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No. 88

June/July/August 2008


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Television
Ivor Davis
Juliet Stevenson:
Another British Treasure

"

 NEVER wanted to become the Hollywood flavor of the month,” British actress Juliet Stevenson declares.

The 51-year-old actress lives in North London with her anthropologist partner Hugh, and their two young children. She has absolutely no regrets whatsoever, she says, about her decision not to succumb to the Hollywood blandishments two decades ago.

In l990, following the opening in America of the much acclaimed movie Truly Madly Deeply co-starring Alan Rickman and directed by Anthony Minghella who died tragically in March,  producers began knocking on her door.

Stevenson recalls, “I had gone to Los Angeles to promote the picture and I was listening to movie offers. So shortly after I decided to do a play Scenes from an Execution in L.A. which would give the studios a chance to come and see me up close on stage.”

“I am not a big schmoozer,” the graduate of the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company concedes. “I am rather shy and I’m not into networking and that sort of stuff.”

She returned home and for the next 17 years built a solid body of work on stage, film and television, relishing the fact that she was able to choose only role that appealed to her—from the classical to the contemporary.

Such is the case with her latest film cinematic outing, A Previous Engagement, a light comedy with Stevenson playing the kind of role that Maggie Smith might have grabbed two decades ago.

In this amusing caper she’s Julia Reynolds, a not too happily married Seattle librarian who persuades her stodgy insurance salesman husband (Daniel Stern) to go on vacation to Malta .

But she has a secret agenda.  A quarter of a century earlier she had promised to return to the island to rendezvous with her first love Alex (Turkish born, French reared actor Tcheky Karyo) – in a part that two decades ago might have been played by Yves Montand.

Of course things do not go smoothly.  Not only do Reynolds’ two selfish daughters show up to share the vacation but she has to make the inevitable choice between  her bland husband, who before her very eyes turns into a seductive salsa dancing kind of guy,  and her sophisticated continental dream lover.

Speaking on the phone from her home in London, Stevenson, who had just put her children, Rosalind, 13, and Gabriel, 7, to bed, explained why an actress known as the “best crier in the business” would go for the lighter than air farce.

“I thought the script (by writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin) was one of the funniest I had ever read," she says.  "It was also clever, insightful and sophisticated.  And frankly there are not many roles like that for women over 40.

“My character is that kind of middle-aged woman whose life is often defined by the life behind her. But she is torn because she wants to be defined by the life ahead of her. She is full of contradictions – as many women of her age often are—because she yearns for adventure but is terrified of it.

“She longs to get out of her family—yet she adores her family. She wants to be bold and brave and free—yet she’s held within the confines of the norm.  While I know lots of women like that, I find that there aren’t that many screen roles written in which women are depicted that way.”  

A graduate of London ’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Stevenson was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company  working extensively at the National Theater in London where her performance in Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden in l991  brought her an Olivier Best Actress award.

She moved smoothly from stage to screen displaying a vast repertory of work and garnering a reputation of being a Meryl Streep-like actress for all seasons.  She demonstrated a range that was wider than Helen Mirren and Judi Dench and a believability in a slew of vastly different parts.

Later this year, thanks to lots of make up,  she plays Jim Broadbent’s wife—ageing from 40 to 70 in And When Did You Last See Your Father. Colin Firth, who is actually just a few years younger than Stevenson, plays her son in a story told in flashbacks about a dysfunctional father-son relationship.

Then there’s a role in an intriguing miniseries done for British television. In Ten Days to War she’s a strong-willed London lawyer, who vehemently opposes Britain ’s entry into the Iraq war despite strong government opposition and is fired for her stand. 

In another big screen outing, she co-stars with Ioan Gruffudd in a more family friendly movie, The Secret of  Moonacre, about the adventures of a 13-year-old orphan in l9th century England .  The film, which co-stars Dakota Blue Richard, the young actress from the 2007 film, The Golden Compass, is based on the popular British children’s fantasy book, The Little White Horse.

I asked Stevenson about a much-published quote attributed to her in which,  after her brief encounter with Hollywood ,  she purportedly said that  the film community was a place that wasn’t particularly interested in talent.

“That was completely mangled,” she insists. “I never said I didn’t think there was much talent in Hollywood . There’s tons of talent there. 

“What I did say was that I was hardly Hollywood material myself and that I felt that in Hollywood ,  like everywhere else,  youth rules because it’s awfully hard  once you've hit 40, to find the kind of role I  was offered in a film like A Previous Engagement.


Ivor Davis, a Southern California-based writer,  has covered the Hollywood beat for some four decades as a foreign correspondent for the London Daily Express and Times of London and as a columnist for the New York Times Syndicate and Tribune-Media Syndicate.


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