I wrote earlier this week on Thanksgiving about spending another Thanksgiving here in London with Emma Thompson when I was writing a cover story about her for Vanity Fair. She loved the article a lot. I often tell people it might be the best one I wrote there. I don’t mean to slight others, but everything sort of came together in this piece with the subject and my empathy for her and her talent conflating somehow with mine. We were simpatico. I have a fantasy of becoming her friend in this London life of mine now. She is now starring in the film version of the musical Matilda as Miss Trunchbull.
Here is the message she left - well the two of them - after she read the story. Yes, I have saved it all these years because I cherish it.
(Above: Photo of Emma Thompson by Annie Leibovitz)
Elinor hardly knew whether to smile or sigh.—Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility.
Emma Thompson, far from her home in Hampstead, England, sits by a pool high atop Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills, California, and surveys a basket of breakfast rolls that the maid has just brought out. No fan of hotels, Thompson has chosen to stay with her great pal Lindsay Doran, the producer of her latest film, Sense and Sensibility, in which she stars as Elinor Dashwood and for which she wrote the stunning screenplay. It has been Doran's dream for 15 years to bring Jane Austen's first published novel to the screen, and she even wrote the introduction to the screenplay, which, along with the diaries Thompson kept while filming, has just been published by Newmarket Press.
The suspicious eye Thompson initially cast at yet another journalist inflicted upon her has now been directed toward the basket as she surveys it for a scone or a freshly toasted crumpet. "It's so strange, the sort of bready articles one can get in America," she says, her tone not quite taking on the contours of complaint—she is much too civilized a visitor for that. It is a tone that relies instead on a sly, high-Brit register, one that Thompson skillfully employs when putting a dash of ironic distance between herself and anything that makes her uncomfortable. "Look at this," she says, holding up one of the baked goods, "this white, sort of English, but maybe a little Scottish, pancakey article. It's so funny."
The daughter of British theater folk, who spent many months of her childhood in her mother's native Scotland, Thompson could almost be describing herself. Her pallor in the Southern California light is a shade or so paler than an undercooked pancake, and her eyes, so lively in cinematic close-up, seem fatigued with the landscape of fame. A sweatshirt falls in sad, soft folds over her body, and the velvet of her baggy pants matches a piece of pumpernickel in the basket. She wears big blue bedroom slippers. Her hair is unwashed. Turning her gaze away from me, she lowers it to what is known as a "pool snake," a serpentine cleaning apparatus which sucks the scum from the chlorinated water, then raises its head to spit it out onto the lawn. Indeed, the 36-year-old actress seems in no mood to partake in the raillery that an interview tends to thrust upon polite conversation.
Who can blame her? It's been a rough few weeks. The announcement of her separation from her husband, Kenneth Branagh, stirred up a British tabloid frenzy that caused throngs of journalists to camp outside her Hampstead home and stalk her every move. Stories in the press were filled with sexual intrigues and naughty innuendos. She has also just finished a prying press junket in the States organized for the promotion of her title portrayal in Carrington—the tortured love story of the Bloomsbury couple Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey—and knows quite well what lies in store for her in another few weeks, when she'll have to go through the process all over again for Sense and Sensibility.
"I was delighted when all that happened to her," Hugh Grant, who co-stars as Edward Ferrars in the film, tells me when I later ask if he gave her any well-earned advice about how to cope with tabloid obloquy of the leering sort that had earlier fallen in his famous lap. "That day I could hear the sound of knuckles scraping against concrete as the British press left my flat and headed for Hampstead. ... I think I saw her a couple of days later, when I was doing post-syncing on Sense and Sensibility, and I did fling my arms around her, but more out of gratitude than sympathy."
"I have a rather strange, familiar relationship with the press in England," Thompson says, carefully keeping the pool snake in her peripheral view. "They're like very, very grumpy parents. . . . They can be thuggish, but then they can turn around and be sort of incredibly sympathetic."
Pausing, her eyes livening a bit, Thompson quickly turns her attention to my shaved pate. "You know, I shaved my head once," she confesses, an eyebrow, ever at the ready, rising to its accustomed arch. "I was 20, at Cambridge, and was living in a house with my mates. We all got stoned one afternoon. They said that I'd look just like Nefertiti with no hair. So we just shaved all my hair off."
