| Jodhi, The Very Serious Starlet by Jasper Rees It's hard to credit that Jodhi May is still only 23. She seems to have been around for years. This may be because, even as she won Best Actress award at Cannes for a performance she gave as a 12-year-old, there was already something unnervingly mature about her. The film was A world Apart - she played the lonely daughter of an imprisoned anti-aparheid activist. Some child actors are in the same boat as those choirboys with exquisite treble voices: ther's no guarantee that the precocious ability of the minor will be inherited by the adult. But it was never going to be difficult to accept May as a fully-grown woman because, at least in spirit, she was playing one, trapped in the diminutive frame of a pubescent girl. It was her first acting role, and the hoopla put her off so comprehensively that she didn't act again for two years. "I had no intention to go into acting whatsoever," she says. "There was no greater plan. The press surrounding it was a bit daunting. I remember thinking I don't really want to have anything to do with the PR stuff that you have to do." But when she did stray back in front of a camera, it was business as usual. In The Last of the Mohicans she tossed herself over a cliff. In The Woodlanders she played the victim of unrepuited love. In Sister My Sister she was a housemaid involved in viloent sisterly incest. In The Gambler she played a penniless stenographer who falls for the much older, but equally skint, Dostoevsky. Spot the laughs in that bunch of mostly earnest, no-budget movies. It is consistent with the austerity of her frivolity-free role selection that the only time her work has taken her to Los Angeles, it was to play the abductee of a batty religious sect in the BBC's Signs and Wonders. "The more challenging a role," she explains, "the more serious the subject matter tends to be. And I still find that something which will be my primary attractiion to a role." So no sitcome for you then, I ask. "Definitely and absolutely not." Stand by, however, for Aristocrast, on which the BBC has lavished 5 million pounds, and you can see where every penny went. The story of the Lennox sisters, the four daughters of the second Duke of Richmond, was first told by Stella Tillyard in the hugely enjoyable book of the same name. It's a drawing-room history of the 18th century, as seen by the spouses of the mighty. Each sister married splendidly, apart from Sarah, the youngest, who thanks to a flagrant act of political manoeuvring by her family, was shunted into the path of the young prince who would soon become George III. He courted her diffidently for a while, but she ended up in the stale marriage bed of an MP from Suffolk, who was probably gay. The interesting catch, and it's certainly what caught May, is that Sarah gets her kicks illicitly: she flirts her way around Paris, before scandalously eloping with a hunky young chancer. You don't often see May luxuriating in her own body. (A costume designer did tell me on set that she was inclined to yank her lowcut dresses as far up her chest as possible.) But, still, it's a change. "It was intriguing to play the kind of character that I would not normally be," she says. "She has a lighter quality to her which I hadn't explored before. I perceived her as quite naive, not particularly well-guided and essentially used as a pawn in a larger political game. She represents a lot of the contradictions that women of the period found themselves in. She tends to be quite misguided by her instencts." Which is not something you could ever level at May. Her sentences are models of meticulous cogitation. She talks of "seeking a versatile set of opportunities", of being "more interested in unconventional forms of love". Not many actresses would claim, "I think stoicism is very interesting to play." When I ask her to describe that distinctive face of hers, she replies, "I think if you become really conscious of how you look it would be astonishingly inhibiting as an actor. You tend to try to remain as oblivious as possible to ti. It's amazing how any degree of self-consciousness can make performance a difficult thing. Anda, also, going from character to character, it helps to have a certain kind of amorphous sence of identity. As soon as you imprint a strong sense of identity it can hinder you imagination sometimes." I take that as a not. Consistent with her equivocatinginstinct, it was with a half-heavy heart that at 16 she took five months out from Camden School for Girls to make The Last of the Mohicans in North Carolina. She had to reschedule her GCSEs. Then came the offer of a place to read English at Oxford. She consulted far and wide before deciding to accept. It's a measure of her astuteness that she knew a sabbatical from acting would ultimately serve her career. "When you start when you're very young, you have to make this transition from being remembered as a child to being perceived as a woman. It was going to university which enabled me to make that transition. It's one of the best things that I've ever done. It really does enable you to become and incredibly autonomous person. The film industry is a very protective environment, especially when you're a young person, and that's not completely representative of what adult life is about, and I think university is. "You're completly on your own, and you have to decide what your agenda is, what your goals are, and how you are going to achieve them and what your motivation is, where al of that comes from, and so, for that reasong, I think it's actually a much more constructive experience in terms of growing up. I didn't really feel that I'd be a complete person without it." Thanks to ThisIsLondon.com for this article |