She’s got it

Gemma Arterton is hot. She’s gone from Tess to Bond to Hollywood, but is now returning to seduce a modern English village

Jeff Dawson

Published: 5 September 2010, Sunday Times

Gemma Arterton swishes into the reception area of her publicist’s Soho offices declaiming against her defunct phone. The quest to recharge it has resulted in her countermanding a PR diktat. "They told me not to come to the first floor, because they didn’t want us to meet before the interview," she chirrups in my direction while simultaneously petitioning the front desk as to the availability of power sockets. "Hello," she adds with a conspiratorial smirk. "I’m Gemma."

Beautiful, high-heeled and struttingly confident, Arterton certainly knows how to make an entrance... and exit. It was her brief but doomed turn as Her Majesty’s agent Strawberry Fields in 2008’s Quantum of Solace (death by sub-BP oil slick, starkers, sprawled on the bed) that gave her her big leg-up. With brown eyes, peaches-and-cream skin and long silky hair at the brunette end of the auburn spectrum, she is unquestionably a head turner. Garrulous, too, charmingly so — if apt to give her handlers kittens. Our brief walk up the stairs (duly chaperoned) reveals that the unseasonably cool August morning has necessitated her "rocking tights" under her little black dress. A giggling lech at a film poster on the stairwell elicits a confession that she’s got a bit of a thing for the French actor Romain Duris.

In the designated interview parlour, Arterton roots around and plugs in her fractious mobile. "Bloody thing. I hate it." In the old days, her accent — embellished with some world-class swearing — would be described as Mayfair cockney, the sloane girl slumming it, though in fact it’s quite the reverse. "Welcome to my office," she trumpets, her laugh — a frequent punctuation — laced with something of a saucy crack. Across the room is one of those screens, the kind that buxom bordello girls fling their corsets over in westerns.

Last night, she says, she was at some dinner, enjoying an evening incognito, when "this drunken toff" browbeat her into dancing with him, twirling her round the restaurant. "There wasn’t even a dancefloor. I was mortified." Armed with an industrial-sized black coffee and glass of water, she seizes the psychological advantage of a higher chair and back to the window. We are up and running.

'Welcome to my office,' she trumpets, her laugh laced with something of a saucy crack

These are exciting times for Arterton. Still only 24, she is the new It girl of British cinema, a position she is about to cement with the title role in Tamara Drewe, a sort of dark, rural bedroom farce, based on the Posy Simmonds comic strip. This year alone, not three summers out of Rada, Arterton has headlined two megabudget blockbusters, Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia, flouncing around as a brace of feisty muse/princesses. Squeezed in between has come the taut British kidnap thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed, and a West End play, The Little Dog Laughed, not to mention the personal landmark of marriage — to a chap named Stefano Catelli, who works in fashion distribution. She’s not long back from honeymoon. "I don’t know how we managed to do it."

Tamara Drewe, like a sexed-up version of The Archers, should raise Arterton’s profile further. Directed by Stephen Frears, best known of late for The Queen, the film was a hit at Cannes. Loosely inspired by Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, it features Arterton as Wessex’s returning native, the local squiress who left for the smoke, reinvented herself as a successful journalist (albeit at The Independent) and has come back, sleekly refined after a nose job, to stoke the ardour of the yokels. They include the local handyman (Luke Evans), the resident author (Roger Allam) and an interloping rock drummer (Dominic Cooper). The ensemble includes the put-upon hostess of a writers’ retreat, Tamsin Greig, who lends her voice to the actual Archers, as Debbie Aldridge.

It’s the closest role to me, I suppose, that I’ve played. It looks like me. She’s a modern girl," Arterton says. "Sort of charming, quite witty and snide remarks, and stuff. That’s quite me. There’s a really great line where she says, ‘Before I had the nose job, I had no problem being taken seriously. Maybe when they removed that cartilage, they pulled out my brain by mistake.’ I am always saying stuff like that. Don’t assume that because you think this, I can’t do this."

Indeed. Despite Arterton’s earnest attempts to offset the commercial gloss with artistic cred, the popular press is still having difficulty digesting her, no doubt discombobulated by her appearance as a raunchy head girl in the St Trinian’s films. Despite broadsheet enthusiasm for Tamara Drewe, tabloid attention has focused on the fact that, in it, she sports a pair of slice-me-in-two denim cut-offs. "I have been known to wear shorts, but certainly not like those ones."

A few days before our interview, The Sun had celebrated the DVD release of The Disappearance of Alice Creed, a film in which Arterton appears half-naked and brutalised, with a snapshot of her breasts, beneath the banner "No bra-terton for nude Gemma". Arterton acknowledges that if she appears topless in a film, inevitably such images are going to enter the public domain. "I’m not an idiot." She suggests, with considerable colour, that if such things facilitate auto-relief for the brotherhood of Onan, then such is life. "You just have to deal with it and move on," she huffs. "I don’t even read that shit."

It’s the closest role to me, I suppose, that I’ve played. It looks like me. She’s a modern girl. Sort of charming, quite witty and snide remarks

Neither does Frears, apparently. The famous curmudgeon had been blissfully unaware of Arterton’s existence and so cast her as Tamara Drewe purely on merit. "Which I was grateful for. He’s a very instinctive man," she says. He also described Arterton recently as "so curvy... like a sort of line drawing in her own way". Might want to keep that to himself. Arterton and Hardy are inextricably linked, permanently inked. Behind the actress’s left ear is a tattoo of an angel wing, a souvenir from her breakthrough TV role, as Tess of the D’Urbervilles, for the BBC. "And I have this ring, as well, which they bought me." She flashes a clunky silver band on her right hand, which counterbalances the diamond sparkler on her left. "I had an amazing time on that job. The people I met on it changed my life." Tess was twinned with another frocksy heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, in the ITV’s amusing time-travel romp Lost in Austen.

Throw in roles in films such as Stephen Poliakoff’s Capturing Mary, Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla and Richard Curtis’s The Boat That Rocked and you have a remarkable entrée for any actor’s career. But then came Bond, James Bond. "I still feel like it’s not real. I don’t feel like it’s me in that film," she reflects. "When I left drama school, I didn’t really know what to expect or what I wanted. I just wanted to work."