Actually, she's more Shavian Cleopatra than shaven Nefertiti. Just as Shaw deconstructed Shakespeare's voluptuous temptress into a young woman whose powerful attraction is based on ironic wit and a modern bearing, Thompson in the last few years has redefined our image of female stardom. She is no sex kitten; hers is a sensibility which flirts, paradoxically, with our higher senses.
The pool snake rears its ugly head and spits right in my face.
Thompson hardly knows whether to smile or sigh. She smiles.
##
An actress who has made a name for herself as the latter-day diva of Serious Cinema, Emma Thompson longed early on to be a comedian—a gilded Lily Tomlin. Her inspiration is not Ellen Terry, it's Buster Keaton. "She's very insightful. She kind of gets at you with humor, while at the same time she's being really honest," claims Get Shorty screenwriter Scott Frank, who wrote Dead Again, which starred Thompson and Branagh. "One minute she can make you laugh at yourself, but the next minute she's got you examining yourself. She's that way about herself, too."
"So do you consider yourself an artist?" I ask her.
"No!" Thompson exclaims, shocked by the impertinence of such a question. "I think that is a fantastically pompous term for an actor. I think one is a performer. ... I remember at Cambridge I was very aware that there was a divide between the people who were interested in doing drama and the sort of panto hams. I was much more interested in having a good time and doing sketch comedy," she says of her days as vice president of Footlights, a male-driven comedy club, which boasts John Cleese and the late Peter Cook among its alumni. She was also one of the founding members of Woman's Hour, Cambridge's first all-female revue. "I'd meet these kind of putative directors, and they'd say to me, 'You must be my Violet!' I'd go, 'What the fuck do you mean, your Violet?' I found it so humorless," she says, pronouncing the last word as if it were the world's greatest indictment.
"There was no doubt that Emma was going to go the distance," remembers friend and fellow Footlighter Stephen Fry. "In fact, we used to write sketches to be in, and we always had a private joke because the surname of whoever it was she was playing would be Talented. Our nickname for her was Emma Talented."
"She has a marvelous, bawdy sense of humor," says Sir Anthony Hopkins.
"It's a British sense of humor," adds Arnold Schwarzenegger, who starred with her in Junior.
"She does make you laugh—that's a big plus," says James Ivory, who directed her and Hopkins in Howards End, for which she won the 1992 Academy Award for best actress, and The Remains of the Day, for which she was again nominated, the same year she received a nomination for best supporting actress in In the Name of the Father. "I've known several other actors who are very big stars who are in exactly the same situation that she was—they did not go to big English drama schools, and they started out as comics. One of them is Maggie Smith. Another is Hugh Grant. That's where they began. It gives them a kind of confidence.
They can really think on their feet in a wonderful way."
##
“Though you've made a name for yourself in these stately Merchant Ivory dramas," I tell Thompson, "I think the secret to your portrayals has always been in your eyes. You've got the corneas of a clown."
"I did a very interesting course in Paris once," she begins, then pauses and laughs at the sound of her own voice. "Now, that's a sentence. ... I did this French course with this clown, Philippe Gaulier. ... I learned the notion about three very particular disciplines that he'd invented, which were Tragedians, Clowns, and Buffoons. His notion was that the Tragedians play to the gods. The Buffoons were sort of the subhumans—sort of the people from the swamps or the leper colonies who were brought in to amuse la jeunesse doree and who had nothing to lose and, therefore, whose gift was parody. They always trod a very fine line because they were brought in to be grotesque, but if they went over the line, they would lose their lives. . . . Then there were the Clowns. Clowns are between the two. They play to the heart. That made so much sense to me. If you take it out of that specific context and you think about artists—a writer or a painter or a composer or a poet in some ways you can absolutely associate that with playing to the gods, whatever that might mean. There is a sense of the sublime there. We don't really do the grotesques anymore, the sort of freak shows. It's very ancient, but it's still a part of our nature. Maybe it's rock 'n' roll. Maybe it's the tabloid press. Maybe it's daytime talk shows. Maybe that's what it is, but there is something necessary about it. That middle ground—this clowning—is very interesting. It's very . . . humane. The really good clown comes on and fails miserably. Just by coming on, a clown makes people laugh, because you're saying, 'I shouldn't be here at all. I can't do this.' It's about failing. It's wonderful, because laughter is a celebration of all our failings—that recognition that we are not gods, that we are human. That's what clowns are for. That's why they are important. And that's definitely what I am."
