Post by Clive on Apr 21, 2013 15:24:10 GMT 9.5
Miranda Richardson: 'I hate our sneering attitude to success'
Miranda Richardson is one of Britain's leading actors, and this year is chair of judges for the Women's prize for fiction. On one thing she is clear: leave Hilary Mantel alone, she's brilliant
Kira Cochrane
The Guardian, Saturday 20 April 2013
Miranda Richardson, chair of this year's Women's prize for fiction judges
Miranda Richardson was fully primed for a fight. Ahead of the recent meeting to decide the shortlist for the Women's prize for fiction – previously the Orange prize – the actor, chair of this year's judges, had her fists balled tight in defence of Hilary Mantel and her novel Bring Up the Bodies. Over the past six months, as Mantel racked up her second win in the Booker prize and her first in the Costa, before adding the David Cohen award – sometimes known as the "British Nobel" – to her haul last month, Richardson noticed a growing disdain for the writer's success, a swirling bitterness. "I so despised the backchat that I heard in relation to Bring Up the Bodies," she says, wrinkling her nose. "I picked up a very negative vibe, and it was very distasteful to me."
There have been increasing murmurs that Mantel doesn't need another prize, that less well-known writers could use the veneration instead. This undercurrent bubbled up ferociously in February, when an excellent, perceptive speech Mantel had given on society's treatment of royalty was selectively quoted in the tabloids, her comments about the Duchess of Cambridge described as vicious and venomous. (These articles conveniently ignored the essay's conclusion, which called for everyone "to back off and not be brutes" to Kate.) The hullabaloo was used by some as an excuse to kick Mantel in the most personal terms, to bring up her weight and infertility; an attempt, said the author later, to set her up as a hate figure.
Richardson was ready. If there's one thing she can't stand, it's anyone who demonises women, an outlook that has had a sizeable impact on her own career. In her early years in the spotlight, she was sent script after script that featured dodgy and demonic female characters – "'a woman with a knife who's after guys' kind of shit," she says. She was offered the Glenn Close role in Fatal Attraction, for instance, which could have made her name in Hollywood, and turned it down for this reason.
As it turned out, there was no need to defend Mantel against the judging panel, who backed the book – but afterwards, when the shortlist was announced, she dived in to answer detractors. Britain has a "hideous" attitude to success, she told the press, with people being "quite vitriolic [about Mantel] in some cases. I think it's disgusting, quite frankly. 'You've already had too much, you can't have any more. Go away and die now.'"
It was a surprising outburst from Richardson, who has never courted controversy or publicity. At 55, she's been well-known and respected for almost 30 years, after attracting worldwide attention for a stellar performance in the 1985 film Dance with a Stranger, as Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Her star rose after that, despite her unwillingness to compromise on roles. There was her anarchic turn as Elizabeth I in Black-Adder II, and two Oscar nominations in quick succession in the 1990s for Damage, and Tom and Viv, and yet she has always managed to keep the press at arm's length. Writers have said she seems to find interviews akin to chewing glass, which left me expecting a prickly character.
In fact, when she arrives half an hour late at the biscuit shop where we're meeting, she bounds down the stairs, peers hopefully, apologetically through the banisters, blonde ringlets shaking fluffily around her face. She's friendly – jumping in to answer questions before I've finished asking them – although the words unspool enthusiastically but unrevealingly, her chattiness apparently just another distancing tactic. She seems to have that actor's dread of being pinned down, of personal stories or traits being attached to her that might undermine the breadth of roles she can play. Probably very canny; also very frustrating.
She is, though, forthcoming about Mantel and the prize. It's the first literary award she's ever judged, and she was flattered to be asked. (The organisers have been criticised for including celebrities on the judging panel in the past – there was scepticism when Lily Allen was appointed in 2008 – but Richardson, who clearly has a sharp sense of language, is a strong, credible choice.) She cleared the decks, warned her agent she might not be able to take on too much work for a while, and settled down to plough through 145 novels. In previous years, those who've judged the award have occasionally complained about the over-riding themes: in 2007, Muriel Gray said there was a lot of "small-scale domestic" writing; in 2008, Kirsty Lang bemoaned the misery of it all, saying she often felt, "Oh god, not another dead baby."
