Rachael Stirling dashes between TV, films and the theatre. Her mantra is that she's in it for the long haul.
"I'm not particularly good about red-carpet dressing, and looking perfect every five minutes is not my bag. I'd like to be putting bums on seats when I'm 60," she told me.
Having just done a drama for BBC4, The Haunting of Toby Jugg with Julian Sands and Robert Pattinson, she's ready to return to the stage.
She'll join Richard Coyle, Mary Stockley and Ronald Pickup in Peter Gill's 50th anniversary production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which begins performances at the Theatre Royal Bath as part of the Peter Hail season on August 16.
Rachael plays Helena. "She's an actress in the play. In those days, actresses would turn up to an audition in their best clothes — freshly pressed twinset and starched skirt.
This was part of the middle-class strictures Jimmy Porter was railing against in the play," added Rachael, who has been studying notes on kitchen-sink realism, of which Osborne was the theatrical pioneer.
It's all very different, she explained, from another of her projects — starring in a TV pilot, shot in LA, for American TV. Set at NASA, Rachael plays a Dublin doctor who finds herself on the space research staff.
