Rosamund Pike: From reluctant English rose to Britain's new screen queen
By Judith WoodsLast updated at 9:18 PM on 18th September 2010
With her standout elegance and cut-glass vowels, Rosamund Pike shines in autumn’s hottest film, Made
in Dagenham. But she insists that in reality she’s far from the perfect English rose. As she tells Judith Woods, she gets into ‘scrapes’ far too often…
'Being single has propelled me into some amazing adventures. I have nothing to lose,' says Rosamund
‘When I was working in New York recently, I decided to do something strange every day,’ she explains. ‘I would pick up a magazine and do whatever was on the page that fell open. I ended up making a trek across the water from Manhattan to eat lobster in a bun on the Brooklyn quayside, and the next morning I rode the Cyclone wooden roller coaster on Coney Island, which was utterly, horrendously terrifying, because it was built in 1927 and is so old that you can’t be entirely sure it won’t fall apart. There’s a camera fixed to take pictures on one of the dips, and I had planned to adopt some sort of artful expression – boredom, maybe – but instead I was screaming and grimacing like a zombie.’
She pulls a face but, despite the acting abilities that have made her one of the hottest British properties both here and in the US, she looks nothing like a zombie. She does, of course, personify the English rose, but I promised not to say so, because it’s a label that hangs like a millstone round her slender, Grace Kelly neck. Although her Miu Miu gymslip skirt and white James Perse T-shirt are teamed rather eccentrically with fluorescent trainers, she is a picture of unselfconscious elegance, positively radiating the sort of money-can’t-buy class that most actresses would kill for. But when
I say as much, her exasperation is palpable. ‘I’m not an English rose at all,’ she says.
‘Or maybe I’m an English rose with…’
‘Thorns?’ I interject.
‘Oh no,’ her eyes widen in well-bred dismay. ‘A rose with bruised petals – not emotional bruises, but flaws; I get into scrapes too often for perfection. There’s this impression that I’ve somehow lived a charmed life. When I applied for drama school I was turned down by every single one, which was crushing at 19, although it’s now a badge of pride. Later I met someone who had been on one of the panels, and he admitted I’d done the best audition he’d ever seen but he’d been overruled because his colleagues felt I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, which simply isn’t true. I don’t own a house, my parents never owned a house; not through any philosophy but because they couldn’t afford one. I wouldn’t mind being thought of as privileged if I’d had any of the wealth that’s supposed to accompany it, but we weren’t at all well off.’
Rosamund in Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightley
From left: In her breakthrough role as Bond girl Miranda Frost in Die Another Day; playing the boss’s wife in next month’s Made in Dagenham
We shall return to the vicissitudes of her personal life later, but for now she is eager to talk about her latest film, a British gem set in 1968 and called Made in Dagenham, about a little-remembered episode in the nation’s labour relations, when the women machinists at the Ford Dagenham assembly plant went on strike in a bid for parity with their male colleagues. A year later, partly as a result of their actions, Secretary of State for Employment Barbara Castle introduced the Equal Pay Bill. Directed by Nigel Cole (who also directed Calendar Girls), the movie has a fabulous best-of-British cast, real heart, and a rare resonance that lasts long after the credits roll and you’ve finished yelling with elation.
Bob Hoskins is Albert, the union rep, John Sessions plays Harold Wilson, Rupert Graves the factory boss and the machinists, stripped down to their bras in the summer heat, include the classy veteran Geraldine James and
rising stars Jaime Winstone and Andrea Riseborough. ‘As soon as I read the script,
I wanted to be part of it,’ says Rosamund. ‘Interesting work is what motivates me, and
I didn’t care which part I had.’
‘I wouldn’t mind being thought of as privileged if I’d had the wealth that goes with it’
The salt-of-the-earth lead is played by Sally Hawkins; Miranda Richardson does a turn as Barbara Castle, and Rosamund is (although I hesitate to admit it) the fragrant middle-class boss’s wife, who excelled at university before sacrificing her career ambitions to keep house. Her cut-glass vowels initially separate her from the sisterhood on the shop floor (no wonder she plays the role with such cool insight) – but it gradually emerges that the same militant heart beats within them all. ‘I am so proud of this film and everything it stands for,’ Rosamund says, eyes shining. ‘But maybe next time I would like to be one of the gang, right in the thick of things.’
Rosamund Pike was born in London. Her parents Julian and Caroline were opera singers – he is now a professor at the Birmingham Conservatoire – which made for a peripatetic childhood in Europe, where she mastered both French and German and learned piano and cello. When the family returned to Britain when she was seven, she went on to win a scholarship to fee-paying Badminton School in Bristol, alma mater of Iris Murdoch, after sitting an entrance exam for which she was completely untutored.
‘I had never sat any sort of test before. It didn’t bode well when we arrived at this incredibly grand school, where the other parents were emerging from BMWs, and the exhaust pipe of our ancient Volvo estate fell off at the top of the drive so that we had to freewheel down it. As I sat in the examination room, I could see people setting out elaborate picnics while my mother chatted to the RAC man. Because it was my first ever exam, I had no idea you weren’t allowed to talk, and I got a terrible telling off because the girl next to me was upset and I asked her if she needed any help.’
