Is Miss Havisham the right part for Charlotte Rampling
(Friday March 26, 1999 - The Guardian)
Helena Smith talks to the star of Great Expectations about divorce, depression and Dickens


The wedding banquet is still stale. Miss Havisham is still sitting in her faded and ragged wedding dress at the head of the table. So far it sounds like any other adaptation of Great Expectations. But next month's BBC version casts one of the most erotic actresses in cinema as the most bitter crone in literature - with a twist. It may well turn out to be one of the most inspired pieces of casting in recent television drama.

"People keep saying I'm too young," says Charlotte Rampling, "but Miss Havisham was left at the altar at the age of 21, and if the story starts 30 years later, she's only 51. People reading the book see this ancient person, but everything at her house is so decrepit because time has stood still."

Charlotte Rampling is 52, only a year older than the eternally-jilted bride, and she clearly feels as much in tune with the character as she does with all the parts she plays these days. "Acting is about feeling you have a common spirit with someone," she insists. "Free-spirited individuals, however deranged, are the people I like. I had no hesitation in accepting this role because the woman is so extraordinary."

Producer David Snodin cast Rampling because of her natural sensuality and startling cat-like eyes, and because Rampling's seething eroticism brings the novel's sexual subtext to the surface. "There is an interesting sexual chemistry between a younger Miss Havisham and a hunky Pip," says Snodin. "Depressed people like Miss Havisham can have a very sexy edge to them."

As Snodin sees it, "Miss Havisham is ripe for psychotherapy. She's a quintessential clinical depressive. She's an agoraphobic who won't wash. These days she'd be on Prozac and it wouldn't do her any good!"

Like Miss Havisham, Rampling has suffered from depression. Unlike her, though, she realised she needed therapy and has spent years in intense psychoanalysis. Bouts of diagnosed clinical lows have made her increasingly introspective: she had a nervous breakdown in 1991 and spent several spells in a psychiatric clinic in London. Much of her therapy has been concerned with "unresolved stuff" from her childhood. She had an itinerant army upbringing as the daughter of a Nato commander, a man who was also such a brilliant athlete that he won a gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

She never felt at home as a child. At nine, she was sent to the Jeanne D'Arc Academie pour Jeunes Filles at Versailles and at 12 she was sent to the exclusive St Hilda's school in Hertfordshire. At 16, she abandoned a Spanish course to travel in Andalusia. But her father insisted she return to secretarial college.

Fame came quickly and overwhelmingly. She was spotted in the typing pool of an ad agency by an executive who put her in a Cadbury's advertisement. She made her big screen debut shortly afterwards with a small role in Richard Lester's sex comedy, The Knack And How To Get It. The next year, she played Lynn Redgrave's cattily glamorous friend in Georgy Girl.

Suddenly she was a sixties icon - thin, mini-skirted, more sexy than Twiggy. "I was living for fun, fun, fun," she said recently. "I became publicity fodder. Everything I did was reported. When I think about it, I feel sorry for my father. He had a terrible time at the golf club."

Then, when she was only 21, her world came tumbling down. Her sister, with whom she had a very close relationship, died of a brain haemorrhage. "I found I couldn't be frivolous any more," Rampling has said. She grabbed at alternative therapies and religions, only years later finding her way into counselling.

"Depression is a journey of discovery," she said recently. "Metaphorically speaking, it is walking through the night in the worst possible conditions. In the end, it is for you to find your own way on that journey. You are, essentially, alone."

When I arrived to interview her, she was curled up on the sofa of a hotel suite in Athens, listening to a self-help tape and taking notes. "I felt quite anxious before you came," she told me. "A friend sent me this tape of Carolynn Mist, some American healer who goes on about spirituality and how to get your life together - things that are really quite good and wonderful, but oh so dogmatic and born again. Only Americans can come up with a thing like that, because they all follow blindly, don't they, like fucking sheep?"

She does an hilarious parody of Miss Mist, complete with whistles and strange voices. She seems happy. Maybe she's helped by the view from her suite of the Acropolis, which "holds me somehow in very, very old roots". Rampling says she's come through the worst and is now in a "good cycle". She says she feels good in Greece, where she's working on a film called Signs And Wonders, playing a woman trying to hold things together. As with Miss Havisham, it's hard not to draw comparisons between her role as an older woman in a love triangle with her husband and his lover.

