Film star Rachel Weisz (Trinity Hall 1987) made her name in Bertolucci
and has three new movies out
this year. But Cambridge was a bruising experience.
You flex different muscles in student theatre. There were urban myths in
Cambridge about
power-crazed directors saying 'Be a tomato' or 'Be a tennis ball'. They
did put you through the
wringer and subject you to more humiliating things than in the outside
world. But I guess this was
good preparation for the big wide world of acting. We were passionate about
it and imagined playing
on stages all over the place.
I did hardly any acting at school and I don't come from a theatrical family
- my father invents medical
equipment. But at Cambridge I felt certain from the start that my acting
was something to be
continued. I was one of the Saxon girls in the first student production
of The Romans in Britain. It's a
very violent play and there was a terrible hoo-ha about it. The author,
Howard Brenton, came to talk
to us and Mary Whitehouse sent some people down to the ADC and tried to
ban it.
I had a boyfriend right through my time at Cambridge, Ben Miller, who was
at one time president of
Footlights. I acted with him in Removal, a play by a friend of mine, David
Farr, who's now director of
the Gate Theatre. It was a very bad play but it was more pleasant acting
with Ben than with a
complete stranger. My worst performance was as the bride in Lorca's Blood
Wedding: so bad that my
parents suggested - only half joking - that I should think of some other
profession.
In my second term, four of us started our own theatre company, Cambridge
Talking Tongues. There
was another actress, Sacha Hails; David Farr was the director and Rose
Garnett the producer. We
devised six or seven plays with improvisations, writing and performing.
At the end, we didn't have
anything written down - it was all in our heads. David typed the results
out for me as a birthday
present. They weren't great text; they were plays about energy and performance.
But some of the
pieces did have beauty. They were two-handers and we went through the entire
gamut of what two
people could do on stage. It sounds pretentious, but I'd call them comic-tragic-absurd,
in the world of
Ionesco. They were very fast - French clowning technique and 100 mph dialogue
- and very physical.
We ended up covered with bruises.
In Slight Possession, the last of the plays, the third character was a
stepladder: we hurled each other
off it. I'm very proud of Slight Possession. We devised it in Cambridge
but didn't put it on there; we
took it to the Edinburgh Festival after Finals and won the Guardian Student
Drama Award. We then
did it at the Cottesloe in the National Theatre. It was somebody else's
set but that didn't matter; all
we had to do was climb on the stage and put up our stepladder.
For one of my new films, I Want You, the director, Michael Winterbottom,
made us do a lot of
improvisation like that. It's rather a dark film, set in Hastings, about
obsessive love. I also have lead
parts this year in Land Girls - which is a wartime comedy - and Swept from
the Sea, which is set in
Cornwall and based on Conrad's short story, 'Amy Foster'.
I read English and loved it. There are lots of lawyers at Trinity Hall
and law involves a great deal of
hard work, so they thought we English students had a very lazy time, lying
about and reading
Wordsworth. Cambridge English had turned away from Leavis by then, of course;
we were all into
deconstruction. My tutor was Peter Holland, who is now director of the
Shakespeare Centre at
Stratford. I was taught by Adrian Poole at Trinity in my third year, and
Tim Cribb at Churchill, a great
guy, for practical criticism.
I loved supervisions. It's the old cliche: a room with a crackling fire
in which clever men and women
argue with you - even if they agree - to test your powers of reasoning.
People say academics live in an
ivory tower. I say good for them!
At one time I was thinking of carrying on to do a doctorate. Undergraduate
dissertations are a very
good way of getting deeper into a subject. In my second year I did one
on Katherine Mansfield, and in
my third year I did two more: 'Haunted fiction: the pursuit and flight
of the self in Henry James', and
'The politics of space', on women writers in the Deep South. I've still
got them.
I managed a First for the dissertations and in my Finals was just two marks
off a First: my papers
were re-read, which is what they do if you're borderline. But I got a Third
on my Tragedy paper! It was
nerves. I didn't answer the question, just regurgitated an essay I'd written
before. By the last paper, I
realised what you had to do, even though it was the Novel paper and I'd
read hardly any novels.
Just three weeks before Finals, an ex-Cambridge impresario who had seen
a picture of me in the
Evening Standard said he wanted me to be in his film about Chekhov. He
wined me and dined me at
his London club and introduced me to film directors. He then said: 'You
might have to leave college
without taking Finals'. But I didn't ... and I don't believe the film ever
happened.
I had a place at drama school afterwards but at the last moment decided
not to go. I started to get
television jobs, which at the time seemed amazing but with hindsight were
junk. I had been in
full-time education since I was four. At twenty it was time to start work.
(c) CAM - Lent 1998
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