"One of my favorite performances of Emma's was as the Fool in King Lear" Kenneth Branagh says, remembering their younger days as members of the Renaissance Theatre Company. He is taking a break in his production office outside London, where he is planning his film version of Hamlet, in which Ophelia will be played by Kate Winslet, who portrays Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. "She was absolutely magnificent—one of the best pieces of acting I've ever seen. She obviously does have a very sharp sense of comedy—but also of pathos."
"I was brought up by actors, and one learned that the important thing really is to have a laugh," Thompson insists. "My father was terribly ill almost all my life. He had his first heart attack when he was 35 and I was 6 or 7. He had a blood condition and died when he was 52." She smiles at some private memory of her father, Eric Thompson, the writer and narrator of the popular BBC children's television show The Magic Roundabout, as well as a successful West End director of Alan Ayckbourn comedies. Her mother is the actress Phyllida Law, who appeared as Ursula opposite Thompson's Beatrice in Branagh's spirited film version of Much Ado About Nothing. "He was ill all the way through, but somehow it was the way my parents dealt with that—the humor which they brought to the situation. My uncle also was very ill, because he had a serious car accident when he was about 25. He lived with us and was like my third parent. He was gay and didn't really come out until he was about 44. He was one of the funniest men on the face of the earth. He died when he was 51 of a brain hemorrhage. I was brought up by very witty people who were dealing with quite difficult things—disease and death. ... I was brought up by people who tended to giggle at funerals. If you want the tone of my family, it's very Sydney Smith— the 18th-century writer. Very ironic—always a sense of poking fun at himself, yet there is also a tremendous humanity and kindness to it. It's incredibly broad-shouldered, that view of life."
##
“Do you think it's rude to keep the Oscar in the lavvy?" Thompson asks me when I pay her a visit at her home in Hampstead, which is located on the same suburban block where she spent her childhood. A modest, red-brick semi-detached in the less posh section of town—she even has to park her 1969 MGB GT at the curb—this is not the home one would imagine for an Academy Award winner. She's caught me, however, in the downstairs bathroom staring at the golden statue, which stands on the back of the toilet. "I just think it looks nice in that room." On the wall opposite the Oscar are 20 suggestions by Sydney Smith on how to keep your spirits up. Number 12: Avoid poetry, dramatic presentations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy, sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence.
Thompson has heeded his advice, except for the music and serious novels. Her CD collection is kept in the kitchen and contains Mozart, Bach, Armstrong, and Fitzgerald. The room is also overflowing with pots and pans and well-examined cookbooks. The woman will never be at a loss for liquor.
Books are stacked everywhere in this house she and Branagh bought when they started making money. Her current reading includes Gitta Sereny's Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth.
Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover lies facedown on the comforter upstairs in the lone bedroom. Across the hall is Thompson's study, where she spent five years struggling with the Sense and Sensibility screenplay.
Perhaps because she's so happy to be back home, Thompson looks ravishing this morning. She's spent time at a spa in San Diego before her return, and she seems much more relaxed. In fact, she says she plans to take a full year off from work. Her skin is clear; so are her eyes and thoughts. And her hair has been attended to; the streaks are now as golden as her Oscar.
The front door swings open, and Phyllida Law makes her entrance. A Katharine Hepburn look-alike, Thompson's mother lives across the street, and has come for morning coffee and a catchup chat. She and Thompson's younger sister, Sophie, who is also an actress and lives a few doors down, have made their own contributions to the spate of recent Jane Austen films. Sophie is in Persuasion, and they are both in Miramax's upcoming Emma. "Oh, lemon curd!" Law coos, and slathers a bit on a biscuit before taking her seat at the kitchen table, ready to be regaled with her daughter's tales regarding her trip to Los Angeles.
"I remember my very first visit to Los Angeles," Thompson says, taking a stray strand of her mother's hair and smoothing it back into place. "I was 14, and Dad was directing The Norman Conquests, I think. ... I remember going to the supermarket for the first time. Dad gave Soph and me the cart and said we could have anything we wanted. We came back with four cartons of ice cream, smoked bacon, and makeup."