Rampling does not attempt to conceal the fine lines making their way across her otherwise perfectly sculpted face, or the grey roots that have begun to surface beneath her determinedly uncoiffed hair. Beauty, she says firmly, is internal. But in Rampling's case, the years have done little to diminish her elegance.

Her battle with depression and the break-up three years ago of her 20-year marriage to the French rock musician Jean-Michel Jarre, have left their marks. She refers to Jarre repeatedly, almost doggedly, as "my husband". The couple raised three children (his daughter, her son from a previous marriage to PR agent Bryan Southworth and their own son, David) in their luxurious mansion outside Paris.

They still meet regularly despite Jarre dumping her for a much younger woman, a civil servant called Odile Froument. "No, I won't be getting a divorce," she winces, "I hate ends. I hate separations."

When she's working she hates being separated from her family and friends and from the real Charlotte Rampling. On location, she says, she feels vulnerable. She's brought all manner of little comforts to Athens - blankets, cushions, even a fluffy toy animal. You sense loneliness.

"Stellan Skarsgard [who co-starred with Emily Watson in Breaking The Waves], who is in this picture with me, has brought his six children and wife with him, as well as her friend and mother, because he says it's the only way to survive," Rampling smiles. "I can't have the new man in my life here because he works in Paris. So much identity is lost [during a shoot], that you have to put yourself on hold a bit, let the character and everything else take over the whole process. After that, you have to work it back. It can be quite complicated.

"Certain actors have a great talent to be a chameleon and they can just weave, weave, weave into different people. I'm not an actress who can do that. I've tried it and it just doesn't work."

In her best performances, Rampling hasn't woven into different people, but has given more than a little of herself to the character. She seems drawn to characters who have suffered like her, who have been spurned or endured terrible losses. "She has not just a chilly edge but the capacity to make us suspect a cold heart," writes David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary Of Film. "Yet in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, she gave a heartbreaking account of breakdown."

But she's probably best known for her performance as a concentration camp survivor in The Night Porter, an uneasy exploration of extreme sexuality, in which she played opposite Dirk Bogarde's sadistic Nazi.

"I don't do easy cinema, I don't take facile roles," she declares. "I've always taken roles that fascinate me and people who fascinate me are not necessarily dark but they're not particularly easy. I can't do Hollywood. The English may speak the same language as Americans, but we're foreigners in their country. Working in New York [on Stardust Memories and Sidney Lumet's The Verdict] was great, but otherwise I don't really care for it - it distresses me. I'm too European. I don't understand the way they function.

"I don't work for the sake of working, it has to be a love affair. Something where desire is very strong because, you know, keeping that feeling alight over a 10-week shoot is sort of like holding an orgasm for three months.""Ooh, what fun!" I say. "No, Helena," she chides, "it's really quite difficult, because the difficulty of filming is enormous. It's very laborious and complicated and intricate - each moment that you see on screen has perhaps taken three days to get to."

Her latest film role is the lead in the first film adaptation of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, shot last spring in Bulgaria with a British cast that includes Alan Bates, Frances De La Tour, Michael Gough, Katrin Cartlidge and Owen Teal. She plays Madame Liubov Andryevna, the Russian landowner. It's her first lead role in a feature since she played a murderous Thatcherite Euro MP in Paris By Night 11 years ago.

"There is something so inspiring about The Cherry Orchard and Liuba is one of the great roles to play," she says. "I've wanted to do it for years. It's true some of the lines sound a bit absurd. I felt absurd saying them. But Liuba's so complete for a woman my age, it's actually the right age that a woman confronts utter loss, in her case not only the world she lives in but her whole ancestry."

As with Miss Havisham, she plays a middle-aged woman in ruins. A woman, moreover, who has lost all the beauty in her life - symbolised by the useless but beautiful cherry orchard. "I don't think life gets easier as you get older, I don't think it ever will," she says, nervously puffing on one of her unfiltered John Player's. "It's constantly changing, constantly evolving. It's full of challenges which are sometimes hard.

"It's that human complexity which interests me. That's why I can't be in Hollywood because Hollywood isn't at all interested in human complexity, in what makes people tick."

But she has other dreams. On the coffee table between us is a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies. "I love literature. I'd love to write well - especially poetry. That's what I'd like to do, but I'm afraid I'm not very good at it which really pisses me off. I want to ask Miss Mist whether Charlotte's allowed two talents. She says you can ask for anything. She says if you want it, go for it."