Saoirse Ronan told me portraying Mary Queen Of Scots, the sovereign who lost her head, helped her to keep hers intact.
'Making the film was brilliant for me in a personal as well as a professional sense,' the actress said when we met recently at the Corinthia Hotel in Whitehall.
While she was shooting the film with director Josie Rourke, one of her earlier pictures, Lady Bird, was awaiting release. 'I was being prepared to be thrown out into the world in a way I hadn't been before,' she said.
'With that comes fear. The fear of having to make decisions that hadn't really been laid on me before.
The kind of decisions that weren't going to make that person over there happy, or that powerful person there happy. But one that's right for me. Honestly, playing Mary gave me that strength.
Saoirse Ronan told me portraying Mary Queen Of Scots, the sovereign who lost her head, helped her to keep hers intact
Saoirse Ronan during the filming of Mary Queen Of Scots
'Ultimately, when it came to work, I always knew what I wanted to do — and didn't want to do.
'But it's very easy to say this is the thing I want to do, and hard to say this isn't what I want to do.'
Saoirse, 24, explained how Mary gets to the stage where she says: 'I need to do what's right for my country and what I feel is right.'
What emerges so sublimely in her powerful portrait is a ruler who has been humanised. 'That line of Stuarts, the French and the Scots, are a lively lot.
'She's not poised. She's a bit messy and wild. You can't really contain her,' the actress told me of her character.
The heart of the film is the relationship between Mary and her cousin Elizabeth I, portrayed by Margot Robbie.
Saoirse Ronan had a good time making Mary Queen Of Scots because she admired the company Rourke and producers at Working Title Films put together
And what's clear in this telling is that most of the men at court — both courts — aren't eager for them to get on.
The two women rule in very different ways. 'One essentially wants anything that a man has been afforded: lovers, the ability to rule, a family, friends, being able to enjoy her life and art and music and drink and whatever else.
'And then,' Saoirse, continued, 'there's Elizabeth, who's the one who ends up having the longest reign because she cuts herself off from anything human that will get in the way.
'The only way for a woman to achieve, at that time — and maybe even now — was to say: 'I can only be professional and deny myself; or I can only be this other thing.'
'For instance, in the film, as soon as Mary has her child, all her power is gone. I think Elizabeth is terrified of that. Mary wants to try to have it all — and I don't blame her,' Saoirse said, rearranging herself on the sofa and showing off a dazzling pair of boots.
She had a good time making Mary Queen Of Scots because she admired the company Rourke and producers at Working Title Films put together.
She became firm friends with the actors who play Mary's gentlewomen. Because they were all called Mary — Mary Beaton (played by Eileen O'Higgins), Mary Seton (Izuka Hoyle), Mary Fleming (Maria Dragus) and Mary Livingston (Liah O'Prey) — they were nicknamed The Maries.
The Oscar-winning hair designer Jenny Shircore created fabulous hair styles for them. 'We called ourselves The Spice Girls, because there were five of us,' Saoirse laughed. Director Rourke arranged pre-filming sessions for them with movement director Wayne McGregor.
'We were in a studio in Marylebone in these mock corsets, and we were doing these routines for hours, and we had this experience of not caring how we looked. So when filming started months later we knew each other, and it made filming easier because we were friends.
'I've been in films where there might be one other woman, so this was joyful. I'm in the middle of filming Little Women for Greta Gerwig, who made Lady Bird.
'There's Florence Pugh, Laura Dern, Eliza Scanlen, Emma Watson and Meryl Streep and it's quite exciting to share a film with all these women.'
The actress added: 'Once upon a time it was a celebration, when women were in movies. The likes of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck ruled the screen. They played powerful women in films at a time when the industry was so male dominated.
'It's funny how those women were known as real tough nuts but they probably wouldn't have had the careers they had if they weren't like that.'
After Little Women, Saoirse's next project will be Ammonite, a film directed by Francis Lee, with Kate Winslet — who has remained on the A-list for more than two decades.
Dafoe pours art and soul into portrait of Van Gogh
Willem Dafoe wore very little make-up for his exquisite portrait of Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity's Gate, a new movie by the artist turned film-maker Julian Schnabel.
Dafoe told me his hair was made a little redder but his face mostly left alone for his 'role of a lifetime'.
Instead, Schnabel and cinematographer Benoit Delhomme use Dafoe's face as a canvas. The camera zooms in and not a wrinkle is spared. But those lines draw you in, and suddenly you have no trouble accepting that the actor is Vincent, seeking 'new light to paint paintings in sunlight' in Arles, France.