Arterton’s background has been trotted out quite a bit. She grew up on a Gravesend council estate to divorced parents, her father a metal worker, her mother a cleaner. She supports Charlton Athletic. Rarely does an interview fail to mention her little physical idiosyncrasy. "The fingers," she anticipates. She was born with the rare genetic condition of having six fingers on each hand (until they excised the boneless appendages). "People are fascinated by it, which I understand. I’m proud of them, because it’s my little oddity. It’s my personal thing… It’s also a sign of wisdom." Not north Kent insularity? She laughs.

At school, Miss Spitfire put her extant digits to good use, playing guitar and singing in punk bands. "Tourniquet. And a band before that, Violent Pink, when I was 12. We were angsty girl punks. I think that’s my thing. I am a punk-rock star underneath that’s dying to come out." It was on viewing Lars von Trier’s film Dancer in the Dark that she came to believe acting might be her calling. "I was 17. I was a huge Björk fan. Still am. Before that, I was only watching blockbusters, and then I saw this film. It had singing and dancing, but it also had a f***ing journey." The local theatre group followed.

Though Arterton is the first one in her immediate family to have made it in the arts, there is a musical streak running through the distaff side. Her younger sister, Hannah, currently also at Rada, is a songwriter with a record deal. Eric Goulden, a cousin of her mother’s, is better known as the influential 1970s new-waver Wreckless Eric. Lately, a bit of genealogical digging revealed a German-Jewish great-grandmother who was a concert violinist.

Arterton claims not to be in awe of the business. Her husband has nothing to do with the film world. "It’s great, because I go home and we don’t talk about acting. Why would I want to talk about acting? That’s my job. Even though I’m very passionate about it, not everybody wants to listen to me bang on about it all day. I’d much rather talk about our dog and how many times a day she went to the toilet, which is what we do." (For the record, an apparently lax shar pei.)

She said the scales fell from her eyes after watching the first St Trinian’s film at her local flea pit. "You can hear people going, ‘This is f***ing shit, this is not even funny.’" As such, it’s since been the work rather than what ends up on screen that has become the chief interest. "I sort of have a clearer idea of what I want, and, yeah, I do want to do more theatre and the smaller films, because I enjoy the process a lot more. It’s the only thing that interests me. I’m not that bothered about the finished product."

Before, I was only watching blockbusters, and then I saw Dancer In The Dark...

It was fun making Tamara Drewe, she says, and has a grumble about the winding-up of the UK Film Council, which had helped fund it. "Having now made some Hollywood movies, big-budget movies, you realise that shitloads of money gets made making crap." She cites the difficulty in financing a film called The Keys to the Street (from the Ruth Rendell book), in which she has just been cast, a thriller written by Christopher Nolan (Inception). The script has been on the shelf for eight years. "You think, ‘Why on earth has this film been sitting around?’" Such ready dismissal of studio films can sail mighty close to blasé. She’s not done too badly. "Ridley Scott saw Alice Creed and loved it," she continues. "He wants me to meet for Aliens: The Remake, or something."

There is also a British cowboy film, In with the Outlaws, with Richard E Grant in the offing. More immediately, a sequel to Clash of the Titans seems on the cards. One may yet follow for Prince of Persia. In which case, what better hair shirt to put on first than a play by Ibsen? Arterton starts rehearsals in October for the role of Hilde in The Master Builder, opposite Stephen Dillane. "It’s going to be the most challenging thing I’ve ever done — very complex, so dark, so complicated and very deep, full of imagery and metaphor. It’s a classic, so I feel I have an obligation to play it particularly well.

"Somebody told me I was born to play that role," she sniggers. "She’s an absolute devil."

Tamara Drewe opens on Friday

Pretty funny

Isla Fisher — or Mrs Borat to the rest of the world — has moved on from anorexic lesbians and girlfriend roles to become a real force in comedy

Jeff Dawson

Published: 17 October 2010, Sunday Times

The late Georgian period had some curious costumes: teetering, Cat-in-the-Hat stovepipe titfers for the men; female cleavages so ridiculously exposed, it’s little wonder the era’s literary heroines had a tendency to succumb to pneumonia. So uplifting is the grey ballgown sported by Isla Fisher, it enforces nervous and vigilant adherence to that unwritten rule observed in communal Scandinavian saunas (and on the shop floor of “art” films) — eye contact at all times.

It’s a February day in the grounds of Osterley House, in west London, and snow flurries swirl. Prudently, once her scene is in the bag, Fisher is bundled up in a parka and hastened away. Film sets are never as glamorous as you would imagine. Burke & Hare is no exception. She apologises for her trailer ponging of chicken tikka masala, her earlier lunch. “Sorry, it’s a bit smelly.” I’ve just been sitting on the crew bus, I say. This is nothing. Petite and beautiful, her red ringlets topped with an ostrich feather, Fisher performs the incongruous manoeuvre of sliding her elegant habillement between a Formica-topped caravan table and what Alan Partridge would call “the old bonkette”. Her character, Ginny, is a bit more exotic than the other wretches still shivering out there. “A showgirl with a past,” as she puts it, “whose dream has been to put on an all-female production of Macbeth, which in itself is funny.”

Even though I’d studied comedy, I didn’t know I could do it for a living. It felt like too much fun

As the romantic interest of William Burke, Ginny remains oblivious to the plot’s goings-on. “It keeps their love story kind of pure and gives the movie a different feeling from when he’s with Hare, committing these heinous crimes.” Heinous crimes indeed.

The film is based on the story of the infamous rippers of 1820s Edinburgh, who slaughtered at least 17 innocents in their under-the-counter business of supplying cadavers to the esteemed anatomist Dr Robert Knox. Apprehended in 1828, Burke was hanged and dismembered; Hare was granted immunity from prosecution for his testimony against his partner. (Knox got off free.)

Starring Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis as the titular duo, the film is hardly a docudrama — “less gruesome, more comedic”, as Fisher puts it. “I mean, there are some images of things that seem extreme, but they are shot from a funny angle, or the body’s bent in an amusing way.” It’s been made by John Landis — the American director of Animal House, The Blues Brothers and, most pertinently, for its tragicomic mix and British setting, An American Werewolf in London — so you know where the sensibilities lie. With a cast including Tom Wilkinson (as Knox), Tim Curry, Ronnie Corbett, Christopher Lee, Jenny Agutter and Jessica Hynes, much is expected of the £8m production, an output of the resurrected Ealing Studios.