It is obvious how much Eric Thompson is missed in this household, and soon the two women are reminiscing about the days when they helped him cope with his language loss after he'd suffered a stroke. "We structured the day like a kind of menu," says Law. "You have to keep the stimulation going at 15-minute intervals.
. . . You were very severe with him," she primly tells her daughter.
"I was fierce," Thompson says softly.
Law: "You used those flash cards. . . . I learned a lot about the English language myself, and why it's so difficult for children to say 'Phyllida.' F's are sophisticated things to learn to say . . . and the sh's.
Thompson: "And yet the only things that Dad could say when he came out of hospital were 'fuck' and 'shit.' When you have aphasia, somehow people can always remember to swear."
"Oh, that sounds awful," Law says. "What they don't forget also—which I think is delightful—is the politenesses: please and thank you and hello, darling. . . . And his genders were off."
"Yes," remembers Thompson. "Mrs. Thatcher was always a he."
"He'd say things like 'Oh, he's a lovely woman,"' says Law, laughing with her daughter. "We'd howl! Sometimes we'd go, 'Don't get better! Don't get better!'"
"Dad was pretty tough, but he did weep sometimes," says Thompson, her laughter subsiding. "Once, I must have pushed him a bit too hard, and he went into the study to where the piano was. He was weeping slightly. He said—this struck me to the core— I can't do it, Emma.' I said, 'You can, you can, you can."'' She falls silent. "That's when I suddenly thought, Everything is upside-down now."
"You became the parent?" I ask. Law looks her daughter's way.
"Sort of," Thompson admits, returning her mother's loving gaze. "But it's more that you're learning about fallibility and mortality and that you can't rely on people not to feel or get run over or fall apart or go mad. It's an incredible lesson to learn—and the earlier you learn it, the more useful it is."
##
“You can have heartbreak for all sorts of reasons," Thompson says. "But one can't help thinking that that's the crucible in which one's humanity is fired. It's unfortunate—and I really wish I didn't have to say this—but I really like human beings who have suffered. They're kinder. I mean, if you've suffered and done some work on it. Adolf Hitler suffered, and look what happened to him. All those years of being a tramp in Austria didn't really help out on the old compassion front."
We are talking about the end of her marriage.
"Ken will always be family. That's a given. There has been a metamorphosis, perhaps. I don't know yet. ... I committed every molecule to my marriage, so relinquishing it has been very hard. It's been like breaking your fingers as you let go. But that's perhaps important in itself. . . . Certainly it was like sitting on a time bomb. ... If you like, the pain sort of started such a long time ago. Three years. I know I'm steering into a calmer place. Despite the pain, one comes through it."
"Any regrets at not having children with him? Would that have kept you together?"
"No, I have no feelings of that sort. . . . I would have thought one is more likely to maintain a decent relationship if one doesn't have something that forces you into it."
"Do you have a sense of failure about all this?" I ask.
"No. Marriages stop. Marriages change. People are always saying a marriage 'failed.' It's such a negative way of putting it. I've discussed the value of failure in creative work. Failure is terribly important. Perhaps that's what I'm saying: the notion that failure is a negative thing is wrong."
"Not even a grain of failure in any sense could be attributed to Emma in any of this," insists Branagh. "She's been absolutely magnificent throughout. She is able to remind herself, and me, that what's happened to us has happened to a trillion people in much more difficult circumstances. The price we have to pay—and in the grand scheme of things it's rather a small one—is the public spotlight."
Thompson and Branagh took to that public spotlight quite effortlessly early on. Crowned as acting royalty by the British, they began to have even greater success in America. Then the attitude back home changed. The press began to rib them as "luvvies," a critical term flung sardonically at certain self-referential English actors. Thompson and Branagh had become the latest in a long line of celebrated thespian couples—Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith, Timothy Dalton and Vanessa Redgrave—whose combined talents seemed sadly somehow to diminish their individual brilliance. "Though Kenneth tends to pour himself into his work as a way of coping with problems, Emma is much more the introspective one," says a good friend.
"Is there an aggrieved party in all of this?" I ask Thompson, who is becoming discomfited by this area of discussion.
