15 December 2003
Posted by Bonnie on 15 December 2003 at
12:00
The glacial blonde in the black veil eyed Hercule Poirot in the restaurant at the Savoy. "I've heard about you. The things you've done. The way you work. It's psychology. It's your forte, n'est-ce pas?" Poirot tipped his head slightly to one side, pondering the historical accuracy of the woman's makeup and hair. "My success, it is founded in psychology," he murmured in his mannered Belgian — Belgian, mind — way. "The 'why?' of human behaviour."
Why indeed.
It's Sunday and it's cold out. Foyle is engaged on other matters in the countryside and the torrid tussle for Miss Marple's tweed skirt continues. ITV's contemporary dramas — Sweet Medicine, Single, Family, Fortysomething — were all flops. It must, therefore, be time for Agatha Christie's Poirot, a ratings warhorse in the shape of a penguin.
The first of five new Poirot adaptations, Five Little Pigs, was, in a lot of ways, vintage Christie. There was a murder (obviously), a country house and selection of suitably suspicious suspects — from a repressed homosexual to a one-eyed archaeologist. There was a scratchy gramophone and a pearl-handled pistol, a severe bob and a tsunami of Marcel waves. There was even a drawing room — or possibly, a draw-ring room — denouement. Annette Badland, so memorably murdered and pegged to the washing line in the Miss Marple mystery A Pocketful of Rye, appeared as Mrs Spriggs, the housekeeper.
But wait. There's a twist in the plot, a swing in the tale. The camera work was jittery, the direction terribly modern, the palette washed out. There was no moustache waxing, no tie-straightening, no comedy-fastidiousness. There wasn't a hint of Captain Hastings or a whiff of Miss Lemon. Instead of picture-postcard vistas, we had painful, lingering close-ups. Jaunty, out. Gritty, in. Poirot has gone NYPD Blue. Christie's come over all Cops.
It was all the better for it. Of course, it was the same old story of love and death, but there was an emotional depth distinctly lacking in adaptations of late; here was tragedy rather than parody. Five Little Pigs was about hate and guilt, about how, if you are remotely human, you can never get away with murder. It was, pleasingly, concerned with the subjectivity of truth. Derrida in the Library with the Candlestick: Post-structuralism in the Work of Agatha Christie. Discuss.
With a "with" for Gemma Jones and an "and" for Patrick Malahide (who would have been missed in a blink), the cast — which also included a rather splendid Rachael Stirling — was a bit top-notch. Despite the inherent feyness of the whole thing, Five Little Pigs had weight.
Nobody, you may be interested to know, went wee-wee-wee all the way home.
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14 December 2003
Posted by Bonnie on 14 December 2003 at
12:00
Renowned painter Amyas Crale is murdered, allegedly poisoned by his wife Caroline who went to the gallows for her crime. Fourteen years later in 1938, their grown up daughter Lucy returns from her life in Canada with new evidence — a letter written to her by her mother on the eve of her hanging, declaring her innocence. Poirot agrees to dig up the past, but warns Lucy he may discover things she will not wish to hear. Based on the novel by Agatha Christie.
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13 December 2003
Posted by Bonnie on 13 December 2003 at
12:00
… but the actor daughter of Dame Diana Rigg really hates being called posh.
Her mummy's a Dame, her daddy owns an estate in Perthshire and she's been dubbed one of society's most eligible women by Tatler magazine.
But toffee-nosed? Posh? Rachael Stirling won't hear a word of it.
"I'm not posh," says the daughter of ex-Avenger Diana Rigg, with the kind of accent you'd expect to hear ordering a hide of venison and a side of caviar.
"OK, I talk with a stupid accent but that doesn't make me posh.
"And yes, I went to boarding school, but I don't think that makes me posh either. Posh is a mentality I just don't have."
Fine. But Tatler magazine, on the other hand, is undeniably posh. Let's put it this way: Rachael's co-nominees in last month's poll include Lady Tamara Grosvenor, Lady Honor Wellesley, The Hon Sophia Hesketh and The Hon Hannah Rothschild.
All names you're familiar with, no doubt. And, not one among them bold enough to use a glottal stop, you can bet.