She went on to study English at Wadham College, Oxford, but was by then determined to become an actress, having starred as Juliet in the National Youth Theatre at 18, just after she sat her A-levels, and been so outstanding that she was taken on by an agent (the same one she has now). She continued to act at university, then dropped out with the aim of training seriously. But after being rejected by all those drama schools, she returned, cap in hand, to Oxford and was magnanimously allowed to complete her degree.
Following graduation, she was considering a job at Waterstone’s when she landed the role of double agent Miranda Frost in Die Another Day, with Pierce Brosnan. ‘I was so clueless that I turned up for the audition with one of my mother’s concert dresses – which my grandmother had made and altered to fit me – an 80s taffeta confection with huge shoulder pads. The woman in the costume department took one look at it and tactfully said, “Gosh, that is a very beautiful dress, but I think we’re going to go with something like this,” and poured me into a white sheath.’
Her brush with Bond gave her a taste of the high life as she was sucked into the 007 machine – plenty more glamorous sheath dresses where that one came from, first-class air travel and international movie premieres. It might easily have gone to her head. ‘Not at all,’ she says, with a touching air of anguish. ‘I was too busy agonising over whether I was good enough. I still know all the lines from my scene with Judi Dench who plays M, because for the next ten years I went over and over them in my head, wishing I’d delivered them differently. It was so nice to work with Judi again in Madame de Sade [in 2009, at the Donmar Warehouse] – it helped exorcise my demons.’
Since Bond, she has moved seamlessly between stage and film: Hitchcock Blonde at the Royal Court Theatre; a touring Hedda Gabler that garnered rave reviews; The Libertine with Johnny Depp, Fracture with Anthony Hopkins. Whenever she’s filming, Rosamund hires a car and drives into the countryside to find a lake in which to skinny dip – whatever the weather. When she’s not on set, she lives alone in a ‘very sweet but tiny’ mews house near West London’s Kensington Gardens. ‘I like beautiful objects and I’m always window shopping on Liberty’s furniture floor, but I seldom buy anything.’
Pride of place in the house currently goes to a life-size bust of herself, painted green, which was created when she was fitted with prosthetics for her soon-to-be-released Dustin Hoffman comedy, Barney’s Version, in which she had to age 30 years. ‘It was really scary having this rubbery mask applied to my whole face, with just two straws up my nostrils to breathe through. They put a layer of plaster on top that sets and you feel as if you’re being buried alive,’ she says with a shudder.
‘My heart was pounding and I was trying to stay calm, but it was a real ordeal.’ If the trailer is anything to go by, the film is very funny. To everyone’s surprise – except her own – she has a gift for comedy, as attested by her role as Helen, Carey Mulligan’s dim friend in An Education, given to such priceless comments as: ‘Someone told me that in 50 years, no one will speak Latin. Not even Latin people.’
More comic turns are in the offing, as Rosamund has just finished filming The Big Year alongside box-office heavyweights Owen Wilson, Steve Martin and Jack Black. But being funny is a serious business: ‘Owen and I were admitting to each other that actors have a tendency to cannibalise their own emotions; you might be sobbing your heart out about some disaster and then your actor’s brain kicks in and you start scrutinising the strange honking, bellowing noise that you’re making and wondering how you could reproduce it.’ By her own admission, she cries and laughs a great deal, and in person she is quirky and self-deprecating – the very antithesis of the untouchable aloofness that she exudes in photographs.
‘I’m one of those contradictory people who can be the life and soul of the party or quite happy on my own. I like oddities – in friends, relationships and activities,’ she
says serenely. She was engaged for several months to Atonement director Joe Wright,
38, who directed her in Pride and Prejudice. She was well within sight of her big day –
the dress had been fitted, the cake and flowers ordered – when Wright apparently broke it off after she sent out ironic wedding invitations, featuring them in a hot tub,
without consulting him.
She was reportedly mortified by this end to their three-year relationship, but won’t discuss it, although it would possibly qualify as one of those scrapes she gets into. That was in 2008; these days she says that she’s ‘as single as I want to be and as together as I want to be’, with someone she mysteriously alludes to as a ‘fellow adventurer’.
‘Being single has propelled me into some amazing adventures,’ she muses. ‘After what happened, I have nothing to lose any more; I’m not scared of being heartbroken, because love is always going to take you somewhere new and frightening and wonderful. When you spend time in a couple, that starts to define you and, while it was fun, I’ve discovered that it’s also fun being me. I might meet someone tomorrow or in two years and that’s fine. Meanwhile, I get to live out the most glorious love affairs on screen. How fabulous is that?’
Our conversation over, she tells me she’s off to buy sequins for a party the next evening. The waiter approaches and asks how she enjoyed lunch: Rosamund responds that the sweetbreads weren’t quite to her taste but that she’s so glad she ordered them because now she has eaten offal. And then she smiles – and lights up the entire room.
Made in Dagenham will be in cinemas from 1 October