These are interesting times for Fisher, who in recent years has notched up lead roles in Wedding Daze, Definitely, Maybe and, memorably, Wedding Crashers, playing Vince Vaughn’s bipolar nymphomaniac seductress, a “stage five clinger”. She was last seen as the star of The Confessions of a Shopaholic, an ode to spending that had the spectacular misfortune to be released just as real-life credit began crunching — “a cautionary tale”, is her reassessment. Such movies have enabled the 34-year-old to claim her seat at female comedy’s top table, a procedure conducted with no small degree of stealth.

“I didn’t know she was Australian,” shrugs Landis, just one of many in the film business to have been flat-footed by her advance. “I had only seen her in Wedding Crashers and Shopaholic, then I meet her and it’s ‘shrimp on the barbie’.” Despite the accent and the argot, she’s not quite all that, either. Though she grew up in Perth, Fisher was born in Oman, to Scottish parents living in the Middle East. Then there is her other half, one Sacha Baron Cohen, whom she met at a party in Sydney in 2002: the reason, you suspect, for much of the secrecy. As all of Fisher’s films have been American, and with Baron Cohen currently the toast of Hollywood, I had assumed that the couple lived over there, but not so. “We rent a house in LA because of work, really, but our house where our furniture is is in London,” she says. You get the sense that you are straying into forbidden territory. And once you venture whether having a family together (at the time of filming, a two-year-old named Olive) has limited Fisher’s ability to take roles in recent months — perhaps the reason she’s doing a British film? — the shutters are politely closed.

In an era when celebrity lives are hawked ad nauseam, this seems exceptionally refreshing. Professionally, too, it must get tiresome to be constantly linked with another performer. When Fisher was on the David Letterman show, and was introduced as being “engaged to Borat”, you could sense her grinning and bearing it. So, let’s try this. How is it with two comics in the house? Are they constantly trying to outdo each other? “No, but I definitely can’t help myself from trying out new characters on Sacha,” she discloses. “I think in all relationships, particularly if you’re in the same field, you end up bringing work home with you. At the same time, you never want your relationship to be just about work.”

It was he who encouraged her to become a funnywoman, it turns out. “Even though I’d studied comedy, I didn’t know I could do it for a living. It felt like too much fun.” Glad to hear he’s not all maudlin and Jim Carrey away from the spotlight’s glare. “Oh, God, I couldn’t live with one of those,” she chuckles. “No, Sacha’s the funniest man I know, and that’s on and off camera.”

Fisher actually started out as an author. As a teenager, she penned a couple of novels, Seduced by Fame and Bewitched, abetted by her writer mother, Elspeth Reid. On choosing to act, like any Aussie aspirant she served her apprenticeship in the beachside soaps, most notably as Home and Away’s Shannon Reed (a sexually abused, anorexic lesbian). Thus followed her previous spell working in Britain — panto in Tunbridge Wells and the stage musical Summer Holiday, alongside Darren Day.

In 1997, she quit telly altogether — “When you’re acting in television, you’re acting from the neck up. I really wanted to develop my — inverted commas — ‘craft’, without sounding pretentious.” She enrolled in the Parisian school of the late mime artist Jacques Lecoq. She jokes about there being “not much call for ‘the wall’” in any of her films, but physicality has been integral. A supporting role in the first Scooby Doo film (an American production shot in Australia) got her an American agent — “All that acting alongside an animated dog paid off” — and she’s been up and running 
ever since.

I’ve actually been working on a movie idea my husband came up with, a character for me

It’s still a struggle, though. “After I did Wedding Crashers, I felt really optimistic about my future, but there weren’t the opportunities I’d imagined to follow such a big commercial movie.

"The roles offered were to play the girlfriend of another comedian. They would get to do the joke, and you’d roll your eyes. I was a little disillusioned and ultimately grew more and more frustrated.”

Plus, she says, she keeps running up against the not dissimilar Amy Adams. “We both went for Catch Me If You Can, and she got it. We both went for Wedding Daze, and I got it. Then we both went for this movie Tourists — and we both didn’t get it.”

Inspired, she says, by the new wave of female comics — Tina Fey and her Saturday Night Live sidekick Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig and Chelsea Handler — Fisher reels off a number of projects she has been proactively developing. There’s Desperadoes, “a female Hangover, quite puerile”, another called Life Coach (about a life coach) and one with Poehler, called Groupies: “The story of two overconfident dum-dums, the king turds of turd mountain. They follow this terrible Christian rock band... Er, I didn’t pitch it 
very well.”

I’m still trying to get my head round “king turds of turd mountain”. She laughs. And, as she does so, the trailer door is flung open, yielding an Arctic blast and a chap with a walkie-talkie asking if Fisher could get her parka back on. As she leaves, she turns back. She’s a bit concerned about the Amy Adams comment. They’re good friends, not rivals. And so it shall be reported.

Seven months later, Fisher is on the phone. The first interview, she had joked, was “foreplay”. She’s somewhat tardy in her call, and the conversation is chorused by text messages from frantic publicists checking if we’ve made contact, and a dash by Fisher to attend to her daughter. “The wonders of Lego,” she sighs. Except if you tread on it with bare feet, I say. The cloak of mystery still hangs heavily. It turns out — or maybe it doesn’t — that Fisher has since had another child... which would have accounted for the bosomy thing. Yet in the press, not even her agent or publicist has been able to confirm this child’s existence, let alone its gender or name. “You know what, I’m actually not going to discuss my personal life,” she repeats, adding a mischievous chortle. It had been reported that she and Baron Cohen got married in March in a private ceremony in Paris, following Fisher’s conversion to Judaism. Or maybe they didn’t. Baron Cohen is now referred to as “husband”, anyway.

