FIVE QUESTIONS FOR ... BESSIE CARTER
NOW BRILLIANTLY STARRING AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE AS FENNY IN "DEAR OCTOPUS," CARTER HAS ALSO GRACED "BRIDGERTON" AS THE BRITTLE PRUDENCE FEATHERINGTON AND "HOWARD'S END" AS THE BRACING EVIE WILCOX
(Above: Bessie Carter photographed for 1883 magazine by Joseph Sinclair.)
“Only connect!” E.M. Forster famously wrote in Howard’s End and Bessie Carter and I were making lots of connections when we connected by Zoom as I sat in a booth at London’s Kiln Theatre because my wifi was being spotty - not connecting - back at my place close by. When I told her where I was, her lovely eyes brightened with her own love of the Kiln, our local fringe theatre and keenly curated neighborhood cinema, as she told me that she lived close by as well over toward Maida Vale and grew up in West Hampstead which cossets the Kiln’s location in the other direction. Indeed, the first time I ever came to the Kiln was years ago with my friend, director Michael Engler, who directed Bessie’s father, Jim Carter, in many of the Downton Abbey episodes and its 2019 film version in Carter’s role as the estate’s butler, Mr. Carson. The night I accompanied Michael, Jim and his wife - Bessie’s other parent, Imelda Staunton - were hosting a benefit cabaret for the Kiln. They are big supporters of the theatre and have instilled a love of the place in Bessie. Another famous line from Howard’s End is its opening sentence: “One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.” One may as well begin with Bessie’s words about her parents.
QUESTION ONE
You’re an only child?
Yes. But there were two girls who lived on my road and were my best friends and every day I played with them in the garden. My whole childhood was just lived outside mostly. In the garden. Climbing trees. I was a proper tomboy. I didn’t do dolls. Or play inside. It was all just scruffy knees. Bonfires. And potions. So I didn’t feel like an only child. But I appreciated the independence it gave me and the confidence it gave me because I can go into any room and talk to anyone. That’s just been built with growing up with grownups and having dinner with grownups and learning how to carry on conversations and how to listen and how to be involved. I wouldn’t call them skills but they are things I value.
Plus, your parents are famous. Fame was a part of your growing up.
I wasn’t aware of my parents being famous until my mom did Vera Drake and was nominated for an Oscar. That would have been about when I was 11 or 12. Until then, they were just actors. That was their job. It was just normal. But when she was nominated, we went to the Oscars. I was like, “Oh, my God. There’s Sienna Miller. There’s Leonardo DiCaprio. He just said hello. Morgan Freeman is in the lift with me.” That was memorable. And, yet, it felt again very normal. I don’t know how to explain that except that it was just my life. Normal in the sense that it was still very exciting and we all felt like the most boring, dull little English people eating our sandwiches. But then the Harry Potter thing came along and the Downton thing came along. And then I became aware of how people were aware of who they were. But that became normal too because my parents never took it for granted. They are two of the most humble and modest people I’ve ever come across so it has never been assumed in the way that is normal, so it remains, in a way, normal - if that makes sense. There has never been a moment where we’ve sat back and bought a second home in Monaco. It’s always been about charity and giving back and other people.
Part of your becoming an actor seems to be about loving your parents.
Hmmm. Yes. I was shown that it was a joyful experience. I was also shown that it was doable. You take note of that. My subconscious from a young age absorbed the fact that this was a very plausible thing. So I never doubted I would work. I never doubted it. I also just absolutely adore it because my parents from a young age encouraged me to go outside and play and make believe. It was never about watching television or the internet or plastic toys. It was about creating with your mind. My imagination was just continuously nurtured. They gave me such a joyous upbringing. So it just became hand-in-hand the thing that I was going to do.
It could be genetic. Not nurture, but nature.
There is something intergenerational about it. I don’t want to say trauma, but what is the word I’m trying to find that relays the thing that causes that thing within your body to embed itself? I think whatever that is definitely contributes to whatever it is you end up doing in your life. My parents did the hard work. They left their places of birth. They made it out of their families with their very different jobs of hairdressing and being a secretary. They did that hard job and then I was born into a sort of … I don’t want to say successful … but a love story about acting. My parents love what they did, what they do. They have always been very kind with it. They also made a pact that they would never spend more than two weeks apart when booking jobs. They would decide which jobs they would take based on that. So I was always with one of them. They were rarely absent. Or we’d travel to see Dad in Romania filming or Mum in Cornwall filming. I was never lumped with a nanny.
There is an aspect because of your parents to your having a leg up - or maybe you didn’t or don’t feel that.
I have an innate sense of self-belief which goes a very long way. I’ll never know if I get a job because someone has Googled me. I’ll never know that. I did spend some time worrying about that when I was a teenager. But then I just quite quickly got over it when I got into Guildhall off my own back and they didn’t know who my parents. were. And I thought, yes, I do have innate skills in this area which I want to hone. I can’t control whether some people give me something because of my parents but I think what is happening as I am slowly doing different types of jobs is that I am going, “Yeah. I am quite an actor in my own right.” So there is no sort of resentment there at all.
And your audition to get into Guildhall was ….
