Romola Garai
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Okay, sorry for so many posts. It feels weird putting them all into one. I know this isn't so much about her "style" however I think she's a truly genuine, inspirational person in the theatre business and I'm just really happy she's getting so much press despite her resistance to fame.
It Rankles! It Really Hurts!
Maddy Cost, guardian.co.uk
August 22, 2008
Romola Garai is not one to take rejection lying down - even if it's over some harp lessons. She tells Maddy Costa about arguing over Sartre, avoiding Eva Braun, and the fiasco that was Dirty Dancing 2.
Faced with the opening section of François Ozon's new film, Angel, it's hard not to feel that the respected French arthouse director has lost his mind. His back catalogue isn't free of oddities: for every masterpiece like 2004's 5x2, his devastating dissection of a disintegrating marriage, there is a frothy amuse-bouche such as the murder-mystery 8 Women. But Angel is something else: a seemingly artless stab at BBC-style period drama, with sets straight out of Dickensian cliche and characters misted in sentimentality. Worst of all is lead actor Romola Garai as Angel herself, hamming atrociously as an egotistical teenager determined to become a writer.
Fifteen minutes in, however, something magical happens. Ozon makes it deliciously clear that the film is partly a satire: a homage to lush Hollywood melodramas such as Gone With the Wind and Imitation of Life that is as irreverent and spiky as it is loving. And Garai, it emerges, is terrific: a magnetic presence as her character blithely moulds reality to suit the rosy fantasies she creates for herself.
Unsurprisingly, Garai in real life is nothing like Angel: dressed in tailored shorts and a crisp white shirt, she is cool, polite and betrays little in the way of emotion. Until the harp is mentioned. Ozon asked her to learn to play the instrument for the film, only to cut all the scenes in which it featured. "It rankles!" she says. "I spent a lot of time and energy on it - the harp isn't something that you just pick up - and it was ****ing cut out! It really hurts!"
The outburst makes Garai sound princessy, but she isn't: she's serious, thoughtful, yet ready to laugh at herself. As, for instance, when she describes working with Ozon. "He thinks I was demanding and a real handful, but I think I went along almost 90% of the time without questioning his vision," she says, eyes glinting. What worried her was that people watching the film would misread the "heightened realism" of her performance as bad acting. And so, she asked "a lot of questions. I'd say things like: 'Is this a reference to Sartre?' And he'd say: 'What are you talking about? Just do it!'"
Angel is the kind of film Helena Bonham Carter started making when she wanted to prove that there was more to her than her insipid English-rose reputation suggested. (The comparison becomes unavoidable when Garai appears near the end wearing a ragged gothic frock and a hat adorned with a dead bird). Like Bonham Carter, much of Garai's career so far has been rooted in period drama: adaptations of Daniel Deronda, Nicholas Nickleby and Vanity Fair appear in her CV, alongside a Shakespeare (she was Celia in Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It). Even her two breakthrough roles - in I Capture the Castle and opposite Keira Knightley in Atonement - have been in adaptations of novels set in the past. Is Garai already tired of being pigeonholed?
She claims not. "I'm very lucky to have the career I've had. When I think of the piece-of-nothing roles that I could be playing, in which your character is just a romantic plot device, your body is your only stock-in-trade, and you effectively have nothing to contribute artistically to the process, I feel very lucky indeed."
It sounds as though she's talking from bitter experience. Four years ago, Garai attempted to break into Hollywood by taking the lead role in 2004's Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. The film bombed, and Garai spent the ensuing years denouncing it. She's recently changed her mind, however. "There was a period of time when I felt I had to be ashamed of it," she says. "I know it's not a piece of art, but it's a film I'm really proud of. It has a good story, and the central character is very bright. I would be happy to watch it with one of my cousins and say, actually, this is a good message for young women."
Even so, her experience during filming - she has spoken before of being criticised by its makers for not being skinny enough - clearly affected her thinking about her career. Garai has since studiously avoided anything that might raise her profile too high. Fame is not a goal. She's clearly a very private person, painting a picture of herself as someone who prefers having a few close friends to several acquaintances, and whose hobbies are cooking, writing and experimenting with gardening. And she's particularly uncomfortable talking about her childhood, convinced that "there's nothing very interesting about my life".
