from http://www.canoe.ca/JamMovies/
Wednesday, December 15, 1999
By Bruce Kirkland
Toronto Sun
The 1999 Genie Awards feature a unique twist in the Best Actress competition: The real-life mother-and-daughter duo of Rosemary Harris and Jennifer Ehle are both nominated.
If that isn't unusual enough, the English twosome earned their nominations for playing the same character in the same movie, the Hungarian-Canadian co-production Sunshine.
"We didn't work together, of course, because we play the same role," purrs Ehle, "but it was lovely."
"It is unusual, I suppose," says Harris with a beaming smile as she gazes proudly at her gorgeous daughter. Unusual but not unheard of: They both played the same character once before, in Peter Hall's British TV drama The Camomile Lawn.
Sunshine, Istvan Szabo's three-hour epic about a Jewish Hungarian family's struggle to survive the oppression of the 20th century, opens in Toronto tomorrow. It made its Canadian debut at the Toronto film festival in September.
For Harris and Ehle, this is the friendliest of competitions because making the movie was one of their greatest pleasures.
"This is one of the characters that I'm most proud of," Harris says of playing the elder version of Valerie in Sunshine. Harris, the grandmother in the recent drama My Life So Far and a veteran of decades on English stages, was nominated for an Oscar five years ago for Tom And Viv.
Ehle, the daughter of Harris and novelist-screenwriter John Ehle (The Winter People, The Journey Of August King), plays Valerie as a dynamic young woman in Sunshine. For her, working with Szabo was a dream come true. She knew his films, such as the Oscar-winning Mephisto, and had heard about him as a director from Glenn Close, who starred in Szabo's first English-language film, Meeting Venus, in 1990.
"I just remember her saying, 'You have to, just have to, move mountains if you have to if you ever get a chance to work with Istvan Szabo.' "
Ehle agrees. "He is just extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary, in understanding how actors work," she says.
"He just covers you in a warm blanket and you don't worry about anything," Harris adds in agreement. "Other directors can stand over you with a big stick saying: 'You better be good or I'll fire you!' He never did that."
Ehle is surprised at her mother's words about other directors. "Did anyone ever fire you?" she asks.
"No," admits Harris, "but you always feel they might. But Istvan, he just made everybody feel happy and at home. The crew adored him. I've never been on a set where it was so concentrated, so quiet." Adds Ehle: "He never even says, 'Cut!' He says, 'Thank you!' "
That was not Harris' experience making My Life So Far with English filmmaker Hugh Hudson just before Sunshine.
"The film I did before was the noisiest set and everybody was chattering and talking about other things," Harris says bluntly. "Then there would be a 'shushing' and this artificial silence and the actor was supposed to do it. I thought: 'Why isn't anyone concentrating?' I didn't want to be a party pooper and say: 'Shut up everybody!' But I really felt like it. The atmosphere on Istvan's set was so beautiful, it was such a contrast."
Neither woman will talk much about the themes of Szabo's sprawling film, however. They feel too overwhelmed. "This is a big subject," says Harris. "You could say it's about humanity -- or inhumanity -- and that men make an awful mess of things. Why don't we let women run the countries?"