A posh burd not pronouncing a 'T'? They'd be hunted out the hamlet for that kind of crime. But, then again, Keira Knightley, a second-generation Greenockian whose mother came from the working class town, topped the poll.
So maybe there is something to be said for posh being a state of mind.
Keira can slip into a strong Scottish accent with the flick of a dictaphone switch. And so, it seems, can Rachael.
She says: "What a bloody stupid thing that poll was, frankly. I mean, who the hell are these useless people who make these things up, eh? It should be called Twatler."
No matter. You're not likely to know Rachael as a face from Tatler, anyway.
Those of you who watched BBC1's raunchy drama Tipping the Velvet, on the other hand, are unlikely to have forgotten her. As lesbian Nan, she got audiences all hot and bothered in her clinches with Spooks star Keeley Hawes.
But, as middle aged men get used to saying her name in front of their wives without feeling guilty, Rachael still can't see what all the fuss was about.
She says: "I didn't expect the reaction it got. What was a really interesting piece of work was overshadowed by a sex toy.
"That's not something I expected. I thought people would watch it because it was an original story.
"I just didn't expect the papers to react the way they did. It was a romp, a fantasy that was written for a group of friends. It was meant to be an adventure, a surreal, wonderful, funny, original adventure.
"They had 14 complaints at the BBC after episode one and 10 of them were complaining there wasn't enough sex.
"So, frankly, what the big fuss was about, I just don't know."
Well, the sight of two ladies kissing one another's breasts isn't exactly Blue Peter.
It's just as well Mary Whitehouse had moved to the big complaints department in the sky by the time it was transmitted.
Rachel says: "I expected it to be taken on the storyline and not just its sexual content, but that happens all the time.
"It happened in Young Adam, where everyone went to the cinema to see them throwing custard all over each other in that saucy sex scene. But it's just not that saucy. My mentality at the time was that if it gets people to turn on the telly then it can't be bad.
"In America, it was acclaimed, because it wasn't given much promotion there. It was viewed without any preconceived ideas. But here, there was such a brouhaha about me and Keeley."
There sure was. Not least, it was reported, with Rachael's poor boyfriend at the time, John Lycett-Green.
He couldn't cope with seeing his lady in girl-on-girl action and their relationship crumbled soon afterwards.
She says: "I'd have thought it would have been a bargain basement bonus. But apparently not. Saying that though, it must be hard for anyone not in this profession to be with someone who is, because until you're part of it, you don't know quite how asexual it all is.
"When you're on set and you're naked and there's a man lighting your chin, and a woman combing your hair, it's just not sexy at all. But all you see on screen is the person you love frolicking about."
But it's not as if you would consider it for real, or anything? "The lines can be blurred," she says. "But, having said that, I'm not attracted to women."
So what's her take on the sexuality as a sliding scale thing then? "People who can't decide on their sexuality are greedy," she says, laughing. "Bisexuals are a bit greedy. They want a bit of both.
"Truthfully though, over the last 10 years androgyny has kicked in and women look a little more like men. But then I've never thought sexuality has ever been straight up or down."
Fine, but didn't Woody Allen say that bisexuality immediately doubles your chances of a date on a Saturday night?
"I'm young, free and single and having a whale of a time," she says. "I'm having a total ball. I'm working hard, doing a play in the West End and I don't have time for a boyfriend. They drain your energy." For the time being, she's devoting her energy to work and as far as slaying the memory of Nan in the collective public perception goes, she's working at that too.
Her latest TV role sees her cast in the return of Poirot on ITV tomorrow, as a tragic cheated wife, hung for the murder of her husband, Aiden Gillen from Queer As Folk. And filming the hanging scene was the most terrifying thing she's done.
She says: "It was nerve-wracking. No matter how much you say to yourself that it's just acting, it's still been filmed to look as realistic and human as possible.
"Despite the fact that you're standing there thinking this is all pretend you still have your ankles strapped, standing on a trap door.
"It made me aware of how terrifying it must have been to be a woman at that time. She thinks that she's going to the gallows for a just cause but I'm not saying any more than that."
And quite right too. David Suchet's on top form as the criminal mastermind, and Gillen's brilliant as a smarmy, arrogant artist with a habit for getting involved with his subjects.