Actually, Garai has had quite an odd, itinerant past. Born in Hong Kong in 1982, where her father, a bank manager, was then working, she later moved to Singapore, to a home with servants and a swimming pool. Aged eight, she returned with her family to Wiltshire and went to boarding school, staying there until she was 16, when she moved to London to do her A-levels and live with her older sister. "I think I managed to convince my parents into this by putting up the image of being a very serious and responsible teenager," she says. "I spent a lot of time in my room reading [she puts a heavy, ironic stress on the word]. I think that persuaded my parents it would be a good experience for me. And it was - but it taught me very quickly that I was nowhere near as grown-up as I thought I was."
Her mother, a journalist, loved theatre, so took Garai often, which is what encouraged her to start acting at school. She had no intentions of becoming an actor, however. "For a long time, I wanted to be a writer - but I think I thought more about the act of writing than about writing itself. I imagined myself sitting at a desk in a flowing dressing gown, with my head in my hands. So there's probably a reason that didn't blossom into a career."
Even when a casting agent came to her school looking for a girl to play a small part in a BBC drama Last of the Blonde Bombshells, and Garai auditioned successfully for the role, she didn't think this was the beginning of anything. It was just a way of earning some money in the summer holidays. She was still filling "terrible, terrible notebooks with excruciating romance", and planned to study English literature at university. But one bit-part led to another, until she was cast as Cassandra, the dreamy younger sister in I Capture the Castle. "When you get something like that," she says, "it isn't just work, it's people's lives and passions. And you think: this isn't something I can do just to pass the time."
It sounds soppy, but making that film, Garai discovered her calling. "I thought: there is nothing I would rather do for a living. I love my job, in a very limited way I feel I'm reasonably good at it, and morally it's not a bad choice for my life, as long as you do good things that you really believe in, that you feel have some kind of purpose. What more could any human being want from their job?"
It's typical of Garai's conscientious personality that, after a couple of years of working, she signed up to finish her degree with the Open University. It is, she says, the perfect way to fill the longueurs when filming - although she did feel a bit odd sitting on the set of Angel, dressed in a pink meringue, with a book on the history of the romantic novel on her lap. Plus, she says, "in what I do there's a huge reliance on your emotions and your emotional life, so quite frankly I need to sit down for eight hours a week and make notes and study and have an awareness of how much I don't know".
It also gives some focus to the periods when she's out of work. Garai still has to audition for roles, and can spend months unemployed. Partly that's down to her own fastidiousness: recently, the opportunity came up to play Eva Braun in a biopic, but Garai didn't audition because she couldn't square the role with her father's Hungarian-Jewish ancestry. Being so careful may not make her the best-known young actor in Britain - but it does make her fascinating, and more likely to remain successful long after many of her contemporaries have faded from view.
source: romola-garai.com
It Rankles! It Really Hurts!
Maddy Cost, guardian.co.uk
August 22, 2008
Romola Garai is not one to take rejection lying down - even if it's over some harp lessons. She tells Maddy Costa about arguing over Sartre, avoiding Eva Braun, and the fiasco that was Dirty Dancing 2.
Faced with the opening section of François Ozon's new film, Angel, it's hard not to feel that the respected French arthouse director has lost his mind. His back catalogue isn't free of oddities: for every masterpiece like 2004's 5x2, his devastating dissection of a disintegrating marriage, there is a frothy amuse-bouche such as the murder-mystery 8 Women. But Angel is something else: a seemingly artless stab at BBC-style period drama, with sets straight out of Dickensian cliche and characters misted in sentimentality. Worst of all is lead actor Romola Garai as Angel herself, hamming atrociously as an egotistical teenager determined to become a writer.
Fifteen minutes in, however, something magical happens. Ozon makes it deliciously clear that the film is partly a satire: a homage to lush Hollywood melodramas such as Gone With the Wind and Imitation of Life that is as irreverent and spiky as it is loving. And Garai, it emerges, is terrific: a magnetic presence as her character blithely moulds reality to suit the rosy fantasies she creates for herself.