They are definitely still in London. “We’ve been here now for a good two months, and we’re here for another two because Sacha’s doing a Martin Scorsese movie,” she enthuses. (The children’s film Hugo Cabret, currently being shot over here by the old maestro.) “That’s my namedrop for the interview, by the way, which is very exciting. So he’s out at... oh, God, it’s not Pinewood, what’s the other one? Not Ealing...” Shepperton. “Yeah, Shepperton, great. So I’m just here with the family, and it’s been a beautiful summer in London. It’s been very nice.”

She hasn’t yet seen the finished Burke & Hare, but there’s been voice work with Johnny Depp on the animation Rango. Meanwhile, she’s been “working at home”, pushing those pet projects, pitching stuff to the studios via Skype. Sadly, Groupies, the “king turds of turd mountain” one, has been shelved, but there’s a new one to add. “I’ve actually been working on a movie idea my husband came up with, a character for me, which I do around the house.” Great, what’s it called? “I don’t know if I should say.” Oh, Lord.

Fisher has been energised by wearing “the developmental hat” — producing, writing stuff. “Things move a lot slower. It’s definitely more frustrating than being an actor for hire, but it’s a lot more exciting, creating what you’re going to play, thinking about what you do best, what your shtick is.” Comedy, as a trade, should never be underestimated, she insists: “I can sit through a bad dramatic movie and still be engaged, but I can’t sit through a bad comedy, people trying to be funny when they’re not. It has to work.”

Burke & Hare opens on October 29

The truth about Essex girls

A 1968 strike by women workers at Ford has inspired the latest British feelgood film. But how far has fiction strayed from fact?

Jeff Dawson

Published: 26 September 2010, Sunday Times

If you think the rumblings at the recent TUC conference were ominous, take a glance back to 1968. That April, when Barbara Castle became secretary of state for employment and productivity, she was faced with a nation where industry had been crippled by more than 2,000 strikes and 4m lost working days in the previous 12 months. On June 7, when news of a walkout by the 187 female machinists at Ford’s giant Dagenham plant reached Castle’s desk, it was merely another ritual down-tooling, a speck on a broader political landscape that was to feature anti-Vietnam protests, Paris aflame and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

“I once again stressed the useless damage to exports which is going on,” she tut-tutted in her diary, adding a gripe about the “commies” within the union rank and file. For Castle, a de facto one-woman conciliation service, Ford Dagenham was a pain: near-perpetual industrial unrest, with 15 unions locked in internecine bickering, an embarrassment to its American owners.

Castle continued to downplay the machinists’ dispute over the years, according it only two pages in her 1993 autobiography, Fighting All the Way. Yet, four decades on, it is hailed as a watershed moment for women. “I don’t think Barbara understood 1970s feminism,” says Anne Perkins, author of Red Queen, Castle’s official biography. “She came from that generation that saw single-issue politics as deeply damaging to the wider objective.”

The Dagenham women’s complaint appeared routine. The machinists, who made seat covers for Cortinas and Zephyrs, had balked at their downgrading from “semi-skilled” to “unskilled” status. An unpicking of the grievance, however, revealed a greater, universal injustice — that women doing the same job as men were being paid less for it (15% less at Dagenham). It heralded the Equal Pay Act of 1970, a piece of legislation that, in theory, prohibited disparity.

This week sees the release of a feature film about these events, Made in Dagenham. Formerly titled We Want Sex (thanks to a heavily publicised banner proclaiming “We want sex equality”, which remained partially unfurled), the film has been getting good buzz, not least for Sally Hawkins as Rita O’Grady, a working mum who reluctantly becomes the ladies’ champion. In 2003, the producer Stephen Woolley and the screenwriter William Ivory both heard a Radio 4 programme about the strike. “Stephen got in touch and said, ‘Do you think there might be a film in this?’” says Ivory, whose credits include Faith, a TV drama about Nottinghamshire women during the 1984 miners’ strike. “I’ve always had that interest — strong women and industrial disputes.”

Despite the voyage through Rita’s life — still scuttling home, amid the crisis, to make her husband’s tea — it is Castle who steals the show

Directed by Nigel Cole, who made Calendar Girls, and with a cast including Bob Hoskins, Miranda Richardson, Andrea Riseborough, Jaime Winstone, Rupert Graves, Geraldine James and Rosamund Pike, the movie certainly fits into the feelgood canon of modern kitchen-sinkers such as The Full Monty, Brassed Off and Billy Elliot: not quite gritty social realism.

“It would be interesting, a Ken Loach take on it. Nothing wrong with that,” Ivory chuckles.

“From my point of view, I became interested in the parallel to be drawn between these working-class women, the way they were dealt with in the workplace, and Barbara Castle in parliament, a working-class woman moving in much higher circles.”

Castle, who would have turned 100 next month, would doubtless have been chuffed at her alignment with the proletariat. But then this reclassification of a woman who was an Oxford graduate and daughter of a tax inspector certainly fits the mythology.

Most significantly, there was no Rita O’Grady. Like all the Dagenham women in the film, she is a fictitious amalgam of the real-life protagonists, including the strike leader Rose Boland, since passed away, who was actually something of a militant (“a formidable ringleader”, Castle recorded). Most of this can be forgiven for dramatic licence. “I wanted the political story to be refracted through the women’s personal lives,” Ivory admits. “I couldn’t really go to real people then, because I’d have to be making stuff up.”

Despite the voyage through Rita’s life — still scuttling home, amid the crisis, to make her unemployed husband’s tea — it is Castle who steals the show. Quite what the flame-haired firebrand would have made of such stardom, one can only guess. “I think she would have absolutely loved it,” Perkins says. But there she is, embodied by Miranda Richardson, an unlikely va-va-voom vision in figure-hugging twinset, bossing about a bumbling Harold Wilson (John Sessions), dressing down her male underlings and basking in the glow of victory as she escorts the triumphant Dagenham ladies to meet the press (while simultaneously exchanging fashion tips).

At the film’s climax — a showdown with the strikers at her departmental offices — once the doors are closed, Castle saucily whips out the whisky, making the delegation more pliable in settling on a pay rate worth 92% of the men’s. “I regret there was a tiny bit in the film we took out,” Richardson says. “Her equivalent of rolling her sleeves up was that she’d take off her shoes and pad about the office. It’s a wonderful thing, rather like a lioness walking up and down the cage. Neither did we see her smoking. She smoked like a trooper.”

