The Name of the Rose
Beguiling on both stage and screen, Rosamund Pike is now blossoming into a truly great English actress
Words | Johnharrisdunning
THE CURSE OF THE BOND BABES IS WHAT IT’S CALLED. Many a time, playing a sexy sidekick to 007 has meant a suddenly high profile, often followed by a downward career trajectory. But for Rosamund Pike – who lived up to her reputation as an aloof English Rose as the chilly Miranda Frost in Die Another Day – her brush with Bond was followed by a slew of award-winning roles.Certainly, she has confounded those wishing to pigeonhole this talented actress by her beautiful if slightly glacial demeanour. Starring opposite the likes of Johnny Depp, Judi Dench, Keira Knightley, Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins and Bruce Willis among others, she is among a new generation of British actors who are gaining international acclaim.
When we meet on a spring afternoon in London’s Jerwood Space, it looks like any other arts institute restaurant at first. An eclectic mix of diners add colour to an otherwise sparse minimalist interior. Except that Dame Judi Dench glides in regally, drawing surreptitious glances from the lunchtime crowd. A few moments later Sir Ian McKellen lopes in with a wolfish grin and takes a seat nearby. Then Rosamund Pike makes her entrance. Like them she has that indefinable something – star quality. She wears a nondescript shirt and trousers, but her natural grace and classic beauty, even more pronounced in the flesh, are evident. No wonder that her unchecked rise has been somewhat phenomenal.
Pike, 30, is here rehearsing the Donmar West End production of Madame de Sade, a play about the wife of the French aristocrat whose name became synonymous with sexual adventures. She plays the title role, starring opposite Dench who plays her mother. Pike sits down and waves across at McKellen – it’s all very chummy. “We have been having a very silly time,” she grins, sipping a sparkling water. “Each day we leave one very filthy word in their rehearsal room, and they leave one very filthy word in ours. It’s getting a bit out of hand. I’m learning things I never thought would reach my ears or lips!”
She certainly has a demure air but it’s deceptive. The only child of two musicians, Julian, an opera singer, and Caroline, a concert pianist, Pike was around theatres her whole life – and they always held a special fascination for her. “As a child I would get to go on stage, and it was an amazing feeling being up there. These were empty auditoriums – if I’d known what it was like having people out there I might have made another decision, but out there on your own it’s a wonderful space. It’s sort of magic. It can get terrifying when you’ve got 900 eyes boring into you!”
PIKE NEVER DOUBTED HER VOCATION.
“Acting was always going to be my path,” she states, then laughs and adds jokily: “When I knew I wasn’t going to go to the moon.” But it wasn’t to be as easy as that. When she auditioned for drama school she didn’t get in and so went off to study English literature at Wadham College, Oxford, where she befriended Chelsea Clinton. She plays the piano and cello, the legacy of her musical parents, and clearly no slouch, also speaks French and German. But the dream to act was never put away. “I always knew I was serious about it – and let’s face it, getting to work with people like Judi teaches you so much more than you could ever be taught at acting school. I think those things that seem like such a crisis when you’re young are very formative. The knock-backs either allow you to crumble and realise you’re too weak for the profession – because it is all about rejection in this profession – or it steels you to go to make your own way. At some point you have to think, ‘I’m right. I can do this.’”
And right she was. Pike appeared in a few TV roles before making her film debut in Die Another Day. This won her the Empire Award for Best Newcomer and she was set. Yet, being cast as a Bond babe can be a mixed blessing – did she worry about being typecast? “I was such an unlikely Bond girl – I mean, I had never even seen a Bond film!” she says. This sounds surprising but her mother had been rather protective of her young daughter’s tender sensibilities so Pike remembers being shepherded away from a party early as the rest of the children sat down to the entertainment: a 007 adventure. “Imagine if my mum had known then!” she laughs. “Maybe that meant I didn’t have any preconceptions. I had no idea what they were looking for. When I went in for the audition there were all these girls dressed up in slinky gear and I thought, ‘I’m definitely in the wrong place.’ But I never worried about it.”
Pike’s latest film, Fugitive Pieces, is based on the award-winning novel of the same name by Canadian poet Anne Michaels. It tells the story of Jakob Beer, a Polish Jew who escapes the Nazis as a child, when he is rescued by geologist Athos Roussos and the pair flee to safety to Roussos’s native Greece. Jakob grows up to be a writer, and is haunted by his past from which he seems unable to escape. Pike plays his wife Alex, a feisty young woman who attempts to drag Jakob out of his melancholy torpor.