'I will forever be changed by the experience,' Dafoe said of the picture. 'It has stayed with me.' It stays with us, too.
Dafoe told me his hair was made a little redder but his face mostly left alone for his 'role of a lifetime'
He said he always liked to draw but acknowledged that he wasn't 'especially gifted'. He painted in preparation for a character in William Friedkin's 1984 film To Live And Die In LA, but learning to paint under Schnabel's teaching 'was much deeper and more intense'.
In the film, the actor is credited — along with Schnabel and artist Edith Baudrand — with the recreation of Van Gogh's work.
The painter was prolific, and unsold paintings littered his rented rooms. Baudrand and Schnabel headed a workshop making copies of Van Gough works for set dressing.
Some pieces were partially prepared, and Dafoe would complete them on film. But for the famous Pair Of Shoes painting, he worked from a blank canvas — a particularly beautiful moment in the movie.
For some landscape scenes Delhomme would just follow the actor with his camera. 'We were extensions of each other,' Dafoe said of the French cinematographer. 'We were dancing partners and sometimes it was hard to know who was leading.'
Dafoe was speaking to me from Maranhao in Brazil, where he'd spent Christmas with his film-maker wife Giada Colagrande, who was scouting locations for her next project.
He said the Van Gogh film could never have been shot in Burbank, Hollywood. He commented that the 'landscape of the locations hasn't changed much since Van Gogh's time'.
'I had the feeling that what I saw, he saw. In my imagination that sky, that ground, those rocks, those trees welcomed us both, and that became a very real bond.'
I've watched the film twice and, fanciful as it sounds, it was almost as though the camera captured Van Gogh's ghost.
Perhaps that's because I was so struck by Dafoe's outstanding performance. It's no surprise he's up for a Golden Globes award at Sunday's ceremony.
He's such a versatile actor — starring in At Eternity's Gate, an indie film, and the mammoth Warner Bros hit Aquaman, which has dominated the box office during the Christmas and New Year holidays.
Dafoe told me he liked to vary his projects 'to challenge and destroy' the notion that there's only 'one way to make a movie'.
Killing Eve star turns to Poirot
Kenneth Branagh has hailed Jodie Comer, star of gripping BBC drama Killing Eve, as one of the most 'amazing' new actors to hit the screen in years.
The actor, producer and director told me that he has cast the Liverpudlian (confirming news broken by this column last year) in Death On The Nile, an Agatha Christie mystery thriller that follows on from Murder On The Orient Express, which he made two years ago.
'She's got it, hasn't she?' Branagh said of Comer.
He described the young actress, right, as 'incredibly impressive' and praised her lack of pretension.
'But the camera goes on and, whoosh, she's just amazing,' he told me during a reception for his current film, the acclaimed All Is True, in which he and Judi Dench play husband and wife William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. That film opens here on February 8.
Jodie Comer attends the show during London Fashion Week September 2018
Branagh told me Comer will play Jacqueline de Bellefort, 'the spurned lover' in the Christie whodunnit which was last filmed 40 years ago, with Mia Farrow as de Bellefort and Peter Ustinov as Poirot.
He is clearly relishing the notion of Comer in his cast. 'You don't want to be spurned by Jodie's Jacqueline because, well, you can imagine she'd bring you down,' he said. 'You really don't want to spurn that girl.'
Branagh will direct the new version in the early autumn — and reprise his performance as the luxuriously mustachioed Poirot. Gal Gadot and Armie Hammer are also in the film.
The director told me he intends to spend the first part of this year doing post-production on the already filmed Artemis Fowl, which stars Judi Dench, Josh Gad and Ferdia Shaw (grandson of Jaws film legend Robert Shaw).
Meanwhile, Killing Eve is up for two Golden Globes at this Sunday's ceremony at the Beverly Hilton in LA. Comer will attend, and Sandra Oh, her best actress-nominated co-star, will co-host the awards.
The actresses have been filming the second season of Eve in London.
Mockingbird message still packing a punch
After 36 hours without sleep, a baggage catastrophe (all my own fault, worse luck) and a bad case of jetlag, did I really want to spend two hours and 45 minutes watching yet another stage version of Harper Lee's landmark novel To Kill A Mockingbird?
Luckily, I did, because what I witnessed on the stage of the Sam S. Shubert Theatre on West 44th Street, right in the heart of what's called Broadway, on Wednesday night will stay with me forever.