We then see Castle and the ladies emerge for a triumphant photo call. If we’re being pedantic, this photo call actually took place before the meeting — “In case the talks went sour on us afterwards,” Castle noted shrewdly. The bit about the Scotch is true, though. It proved more influential than the “big mumsy teapot” (as Perkins writes) that Castle had set on the table initially. “I’m almost certain she gave them some cash as well, a tenner,” Perkins adds. “I got that story from her number two, Conrad Heron. He said he couldn’t believe it when he saw the minister get out her purse and give the strikers money.”

Part of being in politics is your armour. Take a breath. It’s never too late. Put on lipstick. Face the world.

As for sexing her up? “Barbara was immensely proud of her figure,” Perkins says, pointing to a woman who had, in her time, had some high-profile relationships. Even Michael Foot, much to Castle’s annoyance, once claimed that they had enjoyed a tryst, in their younger days, in front of the gas fire.

“I suspect Barbara was actually quite a lot faster than she liked to remember,” Perkins says. “I think she had a lot of flings.” Using her femininity was a means for a lone woman to cut through the macho, patronising world of Westminster and the unions, Perkins believes.

“It was a legitimate weapon, the equivalent of going for a beer and a fag with the blokes.”

Hazel Blears, the former Home Office minister — who, as a “Blair babe”, belongs to a group that benefited most obviously from Castle’s legacy — chauffeured her as a young party activist. She spent much of her time contending with her mistress’s habitual tardiness, it would appear. Castle was someone who refused to emerge from the ladies in anything less than full rig. “She said to me, ‘I will give you one piece of advice that will stand you in good stead throughout your political career.’ Which was, ‘It’s never too late to put on your lipstick.’ It’s a serious point as well. Part of being in politics is your armour. Take a breath. It’s never too late. Put on your lipstick. Go out and face the world.”

Castle received the inevitable soft focus from the obituarists on her death in 2002 — the former MP for Blackburn became the “best woman prime minister we never had”, a tireless champion of the oppressed, a trailblazer for women in politics who had beaten the path for the likes of Margaret Thatcher. “She was very radical and very abrasive,” Perkins says. “She did make plenty of enemies. Even her friends found her quite testy. I’m afraid you can’t be focused on making people like you if you want to get things done.” Certainly, government in the late 1960s was no place for the thin-skinned: Wilson once concluded a press conference with the unthinkable remark that “Barbara had to go and get her hair done”.

Within 10 months of the Dagenham dispute, Castle had produced a white paper, In Place of Strife, designed to improve industrial relations, but regarded as a betrayal by union hardliners. Labour lost the 1970 election. Back in power in 1974, Castle’s turn in cabinet was brief, as Wilson gave way to Callaghan, her bête noire, who duly sacked her. She was last seen as a conference grandee, harrumphing about the transition to new Labour. One of the film’s aspects, Ivory says, is that you can see Labour “just storing up trouble for themselves, the winter of discontent and all that kind of stuff”.

Ivory acknowledges that he had to “squeeze” the sense that the Dagenham strike was an immediately “epoch-making moment”, rather than, in reality, “part of an ongoing battle”. Eileen Pullan, now 81, one of the surviving 1968 strikers who stood outside the ministry that day, didn’t feel much of a sense of history either. “At the moment, no, we didn’t,” she recalls. “We were fighting for ourselves. Nobody — well, I didn’t think, ‘Today it’d happen like this.’”

It took a further 16 years, in fact, for the Dagenham machinists to attain employment regrading. By the time of the Equal Pay Act’s royal assent in December 1975, many had lost their jobs as Ford opted for moulded coverings. In 2002, the plant, which at its peak employed 24,000 people and by then had produced nearly 11m vehicles, ceased car assembly to concentrate on manufacturing engines; part of the site is now given over to a wind farm. Nationally, claims of unequal pay continue.

Castle knew this was no magic bullet. As she concluded: “The Ford women’s dispute entered into trade union hagiology.”

Made in Dagenham opens on Friday

Back in the spotlight

After years as a gossip-mag staple and Hollywood joke, Ben Affleck is suddenly a hot director who’s delivering on his early promise

Jeff Dawson

Published: 19 September 2010, Sunday Times

Getting snarled in the Paris traffic might not be good for the temperament, but the honking gridlock — courtesy of the mass protest against President Sarkozy’s pension reforms — affords ample time to peruse the billboards. Posters for Ben Affleck’s new movie, The Town, have been plastered liberally and fraternally. Having your heist flick likened to Michael Mann’s seminal movie Heat is a ringing endorsement, especially in a land where old-school cops and robbers — from Rififi to Ronin and, more recently, Mesrine — prove immensely popular.

“High praise, excessive praise,” gushes Affleck, flopped on a chaise longue, elbow on armrest, head propped on hand. “Heat is the gold standard for a movie like this.”

During the research, he explains, he quizzed numerous jailbirds, who all cited Heat as their inspiration for a life of crime. Back on the outside, he found that FBI agents also worshipped the film. “I started to feel I was under the shadow of this movie. In the end, I thought, ‘Oh well, you just give in to it.’”

“Ben Affleck” and “Heat”. Not so very long ago, those words would have conjured up trash-mag splurges and long-lens pap snaps of a gurning beefcake — the wooden flyboy of Pearl Harbor — patting the bikinied and ample booty of J-Lo on some yacht.

But that was then... When, in 2007, Affleck reinvented himself as an assured director with his child-abduction thriller Gone Baby Gone — a release he delayed in this country because of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance — the “comeback” banners were unfurled.

Dressed in blue check shirt, charcoal pinstripe jacket, jeans and black chelsea boots, the tanned and stubbled 38-year-old endures as the most casual and affable of Hollywood A-listers. At 6ft 2in, he lollops into the hotel suite, thrusts out a palm and is immediately into the badinage, the only smudge on this illusion of mateyness coming with discussion as to whether those revolting locals are going to scupper the chances of catching his private plane to Venice (where he’s due at the film festival). “There hasn’t been a reasonably big strike in the US for a long time,” he muses, almost wistfully. “It just doesn’t happen any more.”

