CAPTURING ROMOLA

NEWS ARTICLES

A fine Romola
Annabel Rivkin - Evening Standard (UK)
April 13, 2006

Romola Garai lights up the small screen with her peachy good looks and emotional range. If she can bear to return to Hollywood after the ignominy of her last experience, she'll be a hard act to beat, says Annabel Rivkin
Romola Garai has strong opinions. Not least, it becomes clear, about what she wears.

Presented with a palette of baby pinks and eau de nils for the ES fashion shoot at Paul Allen's fashionable members' club, The Hospital, in Covent Garden, she turns up her nose and instead delves into the stylist's second choices for the strong green Marni and the violently purple Missoni. There was a time, early in her career, when she was happy to allow her already celestial looks to be tonged and exaggerated to the point where she seemed to be wearing a series of negligees or angel costumes, but now she seems to want the world to see her as she sees herself. And she does not see herself as a fluffy English rose.

We know Romola can act. When compared to her peers she is only 23 her talent seems to be far beyond the scope of many a British belle who has conquered Hollywood. Her breakthrough roles in Daniel Deronda and Nicholas Nickleby won her praise; her West End debut, playing James Joyce's mentally disabled daughter in Calico, bowled over the critics; and her tackling of Cassandra Mortmain in a film adaptation of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle placed her firmly in the way of Hollywood calling.

And when Hollywood knocked, it was with Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights as its calling card.

Doused in the cheesiness of the script, being constantly told that she was 20lb overweight and filled with regret that she had accepted the part at all, Romola spent her five months on Puerto Rico (which read on screen as Cuba) battling with the day-today of the project. 'It's not a great way to work. If I'd known more about the industry at the time I think I probably should have left and they could have got somebody who was willing and happy to work and not impossible to They weren't getting a good performance out of me because I was unhappy.

You think, "Oh, it must be me.'' ' There is a strength to Romola which makes me think that, when unhappy or dissatisfied, she would be a force to be reckoned with. She seems entirely assured and yet not arrogant. She's articulate and wise but still fresh. Anyway, Havana Nights had her fleeing Hollywood back to Shepherd's Bush, where she bought her first, single girl's flat last September. 'Having a mortgage really changes your entire lifestyle to the most extraordinary extent,' she says in her classless, ringing tones.

'I love it. I'm a homebody. I just sit in my house and cook and listen to Radio 4.

When you have put your money into something then you go out less not that I was ever a real go-er outer. And I've become a bit more interiors-oriented. I bought a beautiful, bow-fronted Georgian chest of drawers which is so too big for my room. It's ludicrous. It's like walking into Alice in Wonderland: there's this enormous chest of drawers, a tiny bed and no room in between.' She has a Bloomsbury eccentricity that shows itself on occasions, such as the time she had her parents to tea and answered the door clutching a huge tray set with a beautiful antique tea service and a cake she had just taken out of the oven. But her flat had no chairs and so everyone was obliged to sit on the floor.

She feels less averse to the American film world than she did a couple of years ago, and concedes that 'I watched the Oscars this year and I thought that they are making good movies and those movies are being seen and promoted much more than in this country and that deserves to be lauded. People get very snotty about working in independent films in Britain but I don't think that definition has any meaning any more.' As far as the fat comments go, she is long- legged and perhaps a size ten. With a bosom. 'I exercise, not religiously, but I ride my bicycle and I go running a couple of times a week.

But if you work in Hollywood then there is an expected type. I think if I was asked by a director to lose weight, with no good reason in the script, then I would say no.' Incidentally, in the stills from Havana Nights, which she started shooting after two months of intensive dance training, she looks as lissome as a gymnast. With a bosom.

'I mean, I am an eater,' she continues. 'I'll go anywhere for a good meal.'

It is on food and books that she seems to be most animated. A bluestocking trapped in a bombshell's frame, she is part of a book club that has recently been extolling the virtues of Ian McEwan. She is a passionate follower of postcolonial literature, and when listing her favourite restaurants, she almost smacks her lips.