There was no such problem this year, says Richardson firmly – although child abuse featured as a theme again ("when is that ever not timely, unfortunately?"), along with crime in general, and climate change. The quality of the entries is signalled by the shortlist, she says, probably the starriest ever, featuring Zadie Smith, AM Homes, Barbara Kingsolver, Maria Semple and Kate Atkinson, along with Mantel. One bookseller described it as "staggeringly strong".
The list's strength is welcome, but also has the odd effect of bringing the prize's need to exist into question once again. Along with Mantel's brilliant run of plaudits, which continued this week with a place on Time magazine's 100 most influential list, this year has seen Sharon Olds win the TS Eliot award for poetry, an all-female shortlist for the Costa prize, and a Granta list of the 20 most promising writers under 40 this week, in which the majority are female. The Orange began in response to an all-male Booker shortlist in the early 1990s, but is it still necessary? AS Byatt, a long-standing critic, repeated her stance this week that the prize is discriminatory.
Richardson looks slightly confused at this. "Discriminatory against ... ?" There's a pause. "Oh! Men? Oh, bless!" She laughs uproariously. "Well, if men want to have their singular prize, then they absolutely can do that, too." The Women's prize is important, she continues, because it's "lovely to celebrate women's writing, women having been sidelined for so long in the profession, or having to write under different names, years or centuries back, all that kind of thing". She used to avoid the question of whether she's a feminist, but now, "I think I would have to say yes ... because every day you come up against stuff that forces you to take that position, lightly, if possible … Feminism was a dirty word for a while. It meant a certain kind of strident [woman] – and that was necessary, and we're all very grateful for the women who have gone before, and paved the way for us to have such security as we have now."
She hates the way success is often treated in the UK. She doesn't think the mood is so poisonous in the US, but here "success is actually denigrated. It's as if this person is not allowed to have their moment, [yet] they've got there by dint of their own talent, imagination, hard work, and then somebody turns around and says, 'Well, yeah, but you've had enough attention.' It's very depressing ... Sneering, snide. Pull 'em down."
Has she been affected by this attitude? "No comment," she says. "I've said it stretches across all different fields. It's a British thing, all right." It seems safe to assume she probably feels she has.
There's a mystery to Richardson, a question mark as to why she isn't a bigger star. It's not for want of talent. She has said she grew up a "singular" child, in Southport – so singular that her imaginary friend was apparently an imaginary dog – with a stay-at-home mother and a father who worked in marketing. While small, she took to the stage as an elf, found she liked the attention when people laughed, and proceeded through summer schools that taught performance. At 17, she decided to go to drama school, and took a secretarial course in Liverpool as a back-up. "I actually quite enjoyed it, because I got to go to this fantastic place [during breaks] called O'Halloran's School of Music, Dream and Pun. It was peopled with mad poets, and people doing performance art. So any break I had in my touch typing, which drove me nuts anyway, I would go and wander the streets, and hang around the boho bits of Liverpool, talking to poets."
Her local education authority turned her down for a grant, saying: "It is not now, and never has been our policy to give grants for the arts." She makes a face, stabs up her middle finger. So she moved to Bristol, stayed there long enough to be eligible for a local grant, and went to Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. It was experiencing a heyday, with her contemporaries including Greta Scacchi and Daniel Day-Lewis.
Up until the mid-1990s, Richardson and Day-Lewis seemed on similar paths, often lauded as the best actors of their generation. When Richardson landed the role as Ruth Ellis, after five years in repertory theatre, she was feted everywhere from Tatler magazine to The Face; the US magazine, People, ran an interview with the hilarious headline "Her Dance with a Stranger debut makes Miranda Richardson the hot new bundle from Britain." The next few years brought those offers of demonic roles, and "a sort of series of mini-disasters," where promising productions fell through, but Queenie in Black-Adder proved she was as brilliant at comedy as straight drama. Whatever she plays, Richardson can bring the burn of raw nerves, an alarming intensity.