"Well, even if I felt as if there were, I wouldn't tell you. Our separation had nothing to do with anyone else," she states firmly, while admitting later that she is aware of the requisite gay rumors concerning both of them. Moreover, the British tabloids have been filled with stories of Branagh's alleged affair with actress Helena Bonham Carter during and after the filming of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Thompson's fling with Greg Wise, who portrays the dashing Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, and who accompanied her to the Cannes Film Festival last year for the screenings of Carrington.
"Have you had an affair with Wise?" I ask her point-blank.
Thompson squares me in her sights. "That's a separate issue. ... It involves a third party who's not here and can't speak for himself." (Wise, reportedly in a remote area of the Himalayas, could not be reached.)
"Look, this question of gossip is interesting," Thompson muses, expertly reshaping the specifics of her private life into a broader question. "In some form it isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's to do with story and narrative. It's to do with people trying to work out how to live their lives. For God's sake, look at Jane Austen! It is possible that gossip is a first step, that way in which we try to discover ourselves."
##
“Part of growing up, it has occurred to me—while I was sitting on the loo yesterday—is admitting to what you are," Thompson expounds one day in California. We are walking on the beach beyond Malibu and popping in to visit friends along the way. "I think that certainly during my 20s my intelligence and my articulateness were very important to me. ... I thought I was much stronger than I am. I was frightened of being vulnerable and possibly even frightened of being 'feminine,' because that seemed a weakness. . . . There is a wonderful story by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own where she describes Shakespeare's sister." Thompson stops and stares out at the surf. "God! It's so touching. It's a melancholy story about a woman with a poet's heart in a female body, therefore unacceptable."
"Could one describe Shakespeare as having a female heart in a poet's body?"
"He did seem to understand both sides in an extraordinary way. I think he understood that we contain everything. That's what's such a fucker about having to define oneself as male or female, full stop. Can't we just leave it at genitalia?"
"Do you think you're sexy, Emma?"
"Well, in private, yes. I think of myself as sexual in a human way, but not as a kind of bombshell. I would never be cast in those kinds of roles. I think the sexuality I represent is less to do with fantasy. I tend to represent ordinary women. . . . I'm sexual in the same way that Tony Hopkins is; we can create an erotic charge rather quickly. It's so much more erotic . . . that hidden, unspoken, unshown sex, than the full thing."
"You give us rather the full thing in Carrington. In one nude scene, you're even entered from the rear."
"That's right!" she says, laughing robustly at the memory, then quickly calming herself. Her voice takes on its sly, high-Brit tone. "Did you like my silent orgasm?"
Laughter rises again in her at the absurdity of discussing Virginia Woolf and Dora Carrington here in the California sunshine. She scampers about the beach and falls into a kind of dance, reminding me that her first big commercial break came in the West End as the female lead opposite Robert Lindsay in Me and My Girl. For 15 months, eight times a week, she tap-danced her way into the hearts of the British audience. "I thought if I did the fucking Lambeth Walk one more time I was going to fucking throw up," she recalls now with characteristic irreverence.
It is just such irreverence she put on display in Thompson, her comedy series for the BBC back in 1988, but the public and the critics were quite put off. "I was roundly punished for it. . . but it also taught me a great deal. I'm a rather dog like person who will go bounding up to everybody and go, 'Let's play!' and then not understand when they give me a kick in the stomach because they're not interested."
"Are you a people pleaser?"
"Yeah. It's a sickness."
The BBC disaster was, however, a blessing in disguise, for it was those television sketches, most of which she also wrote, that caused producer Doran to offer the actress the job of adapting Sense and Sensibility for the screen. (Doran's other iconoclastic decision—hiring the Taiwanese Ang Lee, who is best known for The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman, to direct the film—has also paid off brilliantly.) "There were a couple of skits in Thompson—especially the 'Victorian Mouse' skit, as Emma calls it," Doran says, explaining her choice. "It was in the first episode. She plays a Victorian woman who comes to see her mother on the day after her marriage. Her little sister is there also. They're having tea and very polite conversation. Emma's character tells them that the oddest thing happened last night, that after dinner her husband said to her, 'Have you ever seen one of these?' She then says to her mother and sister, 'He opened his trousers and out came a sort of bald, pink mouse.' It was hilarious. It wasn't that it was raunchy. It was that the language was very precise and very funny. It was the voice I was looking for."
