Juliet Stevenson:
Another British Treasure
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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.
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