Unsurprisingly, Garai in real life is nothing like Angel: dressed in tailored shorts and a crisp white shirt, she is cool, polite and betrays little in the way of emotion. Until the harp is mentioned. Ozon asked her to learn to play the instrument for the film, only to cut all the scenes in which it featured. "It rankles!" she says. "I spent a lot of time and energy on it - the harp isn't something that you just pick up - and it was ****ing cut out! It really hurts!"
The outburst makes Garai sound princessy, but she isn't: she's serious, thoughtful, yet ready to laugh at herself. As, for instance, when she describes working with Ozon. "He thinks I was demanding and a real handful, but I think I went along almost 90% of the time without questioning his vision," she says, eyes glinting. What worried her was that people watching the film would misread the "heightened realism" of her performance as bad acting. And so, she asked "a lot of questions. I'd say things like: 'Is this a reference to Sartre?' And he'd say: 'What are you talking about? Just do it!'"
Angel is the kind of film Helena Bonham Carter started making when she wanted to prove that there was more to her than her insipid English-rose reputation suggested. (The comparison becomes unavoidable when Garai appears near the end wearing a ragged gothic frock and a hat adorned with a dead bird). Like Bonham Carter, much of Garai's career so far has been rooted in period drama: adaptations of Daniel Deronda, Nicholas Nickleby and Vanity Fair appear in her CV, alongside a Shakespeare (she was Celia in Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It). Even her two breakthrough roles - in I Capture the Castle and opposite Keira Knightley in Atonement - have been in adaptations of novels set in the past. Is Garai already tired of being pigeonholed?
She claims not. "I'm very lucky to have the career I've had. When I think of the piece-of-nothing roles that I could be playing, in which your character is just a romantic plot device, your body is your only stock-in-trade, and you effectively have nothing to contribute artistically to the process, I feel very lucky indeed."
It sounds as though she's talking from bitter experience. Four years ago, Garai attempted to break into Hollywood by taking the lead role in 2004's Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. The film bombed, and Garai spent the ensuing years denouncing it. She's recently changed her mind, however. "There was a period of time when I felt I had to be ashamed of it," she says. "I know it's not a piece of art, but it's a film I'm really proud of. It has a good story, and the central character is very bright. I would be happy to watch it with one of my cousins and say, actually, this is a good message for young women."
Even so, her experience during filming - she has spoken before of being criticised by its makers for not being skinny enough - clearly affected her thinking about her career. Garai has since studiously avoided anything that might raise her profile too high. Fame is not a goal. She's clearly a very private person, painting a picture of herself as someone who prefers having a few close friends to several acquaintances, and whose hobbies are cooking, writing and experimenting with gardening. And she's particularly uncomfortable talking about her childhood, convinced that "there's nothing very interesting about my life".
Actually, Garai has had quite an odd, itinerant past. Born in Hong Kong in 1982, where her father, a bank manager, was then working, she later moved to Singapore, to a home with servants and a swimming pool. Aged eight, she returned with her family to Wiltshire and went to boarding school, staying there until she was 16, when she moved to London to do her A-levels and live with her older sister. "I think I managed to convince my parents into this by putting up the image of being a very serious and responsible teenager," she says. "I spent a lot of time in my room reading [she puts a heavy, ironic stress on the word]. I think that persuaded my parents it would be a good experience for me. And it was - but it taught me very quickly that I was nowhere near as grown-up as I thought I was."
Her mother, a journalist, loved theatre, so took Garai often, which is what encouraged her to start acting at school. She had no intentions of becoming an actor, however. "For a long time, I wanted to be a writer - but I think I thought more about the act of writing than about writing itself. I imagined myself sitting at a desk in a flowing dressing gown, with my head in my hands. So there's probably a reason that didn't blossom into a career."
Even when a casting agent came to her school looking for a girl to play a small part in a BBC drama Last of the Blonde Bombshells, and Garai auditioned successfully for the role, she didn't think this was the beginning of anything. It was just a way of earning some money in the summer holidays. She was still filling "terrible, terrible notebooks with excruciating romance", and planned to study English literature at university. But one bit-part led to another, until she was cast as Cassandra, the dreamy younger sister in I Capture the Castle. "When you get something like that," she says, "it isn't just work, it's people's lives and passions. And you think: this isn't something I can do just to pass the time."