Poirot will win Rachael more fans but she doesn't see the role as another step up the ladder. "It's not about pushing my profile up, it's about doing an interesting piece of work," she says.
"I did Tipping the Velvet because it's the best job I was offered. I never take a job thinking where it's going to take me."
Besides, she doesn't need fans like the ones she got after Tipping. "I got some weird mail after that," she says. "A guy traced his penis on the back of one of the letters I got, which was odd. I held that one with tweezers as I put it in the bin. Who knows what bacteria was on it.
"I got another one from a man who wrote, 'I'm 5'2", from Wolverhampton. I only work in Tesco but I do have very firm buttocks.'" Despite her accent, you feel Rachael would be happier with someone who worked in Tesco than another dahling from the industry. Providing, that is, he can cope with her snogging on screen.
She's probably more at home browsing the soft drinks aisle than she is at showbiz parties. She says: "I went to The Lord of the Rings premiere. You go to these things, you don't know anyone, and you find yourself sitting in the loo all night wishing you were at home watching telly.
"It's that horrible rubbernecking thing, people pretending they're talking to you while looking over their shoulder for someone more interesting. And there never bloody is at these things. Never."
So, come the release of her new film Freeze Frame in the New Year, where she stars alongside madcap comic Lee Evans, will she be huddling in the lavvy?
"I've never seen anything like this movie," she says. "It's utterly original."
The project, with Evans as a paranoid man wrongly accused then acquitted of murder, has Rachael cast as a femme fatale.
"She's very damaged, a dark emotional girl, and I had to go to some dark places while playing her.
"Lee's character is so paranoid of ever being wrongfully accused of murder again that he films himself 24 hours a day.
"The film is basically about paranoia in the technical age. Lee is brilliant in it."
With no career plan, Rachael isn't one for goal setting, although there is one thing she'd like to achieve.
She says: "I went to uni in Edinburgh and spent a long time on the estate when I was growing up. I love Edinburgh, it's the most beautiful city on earth, but then Glasgow has the best clubs and DJs.
"We used to come through to The Arches as students to see Judge Jules, then we'd go home and end up dancing on the beach at Gullane.
"In my heart I believe I'm Scottish. I went to school there and grew up there.
"If ever the day comes when I'm rich and famous enough not to have to be in London for auditions then I'm moving to Bannockburn in the blink of an eye."
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Posted by Bonnie on 13 December 2003 at
12:00
Rachael Stirling is best known for two things — her mother, actress Dama Diana Rigg, and her starring role in the saucy lesbian drama Tipping the Velvet. She's back on our screens this week in Agatha Christie's Poirot: Five Little Pigs.
Rachael plays Caroline Crale, who is hanged in 1924 for the murder of her husband, the famous painter Amyas Crale. At the time, Amyas (Queer as Folk's Aidan Gillen) was having an affair with the beautiful and cruel Elsa.
Fourteen years later, Caroline's daugher Lucy returns from her new life in Canada. She approaches Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (David Suchet) with a letter that her mother wrote before she was hanged, claiming she was innocent.
Poirot agrees to reopen investigations into the strange case. He must pit his little grey cells against the five main suspects of the murder — the five little pigs of the story's title — who include Amyas's childhood friends Philip (Cambridge Spies' Toby Stephens) and Philip's brother Meredith (Reversals' Marc Warren).
During our interview, Rachael's feeling a little delicate. The night before she had been out with the cast of the West End production A Woman of No Importance, in which she appears with rumoured boyfriend Julian Ovenden (The Royal). But she is still enthusiastic about her part in the glossy murder-mystery.
"This adaptation is much darker and harder than most Poirot mysteries — and it had to be brilliant, otherwise the cast wouldn't have agreed to do it," says Rachael, 26.
"After Tipping the Velvet I was sent quite a lot of pervy scripts, which did put me off for a bit. It was depressing."
But in Five Little Pigs she gets to keep her clothes on. And it is clear that the talented actress has inherited far more from her famous mum than a pair of killer cheekbones. But even though she has worked hard to achieve recognition on her own terms, Rachael does accept that there has been a professional interest in the mother-daughter connection.