In the 1980s, the opportunities felt "edgier in some way," she says, "rougher. Kicking against something much more, and I think the same is true in America actually. I don't think New York has been in the same place since the 80s. Everything's a bit," she exhales loudly, "a bit flabby at the moment." In the 90s she scooped a Bafta and a couple of Golden Globes, as well as those Oscar nominations, and seemed on her way to mega-stardom.
It hasn't really happened, probably partly because she's so choosy. "There are things that are offered," she says, "but, you know, at this point, it's partly about the mortgage, but it's also about: why would I do that? What can I bring to this that is going to be interesting enough, and if I can't answer that question, I don't often do it." She isn't so keen on the classics, because of the baggage that goes with every role, which means she has to find brilliant new work – and she likes to be seduced into appearing, "because otherwise it's too terrifying". Over the past 10 years, she's appeared in a couple of Harry Potter films, as Barbara Castle in Made in Dagenham, as Mrs Wannop in Parade's End. All great projects, all interesting, but not ones that allow the many Richardson fans out there a proper fix. She says there are more meaty roles in the US, especially in TV, where women in their 40s and 50s have been triumphing in series such as Nurse Jackie (Edie Falco) and The Big C (Laura Linney). In the UK, "we get a couple of series that are halfway decent, and the soaps, which everybody loves watching," but other than that, "it feels like a bit of a lazy time. We're not really sharp. We're not honed. It doesn't really feel vibrant."
Still, she keeps busy with dog-walking, gardening, the cello she started playing recently – she's studying for grade 3 – and the falcon she trains, called Cassiopeia. What she needs is a pile of excellent scripts to choose from. Screenwriters of the UK: you could do a lot worse than write something fabulous with Richardson in mind.
Miranda Richardson is one of Britain's leading actors, and this year is chair of judges for the Women's prize for fiction. On one thing she is clear: leave Hilary Mantel alone, she's brilliant
Kira Cochrane
The Guardian, Saturday 20 April 2013
Miranda Richardson, chair of this year's Women's prize for fiction judges
Miranda Richardson was fully primed for a fight. Ahead of the recent meeting to decide the shortlist for the Women's prize for fiction – previously the Orange prize – the actor, chair of this year's judges, had her fists balled tight in defence of Hilary Mantel and her novel Bring Up the Bodies. Over the past six months, as Mantel racked up her second win in the Booker prize and her first in the Costa, before adding the David Cohen award – sometimes known as the "British Nobel" – to her haul last month, Richardson noticed a growing disdain for the writer's success, a swirling bitterness. "I so despised the backchat that I heard in relation to Bring Up the Bodies," she says, wrinkling her nose. "I picked up a very negative vibe, and it was very distasteful to me."
There have been increasing murmurs that Mantel doesn't need another prize, that less well-known writers could use the veneration instead. This undercurrent bubbled up ferociously in February, when an excellent, perceptive speech Mantel had given on society's treatment of royalty was selectively quoted in the tabloids, her comments about the Duchess of Cambridge described as vicious and venomous. (These articles conveniently ignored the essay's conclusion, which called for everyone "to back off and not be brutes" to Kate.) The hullabaloo was used by some as an excuse to kick Mantel in the most personal terms, to bring up her weight and infertility; an attempt, said the author later, to set her up as a hate figure.
Richardson was ready. If there's one thing she can't stand, it's anyone who demonises women, an outlook that has had a sizeable impact on her own career. In her early years in the spotlight, she was sent script after script that featured dodgy and demonic female characters – "'a woman with a knife who's after guys' kind of shit," she says. She was offered the Glenn Close role in Fatal Attraction, for instance, which could have made her name in Hollywood, and turned it down for this reason.