Of course, it was Lady Macbeth, my dream role.
You’d make a formidable Lady Macbeth. You’re tall.
I’m 5’10”.
You got your father’s height. Your mother is quite short. That must have been interesting growing up being as tall as you are.
It has been a journey, me and my height. It’s interesting overtaking your mother in height when you’re about 11 when I’d be crying or upset and we’d have to choose her going up the step to hug me. It is interesting what that does to you. It made me crave being held. I really like when someone is taller and I can feel small physically. Because so much of the time I feel tall and much of the time that is incredibly empowering and I really enjoy it. And then there are other times when I’m feeling a little bit sad or blue, where I go, oh, I now need to feel cuddled.
(Above: Marie Tempest and John Gielgud in Dear Octopus's first 1938 staging. Photo: Performing Arts Images / ArenaPAL)
(Above: Bessie Carter, photographed by Marc Brenner, in rehearsals for Dear Octopus in the same rehearsal studio where her parents, Imelda Staunton and Jim Carter, first met while rehearsing Guys and Dolls in 1982. Her own seminal theatre experience at the National was going with her dad to see the revival of that musical in the late 1990s when her mother was again in it playing Adelaide. They were sitting in the director’s box at the National’s Olivier Theatre. “I can remember it so clearly. I saw my mum in a wedding dress marrying someone else onstage and I couldn’t understand why it was happening. I can remember the smell of the National Theatre that night and I can remember the smell of the carpark. My parents drove in to see the press night of Dear Octopus and I went down to that carpark with them which I hadn’t been to for years. And the smell of it instantly took me back to that night I saw my mum in Guys and Dolls.” The smell of the National Theatre’s carpark is her Proust’s madeleine? “Yes. But the truest seminal of all theatre pieces for me, which I’ve seen several times, is The Lion King. It is still, to this day, one of my favorite musicals. I listen to the music regularly - not from the film but the stage musical. It is just one of the most beautiful pieces of theatre. I absolutely adore The Lion King. I know every single word to every single song.” )
QUESTION TWO
Let’s talk about Dear Octopus, this glorious old play by Dodie Smith that is timeless in the way that Chekhov is. It runs at the National until March 27th. I have described it to friends as it is as if Chekhov had made love to - though I use a more vulgar verb - Barbara Pym. Many of them have never heard of Pym in the way that I had not heard of Dodie Smith so I came home from being so deeply moved by this play and this luminous production - literally so, kudos to the lighting team - and did my research on her. She was famous for writing The Hundred and One Dalmatians but was so much more than that. So deeply smart and nuanced and, in her day, heralded and hugely famous. This play of hers is about the Randolphs, a sprawling family, its many tentacles - the dear octopus of the title - but your character is the outsider nestled there in the bosom of the family because you are the matriarch’s companion, the matriarch being played so beautifully by the great Lindsay Duncan. It is a role of service but not of quite being a servant. I had never really known about that kind of placement within a certain sort of family either. Smith is dramatically shrewd in that she allows us into this family through your character. You are us; you are our stand-in. You are indeed our companion and thus the audience becomes in a way the companion itself, the piece that is missing in much the way you are within the familial structure. We are, I guess, the audience, the companion piece to this play. Are you aware of being one with the audience in an even deeper way than most roles offer an actor to be - which is what great stage acting is in some way: being one with its audience?
Fenny is aware of being on the outside. She’s held in that position. But you’re right. As you become invested in her heart and what’s really been going on behind her rectitude you become entrapped within the family with her. Because by the end she’s stuck in that family. It will keep turning and revolving for the rest of their lives. The audience does tend to decide whether to sit back and join us and let the family just unfold, or they’re waiting for something to happen - but if you’re waiting for something to happen you’re going to be frustrated.
I let it unfold over me. But it is also about aging and the passing of time and how in some way it doesn’t pass - is not linear - but more simultaneous. Time settles in much in the way you have so subtly and aptly - even wisely - described the audience doing so. Time in this play is a widening vista, not a straight line. And yet there is the denial of time in the family’s refusal to wire the house and thus the luminous quality of the lighting called for on the technical side. There is also the approach of war that shadows it all. Dodie Smith has another of her characters, Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle say of herself, “I am restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.” That reminded me Fenny - or the way that you play her.
Right at the start when I was reading the play and reading it and reading it to understand it, I found that there were so many lines of Fenny’s where she says things like “well, it’s not his fault” or “no, no, well, its not her fault” or “no, she’s not like that, she’s a perfect lamb” and I do think there are just those people who really do see the good in everyone. There is a reason they become like that and I think that’s because there is so much need in them to be loved. That’s what I related to - the need to be loved.
I understood her to have been an orphan.
It’s never said why she’s in this role as a companion. It is said that she’s been there for ten years and that she arrived at the door looking like Little Orphan Annie. So we decided between us - the director, Emily Burns, and I - I’ve worked with more female directors in my career than male ones - that her parents probably did die, perhaps her father in the first World War and her mother got ill years later and passed away. So we came up with the story that her family probably knew the Randolphs and it was all pre-arranged for her to have a safe haven there. Fenny would have been of the same class because you could only be a companion if you are of a similar class.