"Mum and I have discussed working together before. There has been a film script about a mother and daughter which we might do. It may be quite difficult, because we are so close, but it would really be an extraordinary journey for both of us to go on. And this particular script sounds as if only a real mother and daughter could do it — so it might as well be us!"
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11 December 2003
Posted by Bonnie on 11 December 2003 at
12:00
Rachael Stirling found fame in the lesbian TV drama Tipping the Velvet. Now, she's on stage with Prunella Scales, and film and TV work is flooding in. So, asks Brian Viner, could she outshine her illustrious mother, Dame Diana Rigg?
As one of the few middle-aged men in the country who did not catch so much as a glimpse of the BBC drama Tipping the Velvet — the "Victorian lesbo-romp", as it was characterised in at least one tabloid newspaper — I am at a disadvantage waiting for Rachael Stirling in a busy bar on London's Haymarket. Neither of us knows what the other looks like. Which is why, when she does arrive, she approaches the wrong man and says a bright "Hello!". He looks pleasantly surprised. He's doubtless one of those who did watch Tipping the Velvet.
Anyway, the misunderstanding is quickly sorted, but it hasn't helped to ease Stirling out of her flap. She is, I think, the flappy sort, though in an ultra-confident, loud, rather engaging way. She rummages in her bag for a packet of Silk Cut, and gets cross with her mobile phone. "Shut up," she says, as it starts to trill. "SHUT UP!"
We talk, as we are obliged to do, about Poirot, in which she appears on Sunday evening, cast very much against type as a quiet, withdrawn woman who is accused of murdering her husband. "I read all of Agatha Christie's books as a child and adored them," she says. "Apparently, after Shakespeare and the Bible, hers are the world's biggest-selling books. Isn't that astonishing?" I point out that perhaps Christie has now been usurped by J K Rowling. "Oh, yes. Oh, isn't that depressing. Fuck, how depressing!"
Stirling swears quite a lot, in that casual, very plummy, public- school way. For a young woman of 26, still finding her way in her profession, she seems formidably self-assured, which I suspect comes partly from a boarding-school education, and partly from being the only child of Dame Diana Rigg — whom she resembles around the dark brown eyes — and the wealthy landowner Archie Stirling.
Does she think that she was a spoilt child? "Oh yes, but spoilt with a great deal of love, really. I have two older brothers, but of Ma and Pa's union, I'm the only product."
Does she ever wish that she did not have such a privileged background? After all, her close friend and co-star in Tipping The Velvet, Keeley Hawes, who sounds similarly posh, actually derives, like Eliza Dolittle, from working-class stock in Marylebone. Which gives her street cred. Stirling has avenue cred, which doesn't always count for as much in the acting world.
"Yes, yes," she says, excitedly. "I know what you mean. I remember auditioning about three years ago and almost seeing the directors' eyes glazing over when I started speaking in this voice. I can't remember who was shit- hot at the time to make the balance swing that way, but I knew as soon as I opened my mouth that I had failed to get the part.
"The annoying thing is that I'm good at accents. I do a bloody good American accent in this [she gestures across the road to the Theatre Royal, where she is currently appearing as Hester in Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance]. That's what made me so cross when I was given so much shit about my accent in Tipping the Velvet. It was an 1880s Whitstable accent that I had really studied; the vowels are slightly longer than in EastEnders. So, when some twit like Lorraine Kelly said, `Why does she talk like Dick Van Dyke?', I thought, `Why don't you go listen to 1880s Whitstable, missus?'."
Lorraine Kelly attempting 1880s Whitstable — now that would be a treat for the nation. As for whether Tipping the Velvet itself represented a treat, opinion was divided. Oddly, Andrew Davies' adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel was received better in America, Stirling says.
"Over there, it was treated as an art- house piece. They celebrated the oddity and bravery of it, rather than letting the dildo [which Stirling wore, strapped on] overshadow everything else. Mind you, it was quite big!" she adds, with a giggle.
She lights up another Silk Cut. "I truly never thought that the dildo would cause such a stir. We'd already had Queer As Folk, and they were licking each others' cracks in that. I never thought that two women having a snog would cause such a fuss."