“The book was amazing. The chapter that Alex comes in on is called ‘Phosphorous’, and she is this really elemental force that suddenly comes in halfway through the book, glittering in the mud of it all. She wants to rescue Jakob. Her attempt is really noble. When we did the sex scene I thought, ‘You know what – she’s just got to laugh at him.’ The original script had something quite sensitive, and I just thought she should just blow it all apart and just giggle at how earnest he is about it all – and that was key to what kind of woman she is.”
ANOTHER FACTOR THAT CONVINCED PIKE TO TAKE THIS PROJECT WAS HER CO-STAR.
“I’d been a fan of Stephen Dillane since I saw him do Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Thing. I was as excited to work with Stephen as I was to work with Johnny Depp, which other people may think quite strange.
“Having said that, of course I thought Johnny Depp was amazing. He’s a bit of a rock star. When I was doing The Libertine we’d get a private room in a hotel and put black drapes over the windows and one of the guys who travels with him who spins tunes would set up some decks and we’d just be there until four in the morning drinking wine. It was cool. He’s funny – but he’s very selfcontained, not at all showy.”
Moving between film and theatre is something Pike has always done – and intends to continue, although she concedes that they are very different disciplines. “With one you’re wondering whether you will be able to afford your train ticket, with the other you’re wondering when the Jaguar will arrive. Film is a lot of waiting around – but it has this strange immediacy. On the day you just have to perform in that minute. You don’t know how long you are going to be waiting, or what you’re going to have to do – you have to bide your time until suddenly the camera’s rolling and that’s the moment that going to be there forever. That’s quite exhilarating. But it is a weird pressure, having to suddenly perform when someone says, ‘Go!’ On the other hand, you forget how exhausting theatre is! But then you often get better scripts, and better parts.”
And theatre has other benefits. “Getting to dress up and make believe your whole life is a bit like paid therapy. Other people have to go and pay for talking cures, but if you’re going through anything emotionally, you can get through things physically with acting.”
Starring opposite Depp in The Libertine (winning Best Supporting Actress at the British Independent Film Awards for it) and then alongside Keira Knightley in the blockbuster version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice meant that Pike was not only a successful actress, she was also becoming a celebrity. She laughs this off lightly. “Look at Judi Dench – she’s never had to appear at the opening of an envelope. Everybody knew and respected her as an amazing actress, and then in the last 15 or so years she has become a household name. That’s the way to do it, rather than the other way around. I sometimes get people recognising me on the tube but they don’t come up or start fainting or swarming around or anything. You can turn it on or turn it off.”
SHE’S HAD MIXED EXPERIENCES OF WHAT FAME BRINGS.
It was a particularly challenging time for her when her relationship with British director Joe Wright, who had worked with her
on Pride and Prejudice, fell apart under intense public scrutiny. “When everything’s going well it’s great – the world loves you, and you feel that – but you can start to feed off the adulation. Some people believe their own publicity and that is pretty dangerous,” she says darkly, then brightens. “But obviously it is good too – fame is wonderful because it opens doors.”
A case in point is when she was researching the role of Doctor Samantha Grimm in sci-fifilm Doom. “I did dissections, which was interesting. I think my second choice of career would be a doctor. I’m fascinated by insides. I suppose it’s the same thing – I’m fascinated by insides emotionally, but also by the insides of bodies.”
Never afraid of a challenge, her famously haughty appearance (she is often compared to Grace Kelly) is turned on its head by playing Renée, the wife of the notorious Marquis de Sade. “My character is fascinating. Everyone wants to know what is it like living with him, what does he do to you? Do you have kinky sex? Does he tie you up? Does he whip you?
“And there, on stage, you have this woman who is valiantly battling to stay above the reach of common gossip and trying to elevate herself and him all the time on to this higher plane, trying to campaign for him to be seen as this enlightened figure, to say that he is free and we are all imprisoned by convention and morality. She fights unceasingly for him – and then on the very day that the French Revolution finally happens and he is free, she joins a convent. Why this woman who has campaigned for her husband all her life ends up joining a convent is such a mystery.”
Yet if anyone can hold a mirror up the late madame, it’s Rosamund. With her grasp of high culture and the pitfalls of fame, she’s likely to remain an enlightened, enlightening figure for sometime to come. Fugitive Pieces is out 29 May. Madame de Sade plays at the Donmar West End until 23 May