As it turned out, there was no need to defend Mantel against the judging panel, who backed the book – but afterwards, when the shortlist was announced, she dived in to answer detractors. Britain has a "hideous" attitude to success, she told the press, with people being "quite vitriolic [about Mantel] in some cases. I think it's disgusting, quite frankly. 'You've already had too much, you can't have any more. Go away and die now.'"
It was a surprising outburst from Richardson, who has never courted controversy or publicity. At 55, she's been well-known and respected for almost 30 years, after attracting worldwide attention for a stellar performance in the 1985 film Dance with a Stranger, as Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Her star rose after that, despite her unwillingness to compromise on roles. There was her anarchic turn as Elizabeth I in Black-Adder II, and two Oscar nominations in quick succession in the 1990s for Damage, and Tom and Viv, and yet she has always managed to keep the press at arm's length. Writers have said she seems to find interviews akin to chewing glass, which left me expecting a prickly character.
In fact, when she arrives half an hour late at the biscuit shop where we're meeting, she bounds down the stairs, peers hopefully, apologetically through the banisters, blonde ringlets shaking fluffily around her face. She's friendly – jumping in to answer questions before I've finished asking them – although the words unspool enthusiastically but unrevealingly, her chattiness apparently just another distancing tactic. She seems to have that actor's dread of being pinned down, of personal stories or traits being attached to her that might undermine the breadth of roles she can play. Probably very canny; also very frustrating.
She is, though, forthcoming about Mantel and the prize. It's the first literary award she's ever judged, and she was flattered to be asked. (The organisers have been criticised for including celebrities on the judging panel in the past – there was scepticism when Lily Allen was appointed in 2008 – but Richardson, who clearly has a sharp sense of language, is a strong, credible choice.) She cleared the decks, warned her agent she might not be able to take on too much work for a while, and settled down to plough through 145 novels. In previous years, those who've judged the award have occasionally complained about the over-riding themes: in 2007, Muriel Gray said there was a lot of "small-scale domestic" writing; in 2008, Kirsty Lang bemoaned the misery of it all, saying she often felt, "Oh god, not another dead baby."
There was no such problem this year, says Richardson firmly – although child abuse featured as a theme again ("when is that ever not timely, unfortunately?"), along with crime in general, and climate change. The quality of the entries is signalled by the shortlist, she says, probably the starriest ever, featuring Zadie Smith, AM Homes, Barbara Kingsolver, Maria Semple and Kate Atkinson, along with Mantel. One bookseller described it as "staggeringly strong".
The list's strength is welcome, but also has the odd effect of bringing the prize's need to exist into question once again. Along with Mantel's brilliant run of plaudits, which continued this week with a place on Time magazine's 100 most influential list, this year has seen Sharon Olds win the TS Eliot award for poetry, an all-female shortlist for the Costa prize, and a Granta list of the 20 most promising writers under 40 this week, in which the majority are female. The Orange began in response to an all-male Booker shortlist in the early 1990s, but is it still necessary? AS Byatt, a long-standing critic, repeated her stance this week that the prize is discriminatory.
Richardson looks slightly confused at this. "Discriminatory against ... ?" There's a pause. "Oh! Men? Oh, bless!" She laughs uproariously. "Well, if men want to have their singular prize, then they absolutely can do that, too." The Women's prize is important, she continues, because it's "lovely to celebrate women's writing, women having been sidelined for so long in the profession, or having to write under different names, years or centuries back, all that kind of thing". She used to avoid the question of whether she's a feminist, but now, "I think I would have to say yes ... because every day you come up against stuff that forces you to take that position, lightly, if possible … Feminism was a dirty word for a while. It meant a certain kind of strident [woman] – and that was necessary, and we're all very grateful for the women who have gone before, and paved the way for us to have such security as we have now."