It sounds soppy, but making that film, Garai discovered her calling. "I thought: there is nothing I would rather do for a living. I love my job, in a very limited way I feel I'm reasonably good at it, and morally it's not a bad choice for my life, as long as you do good things that you really believe in, that you feel have some kind of purpose. What more could any human being want from their job?"
It's typical of Garai's conscientious personality that, after a couple of years of working, she signed up to finish her degree with the Open University. It is, she says, the perfect way to fill the longueurs when filming - although she did feel a bit odd sitting on the set of Angel, dressed in a pink meringue, with a book on the history of the romantic novel on her lap. Plus, she says, "in what I do there's a huge reliance on your emotions and your emotional life, so quite frankly I need to sit down for eight hours a week and make notes and study and have an awareness of how much I don't know".
It also gives some focus to the periods when she's out of work. Garai still has to audition for roles, and can spend months unemployed. Partly that's down to her own fastidiousness: recently, the opportunity came up to play Eva Braun in a biopic, but Garai didn't audition because she couldn't square the role with her father's Hungarian-Jewish ancestry. Being so careful may not make her the best-known young actor in Britain - but it does make her fascinating, and more likely to remain successful long after many of her contemporaries have faded from view.
source: romola-garai.com
one more! and a picture i've never seen before!
Romola Garai: on a roll
John Preston for Telegraph.co.uk
August 7, 2008
Romola Garai fell into acting after being talent-spotted in a school play. Now she's widely tipped to be the Next Big Thing. Trouble is, she's not sure she even wants to be. She tells John Preston why. Photograph by James Deavin
When Romola Garai first auditioned for the lead role in her new film Angel, the director sent her away because she was looking too rough. For all sorts of reasons this is hard to believe. Right now, fresh out of a photo-shoot and dressed in a white blouse, shorts and sandals, she is looking quite the opposite of rough. But even if she had been out on a colossal bender the night before, or was wearing a bin-liner, Romola Garai would still be an extremely striking looking woman. So what happened?
'Ah,' she says, sounding mildly embarrassed. 'I didn't think I was looking that bad, but François [Ozon, the French director of Angel] just looked at me and said, "I want you to come back and make a f-ing effort." I think in France everyone looks as glamorous as possible when they come to auditions, whereas over here basically you just turn up. So I went home and made a stab at looking French and stylish, which of course looked appallingly overdone - at least it did to me.'
Garai says she still has to audition for 95 per cent of the jobs she gets. All that, though, could be about to change. Critics have loved to pit Garai, now 26, against her friend Keira Knightley: she lost out on the role of Lara in Doctor Zhivago as well as that of Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice to the younger actress. Increasingly, though, they are being placed in the same bracket, particularly after Garai's mesmerising performance as the adult Briony Tallis in Atonement.
As well as taking the lead role in Angel, Garai will soon star as Jackie Kennedy in Flying into Love - a film about JFK's assassination as seen from Jackie's point of view - and will appear alongside Liam Neeson, Laura Linney and Antonio Banderas in The Other Man, a new film directed by Richard Eyre. Garai's breakthrough role, though, was as Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle, based on Dodie Smith's novel about the 17-year-old Cassandra and her eccentric family. Garai received glowing reviews for her performance and a correspondingly large amount of attention. 'It really struck a chord with people. I was sitting in a café this morning and someone came up and said, "I really loved I Capture the Castle." And that was five years ago now. The fact that they remembered it after so long was very gratifying.'
Before I met Garai I had heard that she could be tricky. No one said she was difficult exactly, but she's one of those actresses who tends to be referred to in slightly nervous voices as 'uncompromising'. Later on I suspect this just means that she is forthright, intense, clever and far more articulate than most actors or actresses of her - or any - age.
I find her waiting in a small, echoey room on the top floor of a Georgian house in Soho, London - a fragile-looking figure with narrow shoulders and a tiny waist. It quickly becomes apparent that she is a peculiar mix of the excitable and the unusually self-possessed. When she sits in a chair her lower half stays quite still, while her hands continually dart about as she talks, sweeping her long fair hair out of her eyes, or describing shapes in the air to illustrate what she is saying.
