Heard the one about the Victorian lesbian transvestite? Rachael Stirling is a real bodice ripper, says Camilla Long.
"I know every newspaper in the land is going to be calling us 'Greg's Dykes'," says Rachael Stirling, rolling her eyes. She's under no illusions about the stir that her role in Tipping the Velvet, a new BBC drama about a cross-dressing lesbian who trawls the underbelly of Victorian London, will cause. "But I'm proud of doing it, and it would be awful if it caused a bout of hysteria and I wasn't proud."
For Stirling, the 25-year-old daughter of Diana Rigg and building magnate Archie Stirling, the story of Nan, an impressionable oyster girl from Whitstable who falls in love with a stage ladyboy called Kitty (Keeley Hawes), is first and foremost a love story. "It's a simple coming-of-age story about a girl who falls in love — it doesn't matter really whether it's with a man or a woman." In fact, the director, Geoffrey Sax (Stirling had a part in his last BBC drama, Othello, which was also adapted by Andrew Davies), has gone to certain lengths to tone down raw sex scenes between Nan and Kitty. "In one of the scenes, he has my voice saying over it, 'It's only human nature after all.'"
The first thing that strikes you about Stirling is the curious quality of her voice. It's not exactly hoarse — too velvety for that — but it's low and kind of creamy, with a masculine timbre. Apt, considering that she spends half of Tipping the Velvet dressed as a boy, She'd wriggle out of a cream and red dress and immediately get into boys' clothing. "At the costumiers," she explains, "I got kitted out in top hat and tails — heaven."
Today, she's wearing jeans and a red chiffon top from Portobello market. She has a gentle way, swears, and says "ain't" a lot, for comic effect.
Preparing for her role brought Stirling into contact with the ripest of Victorian erotic fantasies. "I saw some engravings that would put hardcore porn in the shade," she explains. "Fans sticking out of bottoms, double-ended dildos… but that's prohibition for you. As soon as you forbid something, it thrives."
Stirling enjoys research: she seriously mugs up on roles. "If a script about 17th-century Holland landed on my doorstep, I'd be piling up the books straight away."
She doesn't just go for frilly costume dramas. A strong believer in the Right Script, she's romped in bed with Christopher Eccleston in Othello, played a disenchanted health-food shop assistant in Helpless at the Donmar, and in her first film, Still Crazy, was the love-struck groupie. "My performance was awful," she says with good humour. "It took me 10 takes to walk through a door, but I learned a lot." She never gives up: "You have to put your life in a jar at the door for the duration of filming; and your friends mustn't mind if you don't call them for months."
In Possession, an adapation of the novel by AS Byatt, Jennifer Ehle plays a Victorian poetess in a lesbian relationship. So is Victorian lesbianism becoming trendy? "Ugh," Stirling groans. "I'd hate it to be trendy, because it only detracts."
Stirling doesn't have any grand notions of disappearing to Hollywood — indeed, coming out to interviews is our heroine's idea of a really bad day. "I'd much rather go to a speech by Tony Benn."