'The Pope's Eye, which is on Blythe Road and two minutes' walk from my house, does steak and chips, and chocolate ice cream and brownies. I think my favourite type of food is probably Turkish and there are a couple of restaurants on Upper Street that I really like. There's a Polish restaurant on Goldhawk Road that feels just like your grandmother's front room, and my favourite posh restaurant is probably St John because it's such a wonderful experience.' She arrives at the local destinations by bike, and those that are further flung by Tube. She doesn't favour members' clubs or premieres, and she goes to Marni or Dries Van Noten a couple of times a year to buy a special piece, but 'absolutely everything else is from Topshop'.

She has often joked about her lack of ambition, her lack of interest in getting dolled up and networking. She mentions Emily Watson as an actress she admires who makes quality films and a good living, seemingly without compromising the normality of her life. 'When somebody comes to me and tells me to make a decision about something and they're telling me it's a good idea and I know it's a good idea, then I realize that I'm so attached to my life and all the things I like about my life. I'm not lazy but it can take a lot to motivate me to do something away from home.' So no decampment to Los Angeles for her.

Romola was brought up to believe that work was about being creative rather than aggressive. As a child she was based in Hong Kong and Singapore, where her father (whose grandfather was a Hungarian emigre) worked as a banker, and returned to live in Wiltshire aged eight. She has two adopted elder siblings, Ralph and Rosie, who are black and were adopted as babies ('they are my brother and sister and that's all there is to say'), and a little sister, Roxanne.

At 16, she left her public school, Stonar, to move to London, live with Rosie and study for her A levels at City of London school, where she was spotted by a talent scout and cast as the younger version of Judi Dench's character in the Second World War drama The Last of the Blonde Bombshells.

Her reading theory and interpretation course at London University had to be abandoned as the acting offers flowed in and that has been a constant source of regret. 'I'm trying to do my degree at the Open University now and I've got an essay due in about ten days.' She is currently filming with the celebrated French director Francois Ozon (8 Women, Swimming Pool) in Belgium.

'I like Belgium great food but I'm sitting on set reading f***ing Turgenev. But the director is amazing and as long as you do exactly what you're told, to the letter, then it's a wonderful experience.' Romola is about to appear in Mary Bryant, a television drama charting the true experiences of a 17-year-old Cornish girl sent to Botany Bay on the first penal convoy after being convicted of stealing a bonnet. Mary is pregnant by the time she sets sail, has another child with the man she meets and marries during the journey, and then engages in a failed bid to escape the penal colony. She is sent back to England for trial, the bid for freedom having claimed the lives of her husband and children.

She is represented by Boswell, acquitted and returns to the countryside where little is heard of her ever again. Perhaps this could be seen as a return to the corseted discomfort of period drama. 'I think of period drama as being adaptations of great period novels,' she counters.

'You're dealing with a different genre when the writing is original.' She felt passionately about the character of Mary Bryant and that the violence towards women at that time should be properly dealt with. 'And they listened to me,' she marvels. 'F***ing hell; they had no reason to.' She's luminous in this role and increasingly gorgeous as her appearance becomes more dishabille and wrecked while the story unfolds. 'It's great when you have a really strong passion for a project but you do have to fight, and it brings your personality on to the set because you are coming to work with a set of beliefs that you have to defend. Working with Francois Ozon, because I respect him so much and he has a much stronger vision of it than I do, there is nothing of me personally being used, I feel like a complete tool... I feel like a complete tool? Oops.' Back when the scheduling of Daniel Deronda clashed with Dr Zhivago starring Keira Knightley, there were some attempts to pitch the two young actresses against each other in a contrived, corsets-at-dawn feud. It seems pointless to compare Romola to Keira. Apart from anything else, their objectives and ambitions seem to be wildly different.

Romola is set apart by her willingness to look dreadful on screen, by her lack of vanity and by the emotional weight she can bring to a role.

In Mary Bryant, she looks Hollywood thin. Has she bowed to the temptation to diet for film work? Was she perhaps trying to look authentically starved?

'Good lighting,' she says. 'Must have been.

Because I went out to dinner an awful lot.' The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant will be shown on ITV1 at 9pm on Easter Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday