Juliet Stevenson - Acting Up

There are people who are born to be performers, and Juliet Stevenson is one of them. Just sitting with the acclaimed British actress, famous for her theatre, TV and film work – including Mona Lisa's Smile with Julia Roberts, Infamous about Truman Capote, and Bend It Like Beckham – is like watching a private play.

There's the words, the eye contact, the way she draws you in, dropping her voice to a whisper one moment, and then has you practically falling off your chair the next, with a booming laugh. And the fact it's completely unwitting on her part makes it all the more captivating, because you're never quite sure where she'll take you next.

Though, you do start to pick up on some things. She talks slowly, very slowly, when she is answering a question, as if she's really searching for the answer, before carefully selecting her precise words. Like when I ask how she prepared for her latest role in Duet for One at the Almeida Theatre, where Stevenson plays Stephanie Abrahams, a world class concert violinist who is told she will never play again.

"It's… difficult," says the 52-year-old, sipping her tea. "Playing music is the thing that…identifies her, that… shapes her completely and it's being taken away. With me… there isn't one thing. If I could never act, I'd still have my children… which is a huge part of my life. So, partly with Stephanie, it is… an imaginative exercise."

Similarly, Stevenson's voice drops when she feels truly passionate about something - which is about 50 per cent of the time.

"There are definitely days when the last thing I want to do is go out into a very brightly lit space in front of a lot of people."

And then she speeds up, most notably when discussing any perceived successes or achievements on her part. When I mention her award winning role in the romantic comedy Truly, Madly, Deeply, in which she starred opposite Alan Rickman, she hastily sums up: "It was successful, had its moment of glory-at-the-time."

Having this predisposition – being an actor inside and out – must make working a lot easier. In fact, despite actors' insistence they work very hard, I've always thought that their jobs (or at least for those who don't struggle to find work) are relatively cushy. They learn lines, get up on stage and perform in front of an adoring audience every night.

In fact, Stevenson reveals how complex it is. First, there's the script. In Duet for One , the writing is ‘amazing', she says, but also very difficult to learn. "It's all broken, so it's like trying to reconstruct a vase from a thousand shards. Many of the shards look the same, but are different, each for their own reason. So it's a complicated thought map."

Then, there are the rehearsals, which she likens to a relationship. "At the beginning, you're firing on your first instincts, everything's flowing and you're bouncing off the other actors. Then there's a period where it becomes more familiar and you start to get bogged down.

"And, if it's a wonderful play, then it can be a fascinating bog. But it can also become more cumbersome. Hopefully you come out of that somewhere else, maybe even getting back to something like the early days where there's a very fresh response."

And, finally, the performance. Stevenson openly admits suffering from stage nerves, which means Duet for One is even more challenging because she and Henry Goodman share the stage for the duration of the play. "Yessss," she sighs, indicating I've just reminded her of this, before we dissolve into giggles. That's the other thing about Stevenson - she has brilliant comic timing.

"In Hollywood, there's a flavour of the moment-ism which is extremely difficult. I would have been spat out very quickly."

"Well, there's no handing over the baton," she laughs, "no hiding place, nor room for when, inevitably, you're not feeling as great as you might have been the night before, or you're exhausted. There are definitely days when the last thing I want to do is go out into a very brightly lit space in front of a lot of people. And then there are nights when I do want that."

I've never heard an actor admit that before. But then, Stevenson is big on truth. She's unflinching about her experience of Hollywood. "I don't think I ever thought I was going to go there, walk in to the offices, and they'd go ‘wow, we have to cast her!' When I did go to LA, I said ‘I'm only going for any length of time if I can work, or do a play'. I thought I cannot be there and spend my life in the hairdresser, I just can't.

"It's probably cowardice as well because I think there's a ‘flavour of the moment-ism' there, which is extremely difficult. Here, we still just about have a culture in which you can sustain a working career if you're careful and keep yourself on your toes. Over there, people come and go fast." She sips her tea, looks over the rim: "I think I'd have been spat out very quickly."

She also blasts the decline of weighty roles for women as they get older. "There's a desert! Well, maybe not a desert because there's a few trees. But when you start, there are masses of roles because every story has a central female character who is invariably youngish… and nubile. That will be part of her power, her ‘value'. Over a certain age, those roles stop. Just stop! The same isn't true for men."

Is this why, like other actors such as Helen McCrory, she came to motherhood so late? An army child before her parents settled in Essex when she was nine, Stevenson wanted to be an actor from the age of 15. She went to RADA drama school, then to the Royal Shakespeare Company at 20, focussing on theatre work until her early 30's when a journalist descibed her as a 'classical actress'. Not wanting to have a label stuck to her, she ventured in to film and TV work, which she became fascinated by.

In 1993 she met her long term partner, writer and anthropologist Hugh Brody. She had her first child at 38, Rosalind, now also an actress, and her second, Gabriel, at 44.

"Children were not an issue in my 20s", she says of coming into motherhood so late. "I was just on a trajectory of work. And it wasn't until 35 that I thought ‘Should I be having a life as well?' Motherhood suited me much better at that age. I wouldn't have had the patience for it beforehand, I didn't want to be domesticated, didn't want to make a bed."

These days, being a mother keeps her sane. "I need the ordinariness. I don't think I would have done well to be in this profession at my age without children because I would have found it very difficult to stand a lot of the silliness of it. Not the work or rehearsals, but the other stuff."

Her children are also the reason Stevenson has cut down on her workload in recent years. Even playing at the Almeida, close to her north London home, she finds difficult because they're just coming back from school as she heads out to the theatre. "I just miss them."

They're also the reason she doesn't take on work months in advance. "Some people like to know what they're doing a year in advance and feel secure in that. I much prefer not knowing. It's a free thing, she says then beams, "we can pile into a caravan and take six months to travel round South America. There's always that fancy hanging over me."

Duet for One runs at The Almeida until 14 March 2009. For tickets, call 020 7359 4404 or visit www.almeida.co.uk

By Barbara Walshe