| That's why the lady is a trump by Chrissy Iley Alex Kingston was once best known as the wife Ralph Fiennes jilted. Now a star of ER, and with a role in the cult film Croupier, she's in the spotlight on her own terms. The first thing you notice about Alex Kingston is how amazingly unruffled a woman in a white lawn salwar kameez with a crying baby can be. Her every pore exudes organisational ability. She's very head girl. Then you notice that her husband, Florian Haertel, exudes a hot charisma. He seems comfortable and bright, the opposite to the darkly clenching form of her previous husband, the terminally brooding, face cursed with intensity and sculpted with introspection, Ralph Fiennes. This one's a big, bright, jolly German: big eyes, bald head, airstrip goatee. They make quite the little family pack, arriving at a friend's Hollywood home for interview purposes with the dogs they rescued before Kingston gave birth to Salome only a few weeks ago. I ask if her hormones have settled back into place, in an attempt to do faux girlie. She's having none of it. "Yes, I'm fairly settled, thank you." The birth has tied in with a hiatus from her long-standing, no-nonsense doctor role as Elizabeth Corday in ER. Playing way against type is her role in Croupier, that of a South African conwoman, a seductress and a vulnerable vamp. She delivers them both impeccably, of course. You get the impression she doesn't fail at much. She can do doctor, she can do gambler. Nothing's a stretch. Her role in Croupier garnered wild acclaim from American audiences last year. The low-budget film is what is called a sleeper. It was actually released in Britain in 1998, before Kingston became one of our most famous television exports. Made by Channel Four Films, its cultish charm missed any serious critical review here. Not in the United States, though. Its director, Mike Hodges, was a maniac with a baby of his own. He knocked on doors relentlessly, showing it to anyone who would sit down for 90 minutes, until eventually he got a deal with a New York film distribution house called Shooting Gallery. The result was rapturous reviews, Oscar heat, the movie making its money back quadruple-fold. Its male lead, the introspective but hardened and cool Clive Owen, was compared to a young Sean Connery, and Kingston's sexuality was as persuasive and overwhelming as a young Kathleen Turner. That's what the reviews said, anyway. So now the British movie is getting a chance to shine in its homeland. You'd think she would be bored or distant about a project she did so long ago, but her professionalism is well honed. "I think it's so fantastic. There was such a furore about it being denied an Oscar nomination, that made people in England sit up and think, 'Gosh - we've really let something slip through the net.' I'm thrilled." I suggest that perhaps it did better in the US as she is a household name thanks to ER; when it was released in Britain, we hadn't yet seen her debut series. "They did use my name alongside Clive Owen's to publicise the movie and, had I not been on ER, that would not have been the case. ER helped the movie, but my character was very different in it. It's one of those age-old problems actors have, which is that if you're on a show for a long time, people think that's all you can do. I did plenty before ER and I hope to be doing plenty after." Most memorably before ER, she played the sexually luxuriant, ready-for-anything Moll Flanders. I read once that there were more sex scenes in Moll than in any other previously broadcast show. It was shot at what was possibly the most traumatic time of her life, the break-up with Fiennes, the man she thought she'd live with for ever, with whom she was the other part of a jigsaw. She was the capable, bubbly one and he was the brooding, self-gnawing one. Together, they fitted, they worked. Or not, as the case turned out. One day he came to the set, all bright and breezy. She thought he was going to ask her away for the weekend. Instead he announced: 'I'm in love with Francesca Annis.' It was callous to so disturb her concentration, but I suppose there's no easy way to deliver bad news. Some say it with flowers. Some with a fax. Or some with over-analytical, protracted half-truths that cover up betrayal. But the betrayal had been fairly obvious. Fiennes and Annis had starred in Hamlet, curiously soon after his mother died. Annis's Gertrude and his Hamlet were a manifestation of 'raging oedipal intensity', one critic said. Kingston then had to turn all her intensity, and a fair amount of delayed demand for the spotlight, into portraying Moll Flanders, a woman who dusted herself off, no looking back, and moved on to the next conquest. Kingston now deflects me from my path of interrogation. She knows it was a turning point emotionally, but wants only to talk about it professionally. "It was a turning point in the sense that it got me this job. It awakened Mike Hodges's interest in Croupier, and it got me ER. Although the character in Croupier is vastly different to Moll, there are similarities in that they are both tricksters. They use their sexuality to achieve whatever result they want." Do you think that came at a time in your life when you needed that sexual expression? "Maybe. Because I know I was rediscovering who I am and my ability to feel confident in myself again." I'd read that when she was with Fiennes, she felt like the invisible woman. "Yes, sometimes," she says flatly. And that must have been a horrible thing. Breezily, she continues: "I know that Moll Flanders gave me the possibility of work, to get my hands on a fantastic role so I could show people something. And after that, I've worked consistently." With Fiennes she felt like the invisible woman. People literally looked past her at parties When she was Hollywood's invisible woman, a meaningless trinket on the arm of what Steven Spielberg called a charisma made up of sexual evil, people would literally look past her at parties. She was the-wife-of, the also-ran, the appendage. And partly, this was her own fault. To some extent, she put her career on the back burner to be Fiennes's constant support, especially when his mother died. They had been living together for nine years before they got married and she has said that the wedding might have been a case of papering over cracks, huge emotional chasms, not wanting to face the fall. As so often happens, though, when you suffer emotional loss you gain prestige - one balances the other. What she lost was the invisible woman. Moll Flanders was indeed an emotional and career turning point. From then on, even though the characters she has played have been different, all of them share an amazing strength. "I've always been cast as a strong woman, which is wonderful for me. I think the most feminine role I ever played was Cordelia in King Lear, and she's a fighter as well. I missed out on the Juliets and Ophelias. Never those roles, never the ingenue." Is that because you're an eldest child, always seen as capable? "I think it's more to do with my deep voice and big bones." NEXT |