On Gone Baby Gone, Affleck delegated the acting duties to his brother, Casey. With The Town, he both helms and stars. “I knew, for the first movie, it would be way too much to try to act and direct,” he says. “I was intimidated. But I loved directing. I wasn’t sure what would happen — would it be a disaster? Would I hate it? — but it was really satisfying.”

The stakes were higher this time round. “I mean, it was huge leaps in terms of doing car chases and action stuff. And acting in it was another big step... But,” he shrugs, “no risk, no reward.”

I was intimidated. I wasn’t sure what would happen — would it be a disaster?

Ben Affleck

Set in his home city, Boston, Affleck’s heist flick concerns a gang of masked, armed larcenists from the neighbourhood of Charlestown — the titular “Town”. Affleck is Doug MacRay, the comparatively smart one, keen to escape his lot. Jeremy Renner, from The Hurt Locker, plays the loose cannon, Joe Pesci of a best bud, questioning MacRay’s loyalty — especially once MacRay gets it on with Claire (Rebecca Hall), the bank teller they kidnapped briefly, and who remains unwitting as to her beau’s true identity. With John Hamm (Mad Men) as the FBI heavy and Blake Lively (Gossip Girl) deglammed as a crack “ho”, Affleck has certainly pulled in the names (Chris Cooper and Pete Postlethwaite also crop up).

The film doesn’t do much for the image of the real Charlestown — here all 24-hour barflies, “Fightin’ Irish” tattoos and Celtic omerta — which is granted an apology in the end credits. “Its not an apology, it’s a qualifier,” Affleck laughs. “I realised the PR was geared to painting this place as a den of crooks and thieves, but there are people in Charlestown who are not that.” His main concern, he says, is that “this movie, Good Will Hunting and Gone Baby Gone all have an embarrassingly similar set of circumstances and themes. It’s obviously stuff I’ve been interested in since the early 1990s... This question about how shaped we are by our environment... about children who pay for the sins of their parents”.

And all played out in that cartoonishly flat dialect (immigrant Irish bludgeoned with a shillelagh) that makes everyone sound as if they’re in The Flintstones. “Ha, I know what you mean.”

Thematically, Affleck could throw in another couple of Beantown hardboilers — Mystic River, written by Gone Baby Gone’s author, Dennis Lehane, and The Departed (starring Affleck’s mucker Matt Damon), whose producer, Graham King, performs the same function on The Town. Yet Affleck shouldn’t be too hard on himself. He’s simply sticking to a landscape he knows: “It’s a lot easier to tell a story when you have an innate understanding of the world.” Although he never actually knew any bank robbers, he insists.

Like Gone Baby Gone, The Town has been hailed as a “mature” piece of work. This, in its own way, is a case of praising with faint damn, isn’t it? The implication being that our expectation would be for something quite the opposite? Affleck likes this, chortling away. “This callow fellow, likely to make some frivolous nonsense,” he mocks. “Look, I’m happy to accept any praise, damned, faint or otherwise. I know there’s not much of a connection, in others that I’ve seen, between the artist and the man, the person and the creative product.”

The popular legend goes like this. Part One: Affleck and Damon, childhood pals, decamp to Tinseltown to try to make it as actors. Thus follows Good Will Hunting, an attempt to script a piece that they can star in, which yields an unlikely screenwriting Oscar and, for Affleck, dates with the fragrant Gwyneth Paltrow.

Part Two sees Affleck eschew the serious roles that Damon craves to become a sort of alternative Keanu Reeves, in films such as Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and Daredevil — a playboy era that includes a stint in rehab and that ill-blinged romance with Lopez. Their film Gigli is oft mentioned as the worst ever made — though it may not even be the poorest Affleck offering, that distinction going, possibly, to Jersey Girl or to the horrible Smokin’ Aces. In a sideline venture, Affleck became the 2004 California State Poker Champion, but, career-wise, he’d cashed in his chips.

In Part Three, Affleck settles down with the wholesome Jennifer Garner and produces a couple of kids, an overture to the revival. The 2006 film Hollywoodland, with Affleck as the 1950s TV Superman, George Reeves, a credible lummox of unfulfilled potential, gets raves, a role he caps with both Gone Baby Gone and a lauded turn as a Slick Willie politician in State of Play.

“You know, the entertainment press wants to construct easily digestible narratives, and you’ve just given me one,” he ponders. “There’s obviously truth to it. There’s definitely movies that I’m proud of and movies that I’m not proud of, and they’ve tended to sort of clump together.

I’ve had movies that I didn’t love that made money, and movies that I love that didn’t make money

I don’t think they have any relation to what happened in my personal life, although one’s personal life really informs a perception of someone’s work, which is why it’s really good to try to be exposed as little as possible.”

Affleck has still not got rid of the stiff hunk thing, though. Shows such as South Park and Saturday Night Live have popped at him with impunity. “I’ve certainly made plenty of jokes myself,” he says. “It would kind of be hypocritical of me to get too sensitive about it.” Let’s cheer him up. Did he know that he was voted the No 1 ideal man by women attending American sperm-donor clinics? “That’s horrible,” he splutters. “Tell them to stop!”

Perhaps overlooked in all this deconstruction is that for both Gone Baby Gone and The Town, Affleck has co-written the screenplay (adapted in the latter instance from The Prince of Thieves, a book by Chuck Hogan). Some in the screenwriting fraternity had been suspicious of that Academy Award, alleging that Affleck and Damon were a filmic Milli Vanilli, a saleable duo bearding for some behind-the-scenes maestro, surely evident in the fact that they were unable to produce a follow-up. “There was definitely a kind of blowback,” Affleck admits. “But I guess that’s to be expected. We were interested in acting and, all of a sudden, we had acting opportunities. And acting, when you’re doing one after the other like that, takes a lot of time. It’s difficult to write. I stated writing again with the Gone Baby Gone screenplay in 2000, maybe 2001. It just took a long time to get it made.”