Angel, which Garai is currently promoting, is a film adapted from the novelist Elizabeth Taylor's 1957 book of the same name. It's about a young woman in Edwardian England who becomes a hugely successful romantic novelist. The eponymous Angel Deverell is also - by any standards - a colossal pain in the backside. Before getting the role, Garai not only had to go home and smarten herself up, she also had to go through a further five auditions. What seems strange about all this is that Garai should have been so eager to play the part. After all, most actresses getting star billing in a film for the first time would fight shy of playing someone who is so hard to like. Garai, however, leaped at the chance. 'It was her unpleasantness that appealed to me,' she says. 'Young actresses rarely get offered parts as complex as this. You tend to get offered romantic leads, which are invariably these saintly characters. But Angel is not a saint. She's impossible a lot of the time and a complete egotist. I was fascinated by the fact that she wanted to be extraordinary, and if that meant she was disliked, well, that was a price worth paying. She also wants to be the centre of attention and as an actress I share that desire with her.'
This is another unusual thing about Garai: her frankness. Although all actors and actresses are, by definition, possessed of an insatiable hunger for the spotlight, few are prepared to admit to it. But Garai cheerfully acknowledges that she's been seeking it out ever since she can remember. 'When I was a child I always wanted to be funny and to please people in my family. As you grow up that instinct becomes more refined, but it's still there. How can it not be? I just don't believe you're capable of being an actor unless you have a desire to experience your emotions in a public way.'
Garai's family originally came from Hungary, but she was brought up in Hong Kong and Singapore until she was eight - her father worked as a banker, her mother a journalist - then in Wiltshire. She's the third of four children, all of whom have names beginning with R: there's her brother, Ralph, and her sister, Rosie (the two elder siblings are adopted), as well as her younger sister, Roxy. Why the big R fixation? 'I really don't know,' she says. 'I guess it was just a fanciful thing to do.' But while her parents may have had their fanciful side, there was nothing especially arty about them. 'My mother and I would go to the theatre in Bristol or Bath every so often, but that was about it. Certainly I had no aspirations to be an actress. For a long time it wasn't something that I was even aware people did for a living.'
This may be so, but she still did the sort of things people do if they're drifting - however unconsciously - towards acting: appearing in school plays, and then joining the National Youth Theatre. After leaving school (City of London School for Girls) she spent a year studying English at London University. While there she was contacted by a casting director who had seen her in a school play and thought she'd be ideal for a television drama called The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, which also starred Judi Dench and Felicity Dean. Garai auditioned for the part and, to her astonishment, got it. 'The next thing I knew I had an agent and I suddenly started getting work,' she says. 'At the time I was incredibly naive about the whole thing. I just thought, "Oh, this must be what happens when you get an agent." I didn't really begin to take it at all seriously until I was sent the script for I Capture the Castle.'
As she read the script, Garai was hit by two big flashes. The first was that she really wanted to do it, and the second was that this wasn't something to be undertaken lightly. 'I knew it was a book that meant a great deal to a lot of people, and basically it mattered if it was ****. So I really tried my hardest. I took a lot of notes, did a lot of research and, as I'd had no dramatic training, I talked to as many actors as possible to see what I could learn from them.'
What, I wonder, would have happened if the film had been a total flop? Would she have slunk back to university and never considered acting again? 'Hmm…' she says, her hands momentarily stilled. 'I think I would probably have stuck at it by then. I don't think I would have been crushed, put it that way. I feel that it's important to fail now and again. For instance, if I go for a job and I don't get it, that makes me not a better person, but more balanced, more aware of what life is really like.'
But the film was a great success and, since then, it's been steadily onwards and upwards for her - she has starred in Vanity Fair, As You Like It, and made acclaimed stage performances as Cordelia in the Royal Shakespeare Company's King Lear and as Nina in The Seagull. The one anomaly in this highbrow roll-call is Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights. After its release in 2006 Garai called the experience 'creatively unfulfilling', saying that, 'The filmmakers were obsessed with having someone skinny. I just thought, "Why didn't they get someone like Kate Bosworth if that's what they wanted?" An actress like that wouldn't worry about whether or not the political ideas were being sensitively or subtly dealt with. They'd do the job, smile and look pretty on the cover of Teen Vogue. There I am, 135 pounds and trying to make art! I was so wrong for it!' None the less, when she was asked if she enjoyed the dancing, she answered, paraphrasing the Dirty Dancing theme tune: 'I had the time of my life.'