She hates the way success is often treated in the UK. She doesn't think the mood is so poisonous in the US, but here "success is actually denigrated. It's as if this person is not allowed to have their moment, [yet] they've got there by dint of their own talent, imagination, hard work, and then somebody turns around and says, 'Well, yeah, but you've had enough attention.' It's very depressing ... Sneering, snide. Pull 'em down."
Has she been affected by this attitude? "No comment," she says. "I've said it stretches across all different fields. It's a British thing, all right." It seems safe to assume she probably feels she has.
There's a mystery to Richardson, a question mark as to why she isn't a bigger star. It's not for want of talent. She has said she grew up a "singular" child, in Southport – so singular that her imaginary friend was apparently an imaginary dog – with a stay-at-home mother and a father who worked in marketing. While small, she took to the stage as an elf, found she liked the attention when people laughed, and proceeded through summer schools that taught performance. At 17, she decided to go to drama school, and took a secretarial course in Liverpool as a back-up. "I actually quite enjoyed it, because I got to go to this fantastic place [during breaks] called O'Halloran's School of Music, Dream and Pun. It was peopled with mad poets, and people doing performance art. So any break I had in my touch typing, which drove me nuts anyway, I would go and wander the streets, and hang around the boho bits of Liverpool, talking to poets."
Her local education authority turned her down for a grant, saying: "It is not now, and never has been our policy to give grants for the arts." She makes a face, stabs up her middle finger. So she moved to Bristol, stayed there long enough to be eligible for a local grant, and went to Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. It was experiencing a heyday, with her contemporaries including Greta Scacchi and Daniel Day-Lewis.
Up until the mid-1990s, Richardson and Day-Lewis seemed on similar paths, often lauded as the best actors of their generation. When Richardson landed the role as Ruth Ellis, after five years in repertory theatre, she was feted everywhere from Tatler magazine to The Face; the US magazine, People, ran an interview with the hilarious headline "Her Dance with a Stranger debut makes Miranda Richardson the hot new bundle from Britain." The next few years brought those offers of demonic roles, and "a sort of series of mini-disasters," where promising productions fell through, but Queenie in Black-Adder proved she was as brilliant at comedy as straight drama. Whatever she plays, Richardson can bring the burn of raw nerves, an alarming intensity.
In the 1980s, the opportunities felt "edgier in some way," she says, "rougher. Kicking against something much more, and I think the same is true in America actually. I don't think New York has been in the same place since the 80s. Everything's a bit," she exhales loudly, "a bit flabby at the moment." In the 90s she scooped a Bafta and a couple of Golden Globes, as well as those Oscar nominations, and seemed on her way to mega-stardom.
It hasn't really happened, probably partly because she's so choosy. "There are things that are offered," she says, "but, you know, at this point, it's partly about the mortgage, but it's also about: why would I do that? What can I bring to this that is going to be interesting enough, and if I can't answer that question, I don't often do it." She isn't so keen on the classics, because of the baggage that goes with every role, which means she has to find brilliant new work – and she likes to be seduced into appearing, "because otherwise it's too terrifying". Over the past 10 years, she's appeared in a couple of Harry Potter films, as Barbara Castle in Made in Dagenham, as Mrs Wannop in Parade's End. All great projects, all interesting, but not ones that allow the many Richardson fans out there a proper fix. She says there are more meaty roles in the US, especially in TV, where women in their 40s and 50s have been triumphing in series such as Nurse Jackie (Edie Falco) and The Big C (Laura Linney). In the UK, "we get a couple of series that are halfway decent, and the soaps, which everybody loves watching," but other than that, "it feels like a bit of a lazy time. We're not really sharp. We're not honed. It doesn't really feel vibrant."
Still, she keeps busy with dog-walking, gardening, the cello she started playing recently – she's studying for grade 3 – and the falcon she trains, called Cassiopeia. What she needs is a pile of excellent scripts to choose from. Screenwriters of the UK: you could do a lot worse than write something fabulous with Richardson in mind.