Gone Baby Gone has its flaws. So does The Town. As with any action flick, you just know that it’s going to descend into people yelling “Stay the f*** down” and loosing off more rounds than in the assault on Monte Cassino (or, in this case, Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox). Affleck’s character, too, must come over as heroic despite committing some pretty horrendous acts. He concedes that it’s a “big ask” to root for him. “But I never liked movies where you have a protagonist who’s a criminal, but we soften his edges so the audience can like him. I wanted him to participate fully in what they [the gang] were doing. Otherwise it wouldn’t be about change, it wouldn’t be about redemption.”

Affleck must catch that Learjet, currently idling on the tarmac somewhere. There’s still enough time for him to scotch two rumours: one, that he’s about to reprise his Jack Ryan character from The Sum of All Fears, and two — mercifully and sensibly — that he will one day run for public office on the Democrat ticket. “Once I did ‘I’m f***ing Ben Affleck’ [a spoof gay song/video with the American talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel: 5m hits on YouTube], I pretty much ended my political career,” he smirks.

He’s shortly doing a film with Terrence Malick, which he can’t talk about, although it’s possibly set in Oklahoma and there may be some fishing involved. Another movie with Damon has been floated, but the problem these days, he says, is prising his pal away from ‘the great legends of cinema’. “I have to somehow squeeze in between people like the Coen Brothers and Clint Eastwood,” he says.

You know a film of Affleck’s I really liked? Extract, the Mike Judge comedy that came and went in the blink of an eye, in which he plays a stoner-dude barman. It’s also one of his faves. “I’ve had movies that I didn’t love that made a lot of money, and movies that I love that didn’t make a lot of money.

What I’m trying to do, and it’s really hard, but the goal is to bridge the two. Do something that works for an audience, but is interesting to me... But, you know, I’m still young, I keep trying...”

The thirties are the new twenties, they say. “The new teens,” he corrects. “Thirty-eight is the new 16.”

The Town is released on Friday

Forgive me if I start to Goldblum...

For someone who died last year, Jeff Goldblum can sure talk up a storm. He tells us about life, death and how his name became a verb

Jeff Dawson

Published: 27 June 2010, Sunday Times

Being upstaged is an occupational hazard for an actor. If it was rotten luck for Farrah Fawcett to meet her maker while the paramedics were jumping on Michael Jackson, then pity poor Jeff Goldblum, whose first death notices, that same day, were also slipping by unnoticed. Mercifully, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of his demise had been greatly exaggerated. The New Zealand climbing accident that had reportedly claimed him proved nothing but an online hoax. “My Mom, for instance, called up going, ‘You’re there!’” he recalls, affecting a relieved moan.

“It was disturbing and trippy. Some other friends called and said, ‘I just wanted to hear your voice.’ It was crazy. Is there any actor as convivial as Goldblum? The tallest working man in showbiz — at 6ft 4in, the Peter Crouch of his profession — saunters backstage at the Old Vic and is instantly being so nice and complimentary about you, his would-be interrogator (“Did you ever act?” he asks, the old devil. “Look at you. You look like a movie star”), that he’s got you in his pocket from the get-go. I had heard that this is part of the Meisner technique, the acting method in which Goldblum was schooled, through which one channels one’s performance by focusing upon the antagonist. Seems more a case of good old-fashioned buttering up. Soon we are “Jeffing” each other like old pals.

Dressed in white cheesecloth shirt and khaki trousers, Goldblum is in good nick: lean, lithe, sun-roasted to a walnut veneer. The thick, wavy hair, if perhaps a little hennaed, is tucked behind the ears, his brown eyes framed by a pair of horn-rimmed specs. At 57, he looks little different from the way he has appeared in any film in the past couple of decades.

Goldblum folds himself into a chair and pours a cup of green tea, which he carries in a flask. One is immediately concerned about spillage on his unforgiving outfit. The room is a strange one, largely unfurnished. It appears to be a shrine dedicated to Kevin Spacey, the walls decked with photos: stills from Spacey’s career; a snap of Spacey with Bill Clinton on Air Force One; a newspaper cutting of a young, hirsute Kev at a student demo. “You can’t beat it, right? Pretty delicious,” Goldblum enthuses. Turns out it is Spacey’s office. They just removed the desk.

During the mid-1990s Goldblum was just about the most bankable, and unlikely, star in the business

Two years ago, Goldblum and Spacey were a hit in the Old Vic’s production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. “Best times I’ve ever had,” he says. Now they are reunited, with Spacey as producer on their version of Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue. Goldblum stars with Mercedes Ruehl, playing Mel and Edna Edison, a Manhattan couple tipped over the edge by Mel’s unemployment, economic meltdown, a burglary and a summer garbage strike.

Directed by Terry Johnson, toting his recent Tony for La Cage aux folles, the play will occupy the Vaudeville theatre, the first time the Old Vic has put on something extramurally.

Goldblum loves Neil Simon: “I’m a big fan of The Odd Couple movie. I’m a big fan of The Sunshine Boys. He wrote the screenplay for one of my favourite movies in the 1970s, The Heartbreak Kid. Very funny.” The Prisoner of Second Avenue, which debuted in 1971, also became a film, with Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft. Given the current financial climate, though, the story is still timely. “Here’s a guy losing his job when New York was going through a tough recession, and here we are again, a lot of people worried about money,” Goldblum says, effortlessly easing into his verbal stride. “But I think it is larger. It’s also about his disenchantment with consumerism, materialism, capitalism, American Dreamism and its dark shadows...”

Goldblum in full flow is a wonder to behold. The full answer lasts 10 minutes. So verbose and stream-of-consciousness is he, you fear you might blow the whole allotted interview time on this one response alone, a meditation that veers from Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets to “corrupt and barren credos”, “the cosmic effect”, “the identification of self”, concluding with: “It’s like waking up and going, ‘Yah, Jeez.’

His answer brings to mind the verb that has been coined in the actor’s honour: “to Goldblum”, now rife on the internet, from a put-down delivered to a verbose character in the American television comedy Community Service. “Going on effusively, animatedly and maybe non sequiturly,” Goldblum defines it, proudly. His waxings, I add, sound not unlike the kind of thing his character in Jurassic Park, the chaos theorist Dr Ian Malcolm, would have uttered. He laughs, affecting the air of the hunted: “There’s a line that keeps coming back to me. Ian Malcolm says, ‘Life will find a way.’ I think that is dearly relevant.”