You might assume that Garai has been so busy over the past few years that she hasn't had room to fit anything else into her life, but you would be wrong. 'Actually, I'm still doing my English degree, only now I'm doing it at the Open University. In fact, when I was doing Angel we were doing a course about the romantic novel. So I was sitting there with my textbooks and my highlighting pen, while I was wearing this enormous pink frothy dress and a huge bow in my hair. And I'd be thinking, "When did my life become this weird?"' One thing Garai is not at all sure about is becoming any more famous than she is already. 'I realise there's an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, "Oh, I don't want to be famous", on the other. But I like my life the way it is. I like the fact that I can wander round the streets and ride my bike and make the work choices I want. I was walking down the street the other day and someone - I don't know who - was coming out of the Groucho Club and there were all these cameras and lights going off. I just thought, I'd be frightened to live like that. It really doesn't appeal to me at all.'
For all her talk of experiencing her emotions in public, there is in fact something intensely private about Romola Garai - she doesn't appear at premières of films that she isn't in, or in gossip columns. If she has a boyfriend she's never talked about him, and she's not about to start now. (Though she has said, 'I date nothing but older men. I've reached a stage in my life where I've started to worry whether it's a fetish or not.') And yet she's in a business where it can be very difficult - maybe even impossible - for a young actress to shield her private life from the public gaze. 'I think I can keep things the way they are,' Garai says. 'I certainly hope so because if it's not possible I'm not sure I would be interested in doing this job. If I think about what I'd like to be doing in, say, 20 years' time, then the absolute ideal would be to be acting at the National Theatre. Acting may be a very fickle world in a lot of respects, but people always need an old lady who comes in carrying a samovar. There,' she says, sounding genuinely excited by the prospect, 'that could be me.'
source: romola-garai.com
Romola Garai: on a roll
John Preston for Telegraph.co.uk
August 7, 2008
Romola Garai fell into acting after being talent-spotted in a school play. Now she's widely tipped to be the Next Big Thing. Trouble is, she's not sure she even wants to be. She tells John Preston why. Photograph by James Deavin
When Romola Garai first auditioned for the lead role in her new film Angel, the director sent her away because she was looking too rough. For all sorts of reasons this is hard to believe. Right now, fresh out of a photo-shoot and dressed in a white blouse, shorts and sandals, she is looking quite the opposite of rough. But even if she had been out on a colossal bender the night before, or was wearing a bin-liner, Romola Garai would still be an extremely striking looking woman. So what happened?
'Ah,' she says, sounding mildly embarrassed. 'I didn't think I was looking that bad, but François [Ozon, the French director of Angel] just looked at me and said, "I want you to come back and make a f-ing effort." I think in France everyone looks as glamorous as possible when they come to auditions, whereas over here basically you just turn up. So I went home and made a stab at looking French and stylish, which of course looked appallingly overdone - at least it did to me.'
Garai says she still has to audition for 95 per cent of the jobs she gets. All that, though, could be about to change. Critics have loved to pit Garai, now 26, against her friend Keira Knightley: she lost out on the role of Lara in Doctor Zhivago as well as that of Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice to the younger actress. Increasingly, though, they are being placed in the same bracket, particularly after Garai's mesmerising performance as the adult Briony Tallis in Atonement.
As well as taking the lead role in Angel, Garai will soon star as Jackie Kennedy in Flying into Love - a film about JFK's assassination as seen from Jackie's point of view - and will appear alongside Liam Neeson, Laura Linney and Antonio Banderas in The Other Man, a new film directed by Richard Eyre. Garai's breakthrough role, though, was as Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle, based on Dodie Smith's novel about the 17-year-old Cassandra and her eccentric family. Garai received glowing reviews for her performance and a correspondingly large amount of attention. 'It really struck a chord with people. I was sitting in a café this morning and someone came up and said, "I really loved I Capture the Castle." And that was five years ago now. The fact that they remembered it after so long was very gratifying.'
