tragically evades her, for the chance to produce great art. "Expressing that is a very moving thing for somebody of my age and sex who's trying to do the same thing," says Garai. "It's a great role for a young actress, and those are few and far between."
Garai's own yearning to make great art stems from her one encounter with the bottom line when, aged 20, she decamped to Puerto Rico to take the female lead in Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights only to discover that, although she had mastered the Latin moves, generic popcorn romance was not for her. "I wouldn't have done something that I thought had no merit in it at all, but I did experience the fall-out from being calculating about your career, believing that you should do something in order to get you somewhere else. It was just creatively unfulfilling."
As if to cleanse her system, she threw herself into her stage debut in Calico, Michael Hastings's play about the brief, passionate but platonic relationship in Paris between the young Samuel Beckett and Lucia, the possibly bi-polar daughter of James Joyce.
It was a startlingly brave choice for an actress whose most recent stage role at that point was a school production of Measure for Measure. Such was the frenetic pace with which subsequent opportunities came her way that there was no time for formal training, nor to complete a degree in English, which she abandoned after a year. Nevertheless, reviews for Garai's impersonation of a girl going doolally in Calico were highly complimentary. "It was a real stretch for me" she says. "I know not everyone liked the play, but I loved playing the role. The goal for me was to prove to myself that I could do it. Ever since, I've thought I really want to be doing theatre." It's taken her three years to make it back to the stage. In the interim she has resumed her studies with the Open University, but regrets more than ever her lack of acting training.
"With Calico, I struggled a lot with my voice. It's only been better this time because I really understood the ramifications of not having had three years of intensive vocal training. Also, when directors are using a language that is very specific to the development of 20th-century theatre, then you want to know what they're talking about. I've had to do a lot of reading myself, just to cover all the bases."
There's something about Garai's statuesque blue-eyed allure that has persuaded casting directors she is not quite of our time. She has played very few contemporary roles - as a nurse to two men in wheelchairs in Inside I'm Dancing, and Scarlett Johansson's posh pal in Woody Allen's Scoop (which has yet to secure a British distributor).
Five years mainly spent in corsets have revealed to her the frustrating truth that not all period roles are as multi-coloured as the heroines she brilliantly played in I Capture the Castle and Daniel Deronda. Disappointing film versions of Nicholas Nickleby and Vanity Fair found her twice strait-jacketed as the nice but rather unsparky young sidekick.
"If you do a lot of period drama, those female characters, nine times out of 10, are going to represent all the good in the world," she says. "As a young actress, there's not a lot that you can do to get away from those roles except try and move within them." In the recently released Amazing Grace, there's little room for Garai to manoeuvre as the toweringly coiffed wife of William Wilberforce.
advertisementBut three forthcoming films give her the chance to broaden her palette. In Kenneth Branagh's Japanese-inflected As You Like It , she found Celia "a great role if you go for the laughs". In Joe Wright's film version of Ian McEwan's bestseller Atonement - due for release in September - she shares the catalytic role of Briony with Vanessa Redgrave and a younger actress called Saoirse Ronan.
But her undisputed lead billing is in Angel, the first foray into English by French enfant terrible, François Ozon, best known here for the star-studded soufflé, 8 Women. The film is adapted from a 1957 novel by Elizabeth Taylor about Maria Corelli, Queen Victoria's favourite purveyor of pulp romance.
"François made it very clear to me that Maria is manipulative and mean and selfish," says Garai. "But you also have to root for her. She's the character that plays it straight while everyone else laughs at her. It's a satire of somebody becoming very famous very young on the back of not a great deal of talent."
Angel and The Seagull afford Garai her first opportunities since playing Daniel Deronda's Gwendolen Harleth to take on a satisfyingly flawed young 19th-century lady on the make. Those who warmed to her back then have rather missed that complexity in her more recent roles. "Yes," she says, "me too."
'King Lear' (until June 21) and 'The Seagull' (from Tues until June 23) are both in rep at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Tickets: 0844 800 1110.
(romola-garai.com)
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