Good old Jurassic Park. During the mid-1990s, starring roles in this film, its sequel, The Lost World, and the alien-invasion blockbuster Independence Day made Goldblum just about the most bankable, and unlikely, star in the business. Strange, then, that this time last year, just as his life was flashing before our eyes, it was still pretty hard to pin a signature role on him. From studio smashes to humble independents, to walk-ons in sitcoms to his corporate work as the voice of Apple, Goldblum’s career has pinged all over the place. Most of it seems characterised by an ability simply to waltz in and steal whichever scenes he’s in. For the past two years, he has been starring as Detective Zach Nichols in the American TV series Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

“When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the idea of being an actor. I was passionate about it. That it came to pass at all — I knew it was a wild roll of the dice, without any logical thinking — and that I’ve continued to do it, very steadily, I feel luckier than ever,” he says. “Sanford Meisner, whose emphasis was on learning, says it takes 20 years of activity before you can call yourself an actor... and if you keep working after that, you can have a lifelong graduate experience. That’s been my context and my plan, if I had one.” He smiles. “I hit some interesting pinball points along the way, didn’t I?”

Everyone I know has their favourites — Goldblum’s cynical journalist in The Big Chill, maybe; a connoisseur’s choice, the crime lord (named, rather amusingly, David Jason) in the underrated Deep Cover; perhaps the molecular meddler in David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly, the film that got Goldblum pegged, for a while, as Hollywood’s resident wacky scientist. (Some boffin. In Independence Day, he destroyed the alien mothership by uploading a computer virus from his laptop, in the days when we were still on dial-up modems.)

You know what my favourite is, I say: The Tall Guy, written by Richard Curtis, the one that set the template for Four Weddings and everything thereafter. “Emma Thompson’s first movie. She’s a wonderful, wonderful person. Fantastic,” he coos. “And Rowan Atkinson is so funny. I love it to death.”

Goldblum was brought up in a middle-class Jewish household in Pittsburgh. His father, a doctor, and mother, later a radio announcer, had flirted with thespianism. “Both had curtailed, unrealised ambitions that may have come out in the wash to me.” One of four children (sadly, an older brother died in his twenties), Goldblum skipped university, noodled around as a lounge pianist (he is rated as a jazz man, performing regularly with his band, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra), then went to New York to learn his craft. Appearing off-Broadway, he was spotted by the eminent film director Robert Altman, who gave him small parts in California Split and Nashville.

Actually, the first official entry on Goldblum’s film resumé is... ahem... as a rapist in the Charles Bronson vigilante flick Death Wish (1974). He is billed, more kindly, as “Freak No 1”. “Yes, number one,” he emphasises. “Freak number one.” Should he ever get round to penning an autobiography, it would make a good title. He laughs. “Okay, if I come out with it, I’d better credit you with it. Freak No 1. Hahaha, that’s pretty good.” Has he kept in touch with Death Wish’s director, Michael Winner — nowadays a celebrity in his own right, a columnist for this very newspaper, Winner’s Dinners, “Calm down, dear” and all that? Word of such career diversions had yet to reach Goldblum. “Reeeeeally? I’ll be darned. Maybe I’ll give him a ticket.”

The first official entry on Goldblum’s film resumé is... ahem... as a rapist in Death Wish. He is billed as “Freak No 1"

By the mid-1970s, Goldblum was cruising through bit parts in Starsky & Hutch and Columbo. Famously, he bagged one line in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, as the party guest declaring on the phone: “I forgot my mantra.”

He soon became a favourite of the directors (and Spielberg collaborators) Philip Kaufman and Lawrence Kasdan, the former casting him in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Right Stuff, the latter in The Big Chill and Silverado. With The Fly, Goldblum had landed not only his first starring role, but a first taste of celebrity, by dint of his marriage to his co-star, Geena Davis. They earned themselves a distinguished place in movie history as one of Tinseltown’s tallest couples.

Goldbum certainly has form in this department. He was previously married to the Big Chill actress Patricia Gaul, and has had long-term relationships with Jurassic Park’s Laura Dern and Catherine Wreford (30 years his junior), who appeared alongside him in his home-town mockumentary, Pittsburgh.

He pours more green tea. I am still terribly worried about his trousers. I had heard that he is quite yogic, meditating at his Hollywood Hills home, having special macrobiotic food delivered daily. This is nonsense. He has a thing for sushi, but otherwise he is into sports, a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers American football team. He enjoys a regular workout. Are there personal career highlights? I know he’s proud of the film Adam Resurrected, a holocaust movie directed by Paul Schrader that never got a general release in Britain. “It’s all fleeting, it’s all going to be forgotten,” he ponders. “I’m getting better at enjoying it more than ever, so the more recent things feel good and memorable to me.”

He muses some more. “Goldbluming,” he quips. And reels off the names of the directors he says he’s been fortunate enough to work with — Spielberg, Schrader, Kaufman, Altman. “Even Woody Allen. That little bit I sort of cherish, because I’m a big fan of his. I watch his films over and over again.” He doesn’t keep photos or mementos, his only little indulgence being a folder containing a DVD of each of the films he’s made. “If there was a house fire, I doubt if I’d replace it. I wouldn’t mind paring myself down to a bowl and spoon and diaper of some kind.”

There are a couple of films out soon: The Switch, a romcom with Jennifer Aniston, and Morning Glory, a comedy about television news. Far more pressing, however, are the play rehearsals. He hasn’t been out much at all, he confesses, for fear of “taxing my zen-ergy or focus more than I need to”. But he’s loving it. He offers tickets, not only to me, but my “entire clan”, which is very nice.

Neil Simon is fond of quoting the actor Edmund Gwenn, who, on his deathbed, uttered an immortal showbiz zinger. “Dying is easy,” it goes. “Comedy is hard.” So glad Goldblum is still with us.

The Prisoner of Second Avenue previews at the Vaudeville, WC2, from Wednesday.

Exclusive Q&A on August 9th - see the show and stay for a talk with cast members Jeff Goldblum & Mercedes Ruehl. Tickets for performance and Q&A start at just £35.

Book at www.sundaytimestickets.co.uk or call 0844 412 2962