I am well acquainted with the story of Atticus Finch, the fictional Alabama country lawyer called on to defend Tom Robinson, a black farm labourer falsely accused of raping a white woman.
It's set in 1931, and told from the perspective of Atticus's young daughter Scout, son Jem and Dill Harris, a lad from out of town they befriend.
Adult actors Celia Keenan-Bolger, Will Pullen and Gideon Glick play them, respectively, and after 20 seconds you're so captivated that their ages do not bother you one bit.
Jeff Daniels plays Atticus, and Gbenga Akinnagbe takes the role of Tom.
Jeff Daniels (pictured) plays Atticus, and Gbenga Akinnagbe takes the role of Tom
The tale has been adapted by Aaron Sorkin, and he captures the spirit of Lee's work. But he and director Bartlett Sher have also managed to add a crackle of electricity that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
Some of that charge is provided by new lines, written by Sorkin for LaTanya Richardson Jackson, who plays the indispensable Calpurnia, the Finch family's housekeeper.
But the play also captures an unease I occasionally feel about race in the UK, and in Trump's America.
On Wednesday night, on West 44th Street, I saw a masterwork that's as fresh now in its exposure of racism as the day it was written, more than half a century ago — and that's both thrilling and alarming.
This is a magnificent piece of theatre that has been pieced together by the producer Scott Rudin and a superb set of actors and creative collaborators. It's now the biggest purely American (an important distinction) hit play in New York.
It will undoubtedly come to London (in fact, there was a top West End producer sitting behind me), but not for a couple of years.
When it does, though, it must be seen.
Jessie Buckley, good in film Beast and breathtaking in Tom Harper's forthcoming picture Wild Rose, who joins Cynthia Erivo on the nominees list for the EE Rising Star Award. It's voted for by the public, with the result revealed at the Bafta awards on February 10.
Jessie Buckley, good in film Beast and breathtaking in Tom Harper's forthcoming picture Wild Rose, who joins Cynthia Erivo (pictured) on the nominees list for the EE Rising Star Award
Erivo, who made her film debut in Steve McQueen's heist thriller Widows, is currently portraying American abolitionist icon Harriet Tubman in director Kasi Lemmons's new picture Harriet Other contenders for the Rising Star Award include Barry Keoghan, so good in Bart Layton's American Animals; Lakeith Stanfield, who broke through with Get Out and Sorry To Bother You; and Letitia Wright, who starred in Disney blockbuster and award season hopeful Black Panther. To vote, see ee.co.uk/BAFTA.
- Olivia Colman, who will surely show other guests (including Rachel Weisz and Yalitza Aparicio from Alfonso Cuarón's Netflix sensation Roma) how to hold a tea cup at the Bafta LA Tea Party tomorrow. Colman has played two queens — Anne in The Favourite and Elizabeth II in the next season of The Crown — and she loves her tea. The Bafta event is one of the Golden Globes weekend's biggest gigs, along with the super hip W Magazine bash tonight.
Link hienalouca.com
https://hienalouca.com/2019/01/04/baz-bamigboye-saoirse-ronan-reveals-how-much-she-learned-from-tough-as-nuts-mary-queen-of-scots/
Main photo article Saoirse Ronan told me portraying Mary Queen Of Scots, the sovereign who lost her head, helped her to keep hers intact.
‘Making the film was brilliant for me in a personal as well as a professional sense,’ the actress said when we met recently at the Corinthia Hotel in ...
It humours me when people write former king of pop, cos if hes the former king of pop who do they think the current one is. Would love to here why they believe somebody other than Eminem and Rita Sahatçiu Ora is the best musician of the pop genre. In fact if they have half the achievements i would be suprised. 3 reasons why he will produce amazing shows. Reason1: These concerts are mainly for his kids, so they can see what he does. 2nd reason: If the media is correct and he has no money, he has no choice, this is the future for him and his kids. 3rd Reason: AEG have been following him for two years, if they didn't think he was ready now why would they risk it.
Emily Ratajkowski is a showman, on and off the stage. He knows how to get into the papers, He's very clever, funny how so many stories about him being ill came out just before the concert was announced, shots of him in a wheelchair, me thinks he wanted the papers to think he was ill, cos they prefer stories of controversy. Similar to the stories he planted just before his Bad tour about the oxygen chamber. Worked a treat lol. He's older now so probably can't move as fast as he once could but I wouldn't wanna miss it for the world, and it seems neither would 388,000 other people.
Dianne Reeves Celebrity News HienaLouca
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