A penis joke led to Jane Austen?
"I'll read those books and I'll get to a point where I'll have to put the book down because I'm laughing so much," Thompson insists. "People don't associate that with Jane Austen. . . . And Jane Austen is sexual."
"Are you ready for the criticism from the stodgy aficionados of Austen?" I ask. "You've jettisoned a few characters. Left out Willoughby's return to Marianne's sickbed."
"I fully expect there to be pickets outside the theaters. . . . The great burden of writing the script was trying to find a structure that was going to work. Every time I had to deconstruct and write something different, I'd get into a terrible bungle and cry a lot. But once I got that structure, it became more and more fun. I could work a little more on the shape of the scene and the dialogue and the jokes."
As we continue shuffling along the expensive beachfront, I ask her, "Does the glamour part of show business put you off?"
"No. Not at all. I love it. It's dress-up. I like all that. It would be awful to lose that. It's like the monarchy. I might not necessarily approve of what it represents, but I'd miss the hats."
"Come on," I say, and lead her toward an ersatz New England mansion poised serenely atop a green-encumbered bluff. "I must say," Thompson admits, puffing through our final ascent up the myriad steps, "that if I had the money I wouldn't object to having a tiny little beach house."
Such transplanted New England splendor belongs to one of Hollywood's top managers, who is still in bed at noon, claiming a slight cold as his excuse. "I'm your biggest fan," he tells Thompson when I introduce them in his upstairs bedroom, which has a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean below.
"Do you mind if I take a quick pee in your loo?" she asks him. "I like to leave my trail behind."
"I'd be honored," he says, his chest congested now with sincerity.
Thompson locks the door behind her. "What's she in town for?" he whispers.
"Her new film, Sense and Sensibility," I tell him.
"Sense of Sensibility?"
"No. Sense and Sensibility.'"
"Hmm . . . Sense and Sensibility, huh," he repeats, pausing to give it his professional, contemplative all, listening for her muffled flush. "Good title."
##
A couple of weeks later, on Thanksgiving, Thompson repays my California beach tour by taking me on a walk through Hampstead Heath. It has been an unseasonably warm autumn here, and golden leaves still cling to the trees. Thompson is wearing a large windowpane-patterned wool coat. Her hair has been ponytailed, and earmuffs hide her ears. As much as she enjoys the California climate and clear skies, she is happy to be back where she belongs.
"Could you ever live in America?" I ask.
"I'm sure I could," she says, to my surprise. "But I do love England. I love the people. Even if they're not friendly, at least they're funny. The northerners. The Scottish. The Irish. God, how I'd miss the Celts!"
After a visit to Kenwood House, a stately home built in the 17th century, where she had the first read-through of her Sense and Sensibility script, Thompson takes me on a tour of the favorite arbored paths of her youth. "This must be where you'd walk with your boyfriends," I propose. "Do you, by chance, remember your very first kiss?"
"I do. I remember it very clearly. I was 12, and the chap I was kissing was 17. So he knew a thing or two. He'd been drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, and it was the best taste I think I've ever encountered."
Laughing at her schoolgirl memories, we both fall suddenly silent and stop in our tracks at the sight before us: three greyhounds are posed in a valley of trees, mist surrounding the sleek, muscled profiles of their bodies, as if they had come to life from a Mantegna painting. She's trumped me—this is not something that Malibu can offer.
As we approach the hounds and their owners—a crisply precise old couple—Thompson and I realize that one of the dogs, named Jessica, is blind. One eye has been removed, and all that remains is a furry slit of a scar; the other eye is fogged to a beautifully opaque blue. Thompson bends down, cups the dog's face in her hands, and whispers secrets in its ears; understanding, the animal licks her face and nuzzles her woolen chest.
Thompson stands, flushed with the British air and the hold that even a simple hound can have on her heart. Her own blue eyes are misted now with the empathy that is the very essence of, yes, her art. "That's a face you'd want on film," she says of the slightly scarred, instinctively regal female animal. Her tone is neither sly nor highly British. It is instead quite practical. She turns her collar up and strides heath ward home.