So that is why she is a companion and not a maid.
Yes. She is not actually paid. If she were paid, then her class would be lower. That is why she is just given food and a bed.
I didn’t know that. I’m an Amurican.
Her role was mainly to keep them company. But that’s another reason why it’s so uncomfortable because she’s in the family but kept apart a bit.
The insider/outsider syndrome - which is a lot of what being a writer feels like. And I couldn’t decide if I were projecting onto her my own sense of having been an orphan in my own life.
But that is what is so good about this play - every member of the audience will bring their own sense of being in a family to it.
QUESTION THREE
You were also in the BBC’s Cranford which was based on the 19th century novel of the same name by Elizabeth Gaskell. - one of my favorite series ever, which was mostly directed by Simon Curtis and starred your parents along with Judi Dench, Julia McKenzie, Eileen Atkins, Alex Jennings, Greg Wise, Celia Emrie, and Leslie Manville, among many others. It was about an 1850s Cheshire town, a provincial village that was about how proud people were to be from there but also it was limned with a kind of self-aware shame at being so provincial. It could have been titled Pride and Shamefulness. We all have a bit - or a lot - of both in our own lives. Is it too personal to ask what you are prideful about and what makes you feel shameful?
Not at all. A lot of the people whom I encounter in my life who have the most pride tend to be the people who are hiding the most shame. I think they are very entwined.
I was only 14 when I was in Cranford and I was just excited that I was getting to miss school and being in something both my parents were also in. The part I was playing was this maid interviewed by Lady Ludlow, who was being played by the formidable and brilliant Francesa Annis. My character knew how to read and that was deemed too intelligent to be a maid therefore she didn’t get the job. So your mentioning pride and shame in regards to that series, I think of how that girl must have felt at that, at how she must have felt such pride in being such a smart girl but that still wasn’t right.
That is something I connect to as a woman - which I think a lot of women connect to - which is you can try your hardest but it still might not be right. That is something I’m fighting as I grow up and grow into the woman I am wanting to be - and I hope am authentically becoming- is not trying to get it right. Instead, I am just trying to be authentically myself in everything I do. And be unapologetic in that.
But I think there is just innate shame embedded into women from a very young age through school, though just nature and nurture, through the world we’re being brought up in and into. I was brought up in the 1990s with women on the front of Heat and OK! magazines with their boobs hanging out. But then women were being shamed also back then just walking into a coffee shop and looking a bit hungover. So living in a world where you feel you have to tread very carefully just naturally builds some sort of shame because no matter what you do you could be seen as wrong. That is something I’m desperately fighting against. I think that’s so, so troubling.
QUESTION FOUR
You also played Prudence in Bridgerton. Another quote from Dodie Smith about a character in I Capture the Castle is “she’s an insidious type - Jane Eyre with a touch of Becky Sharp - a thoroughly dangerous girl.” She could have been describing Prudence. Did you like playing such an unlikeable person?
I think the realty of her would be really horrible. She’s really nasty. Of course, I enjoyed playing that because it is different from how I am. And you also have to think of inventive ways to be nasty because I didn’t want to be too stereotypical or employing any sort of trope. But the fun of it - not to sound too much like an actor - is to find the reason why she’s like that. I think her reason why is that she is coming from a loveless home, loveless parents, an absent father, and being shown no ideal relationship with love. So that is at the root of it which I enjoyed finding.
Do you know when you meet people who are so rude and you think, well, that’s an absolute choice to be that rude. You’re choosing to be horrible. Those people I find fascinating. How can I find a way to empathize with you so I don’t then just, in turn, be rude back. That’s is what I think is possible with acting and what I found interesting about Prudence. Plus, that with the mixture of wearing those silly costumes and silly wigs - I mean, what’s not to like about all that?
QUESTION FIVE
You went to the Camden School for Girls. Its motto is “Onwards and Upwards.” What would be your own motto?
Something along: It’s never too late to make a change. It’s never too late to set new standards. I quite liked “Onwards and Upwards” actually. It was much better than the earlier school I attended.
The Francis Holland School in Sloane Square.
Yes. Its motto was in Latin and it translated into something like “and may the girls be the corners of the temple.” I remember asking the headmistress - I think I was around 13 at the time, “Aren’t all corners the same?” That is what that school was trying to do. Create these really polished same young girls. And when I went to Camden it was the most liberating experience of my life. It was the best decision we could have made for me and how I turned out. It was really nurturing.
I am on a pilgrimage in my life. Living in London half of each year is part of it. Finish this sentence to finish up this conversation: If I were on a pilgrimage, I would be searching for …
Freedom from the past owning your present. That is what my own journey is about right now. I’m freeing myself of the pain that has happened throughout life. I’m not talking about big trauma. I’m just talking about all pain which is different for everyone and yet it is all relevant. I’m talking about the things that just chipped away at me. I’m on a journey of looking at those things, processing them, ridding them so that I can be present and be unaffected by my past in my present.
Thank you, Bessie. I’m going to try to come back and see Dear Octopus. I loved it that much. And you in it.
Oh, great. Let me know if you do.