The fuss continues to yield some decidedly dubious "fan" mail. "There are some really filthy ones that somehow get through to me. I have to tweezer them into the bin. Always from boys, never women." And the fuss hasn't helped, either, in the way that she is perceived in the industry. "I got sent all sorts of scripts that involved flashing your wops on page two, for no apparent reason." Another merry giggle.
Still, the publicity also brought her to the attention of some more enlightened casting directors. And she has been careful to choose roles that differ radically from Nan, her character in Tipping the Velvet, not least Hester in A Woman of No Importance, an earnest, puritanical American heiress.
She is halfway through the run of A Woman of No Importance, and it has been hard work, though she refrains from describing it as "gruelling" because: "I told someone in an interview that it was gruelling, and I've since had the piss taken out of me non-stop. But it is a mental battle. You have to stay chilled and calm during the day, which I'm not very good at, in order to save all your energy for the evening."
She has learnt a great deal, she says, from the production's stars. "Pru [Scales] is a comic genius, and Rupert [Graves] just goes for it head first every night. It's like playing tennis, you have to put a different spin on it every once in a while, because there's a live audience there and you must involve them, gauge what's interesting them and what isn't."
Is her mother a critic of her work? "Oh, yeah, baby, is she. But a wonderful one. I have learnt from her to enjoy being given notes [of criticism], and I had quite strict notes from her for the first few things I did. But they've got less, which is a good thing.
"She came to see this play quite early on, and afterwards I was due to meet her at Sheekey's. I was really nervous, and at the interval I asked the front-of-house manager how she was getting on. I'd asked him to get her pissed, which he did. He said, `It's OK, no notes'. I thought, `Yeah, that's what she's telling you…'. Afterwards, I ran round the corner and arrived all flustered at Sheekey's, and the waiter said: `She's over there. Don't worry, no notes'."
When the roles are reversed, Stirling sits in the theatre watching her mother in awe, she says. "I positively burst with pride at what a wonderful stage actress she is, just gobsmackingly wonderful." The greatest, does she think? "Er, oh, at parts such as those in Mother Courage and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, yes, yes, I think she is."
It must, therefore, have been unnerving, I venture, going into the same profession. "Yes, but it was the only thing at school that got my juices flowing. And I believe so strongly in my own identity, I'm such a different kettle of fish to Ma. If I saw myself as a tributary of her, then I'd invite comparisons. But plumbers' sons do quite often become plumbers, don't they? You grow up with a certain knowledge of the business.
"I have a strong memory of Mama doing Follies at the Shaftesbury, when I was 11. I went to see her in her dressing-room, which of course is the most exciting place on earth. There are some back alleys of London that belong only to people in the theatre, you know. Only they know where the stage door is, for certain, of these wonderful theatres. The alleys around the back of Wyndhams and the Albery are Dickensian still. Almost untouched. That struck me very much as a child."
She has recently become acquainted, she tells me, with another building redolent of Dickensian times: Crumlin Road prison in Belfast. It was there that Freeze Frame was filmed, a low-budget psychological thriller in which she plays a newspaper reporter trying to uncover the details of a 10-year- old murder, apparently committed by a paranoiac played by, of all people, the comedian Lee Evans.
"It's Lee's first wholly straight part," she says. "And my part is dark, dangerous and bloody scary. The emotional territory it goes into is vile, and I couldn't shake it off, not when we were filming in Crumlin Road, which is a disused but still intact prison. Even the gallows are still intact."
Freeze Frame is due for release in February. "Lee and I thought that it would open in one cinema in Peckham, or whatever, but Universal has bought it, and is giving it a huge distribution."
Whether or not Freeze Frame does well, there seems little doubt that we will be getting to know Rachael Stirling very much better these next few years. Not that she wants us to know much about her private life, revealing only that she is currently single. Her long- term boyfriend, John Lycett Green, reggae DJ and grandson of Sir John Betjeman (what a marriage of dynasties that would have been…) recently ended the relationship, reportedly because he couldn't cope with the Tipping the Velvet brouhaha.
"But I'm a very happy bunny. And will you say that I play in an all-girls football team called Frisky Town? We play under the Westway in Ladbroke Grove, and I love it. I'm in defence, but I have been known to sneak forward."
I can't say I'm surprised.
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Look forward to the US release of both films.
