Juliet Stevenson: ‘We are all ruthless recycling artists’
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Version 0 of 1. Juliet Stevenson arrives late and apologetic at the north London rehearsal rooms, having managed to squeeze in a hair appointment en route to our meeting. She conveys the impression of someone for whom beautifying herself is an afterthought, a bit of a chore – she has more interesting things to think about than the curls the hairdresser has introduced. Stevenson has a wonderful face: boyish and made for reverie. Her voice has a comparable lack of affectation: low, musical, instantly recognisable. She is one of our most brilliant actors (she can do anything from Hedda Gabler to Keira Knightley’s mum in Bend it Like Beckham) and is brave too. She’s about to return to a role that brought her rave reviews last year, one of the hardest parts in theatre: Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. Winnie, who ends buried up to her neck in sand as if in a beach game gone wrong. “There is a huge gulf between what Winnie dreamt her life would be and what it’s becoming – diminishing day by day,” she says. “It’s the story of a woman looking at the precipice. It’s sing or sink. She fills the gulf with invention and wilful, manic optimism. She’s like a refugee who has left everything behind and is sitting in the middle of a desert with a tiny handful of belongings.” It’s a marathon of a part, and Stevenson has been meeting regularly with Natalie Abrahami (“supreme among directors”) to keep the lines in her head. Yet it’s not a one-woman show: “It’s about a marriage. Winnie speaks almost all the time and Willie hardly ever does, but his silence is as large a character as her speaking.” Stevenson, 58, says the last “wonderful” year has revived her passion for acting, though like many actors she laments the dearth of challenging parts for older women. Women over 40 are perceived to “have no narrative”, she concludes, or are seen as “players in somebody else’s. Men’s narratives are allowed to go on being interesting until they drop dead at 106.” Yet she has found that life gets “more enriched, complex and detailed as you get older… nobody told me this”. She despaired turning 50, but “now I think: I’ve never felt so open to things”. Stevenson is married to Hugh Brody, an anthropologist, and has two stepsons, a daughter (at Oxford reading English) and a 14-year-old son. She is at an age where the nest is emptying – “you acclimatise”, she reports. Her mother is alive but she lost her father years ago and her brother, tragically, when he was 48. Yet loss, she observes wonderingly, is strangely fused with energy. She draws on this to be Winnie: “We are ruthless recycling artists. There’s nothing in my life I wouldn’t recycle into my work.” Happy Days is at the Young Vic, London SE1 from Friday to 21 March Related: Juliet Stevenson: how I learned to love Beckett |