Before I met Garai I had heard that she could be tricky. No one said she was difficult exactly, but she's one of those actresses who tends to be referred to in slightly nervous voices as 'uncompromising'. Later on I suspect this just means that she is forthright, intense, clever and far more articulate than most actors or actresses of her - or any - age.
I find her waiting in a small, echoey room on the top floor of a Georgian house in Soho, London - a fragile-looking figure with narrow shoulders and a tiny waist. It quickly becomes apparent that she is a peculiar mix of the excitable and the unusually self-possessed. When she sits in a chair her lower half stays quite still, while her hands continually dart about as she talks, sweeping her long fair hair out of her eyes, or describing shapes in the air to illustrate what she is saying.
Angel, which Garai is currently promoting, is a film adapted from the novelist Elizabeth Taylor's 1957 book of the same name. It's about a young woman in Edwardian England who becomes a hugely successful romantic novelist. The eponymous Angel Deverell is also - by any standards - a colossal pain in the backside. Before getting the role, Garai not only had to go home and smarten herself up, she also had to go through a further five auditions. What seems strange about all this is that Garai should have been so eager to play the part. After all, most actresses getting star billing in a film for the first time would fight shy of playing someone who is so hard to like. Garai, however, leaped at the chance. 'It was her unpleasantness that appealed to me,' she says. 'Young actresses rarely get offered parts as complex as this. You tend to get offered romantic leads, which are invariably these saintly characters. But Angel is not a saint. She's impossible a lot of the time and a complete egotist. I was fascinated by the fact that she wanted to be extraordinary, and if that meant she was disliked, well, that was a price worth paying. She also wants to be the centre of attention and as an actress I share that desire with her.'
This is another unusual thing about Garai: her frankness. Although all actors and actresses are, by definition, possessed of an insatiable hunger for the spotlight, few are prepared to admit to it. But Garai cheerfully acknowledges that she's been seeking it out ever since she can remember. 'When I was a child I always wanted to be funny and to please people in my family. As you grow up that instinct becomes more refined, but it's still there. How can it not be? I just don't believe you're capable of being an actor unless you have a desire to experience your emotions in a public way.'
Garai's family originally came from Hungary, but she was brought up in Hong Kong and Singapore until she was eight - her father worked as a banker, her mother a journalist - then in Wiltshire. She's the third of four children, all of whom have names beginning with R: there's her brother, Ralph, and her sister, Rosie (the two elder siblings are adopted), as well as her younger sister, Roxy. Why the big R fixation? 'I really don't know,' she says. 'I guess it was just a fanciful thing to do.' But while her parents may have had their fanciful side, there was nothing especially arty about them. 'My mother and I would go to the theatre in Bristol or Bath every so often, but that was about it. Certainly I had no aspirations to be an actress. For a long time it wasn't something that I was even aware people did for a living.'
This may be so, but she still did the sort of things people do if they're drifting - however unconsciously - towards acting: appearing in school plays, and then joining the National Youth Theatre. After leaving school (City of London School for Girls) she spent a year studying English at London University. While there she was contacted by a casting director who had seen her in a school play and thought she'd be ideal for a television drama called The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, which also starred Judi Dench and Felicity Dean. Garai auditioned for the part and, to her astonishment, got it. 'The next thing I knew I had an agent and I suddenly started getting work,' she says. 'At the time I was incredibly naive about the whole thing. I just thought, "Oh, this must be what happens when you get an agent." I didn't really begin to take it at all seriously until I was sent the script for I Capture the Castle.'
As she read the script, Garai was hit by two big flashes. The first was that she really wanted to do it, and the second was that this wasn't something to be undertaken lightly. 'I knew it was a book that meant a great deal to a lot of people, and basically it mattered if it was ****. So I really tried my hardest. I took a lot of notes, did a lot of research and, as I'd had no dramatic training, I talked to as many actors as possible to see what I could learn from them.'
What, I wonder, would have happened if the film had been a total flop? Would she have slunk back to university and never considered acting again? 'Hmm…' she says, her hands momentarily stilled. 'I think I would probably have stuck at it by then. I don't think I would have been crushed, put it that way. I feel that it's important to fail now and again. For instance, if I go for a job and I don't get it, that makes me not a better person, but more balanced, more aware of what life is really like.'
But the film was a great success and, since then, it's been steadily onwards and upwards for her - she has starred in Vanity Fair, As You Like It, and made acclaimed stage performances as Cordelia in the Royal Shakespeare Company's King Lear and as Nina in The Seagull. The one anomaly in this highbrow roll-call is Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights. After its release in 2006 Garai called the experience 'creatively unfulfilling', saying that, 'The filmmakers were obsessed with having someone skinny. I just thought, "Why didn't they get someone like Kate Bosworth if that's what they wanted?" An actress like that wouldn't worry about whether or not the political ideas were being sensitively or subtly dealt with. They'd do the job, smile and look pretty on the cover of Teen Vogue. There I am, 135 pounds and trying to make art! I was so wrong for it!' None the less, when she was asked if she enjoyed the dancing, she answered, paraphrasing the Dirty Dancing theme tune: 'I had the time of my life.'
You might assume that Garai has been so busy over the past few years that she hasn't had room to fit anything else into her life, but you would be wrong. 'Actually, I'm still doing my English degree, only now I'm doing it at the Open University. In fact, when I was doing Angel we were doing a course about the romantic novel. So I was sitting there with my textbooks and my highlighting pen, while I was wearing this enormous pink frothy dress and a huge bow in my hair. And I'd be thinking, "When did my life become this weird?"' One thing Garai is not at all sure about is becoming any more famous than she is already. 'I realise there's an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, "Oh, I don't want to be famous", on the other. But I like my life the way it is. I like the fact that I can wander round the streets and ride my bike and make the work choices I want. I was walking down the street the other day and someone - I don't know who - was coming out of the Groucho Club and there were all these cameras and lights going off. I just thought, I'd be frightened to live like that. It really doesn't appeal to me at all.'
For all her talk of experiencing her emotions in public, there is in fact something intensely private about Romola Garai - she doesn't appear at premières of films that she isn't in, or in gossip columns. If she has a boyfriend she's never talked about him, and she's not about to start now. (Though she has said, 'I date nothing but older men. I've reached a stage in my life where I've started to worry whether it's a fetish or not.') And yet she's in a business where it can be very difficult - maybe even impossible - for a young actress to shield her private life from the public gaze. 'I think I can keep things the way they are,' Garai says. 'I certainly hope so because if it's not possible I'm not sure I would be interested in doing this job. If I think about what I'd like to be doing in, say, 20 years' time, then the absolute ideal would be to be acting at the National Theatre. Acting may be a very fickle world in a lot of respects, but people always need an old lady who comes in carrying a samovar. There,' she says, sounding genuinely excited by the prospect, 'that could be me.'
source: romola-garai.com
miss_catherine
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Yes. Thanks for both articles. That last comment about carrying a samovar is so cute!
stateofbliss
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She looks amazing in that Lula ed - especially in the last scan.
Glorious 39, Romola's new film, just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on September 14 2009 - here are some pics 
credit: Zimbio
credit: Zimbio
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Drusilla_
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One of the most underrated actresses around, for sure- I first saw her in Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, which she apparently hates so much she's basically disowned it (it's not as terrible as she makes it out to be though, and I'll say it, she and Diego Luna had fantastic chemistry). Pity she's so low-profile though, she'll never get the kind of Hollywood attention that Keira Knightley and now Carey Mulligan are getting as young Brit actresses- she's been great in every movie of hers that I've seen, even the ones that were otherwise not-so-great (e.g. DD2)
I think she might be a touch uncomfortable with fame though, every time I've seen photographs of her on a red carpet she looks like she's squirming a little inside. Though that, in its own way, is a bit endearing.
Here she is at the BAFTAs, courtesy of jezebel.com
I think she might be a touch uncomfortable with fame though, every time I've seen photographs of her on a red carpet she looks like she's squirming a little inside. Though that, in its own way, is a bit endearing.
Here she is at the BAFTAs, courtesy of jezebel.com
littlepaperstars
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She's currently starring in The Village Bike at the Royal Court. It's a absolute smash, totally sold out.
Royal Court
Royal Court
