Anna-Louise Plowman looks radiant. Tall,
elegant and charming, she is a guest at the Wolf SG9 Convention, alongside Tony
Amendola, Carmen Argenziano, Erick Avari,
Alexis Cruz and others, receiving a rapturous welcome from enthusiastic fans.
In a break between appearances on stage, she chats to Carole Gordon about her
career, Trollope's take on the English/American divide and her latest project –
a role in the iconic British TV sci-fi show, Dr Who.
Anna-Louise, it turns out, is not a fan of Dr
Who -- and was even in the dark about the most famous alien race in
sci-fi history.
She says with a broad smile, "I had to
ask my agent what a Dalek was and she laughed. And then her explanation made me
feel like it was a rubbish bin!"
Born in New Zealand, she left at the age of
five and grew up in Hong Kong – one of the few places where Dr Who
wasn't broadcast.
"They had it on television in New
Zealand. I remember asking a friend of mine if she watched it, but she didn't,
because it was one of those weird English things. It always felt a bit scary,
so they didn't watch it."
Although Dr Who has a long
history, Anna-Louise's approach to the show was not as a retread of the past, but
as something completely new.
"It's all new storylines," she
says. "So it was quite good to approach it fresh. You are not trying to
recreate something – you are trying to create something new. Obviously there's
a new Doctor, and I think Chris Eccleston is going to be fantastic. He's an
amazing actor and I think he'll be a terrific Doctor."
In the episode “Dalek,” recently broadcast
on BBC1, Anna-Louise plays Diana Goddard, an assistant to the owner of an
unusual museum.
She explains the character she plays,
"An American, a kind of very prim, prissy, savvy lady. She's uptight and
efficient. It was a very fun part to play, I really loved it. I tied all my
hair back, very tight. I had a good time and I got to wear a great Dolce &
Gabbana suit!"
Anna-Louise is also remembered for her role
in Cambridge Spies, a drama based on the story of Burgess,
Philby, Maclean and Blunt, who were recruited to spy for the Soviet Union while
studying at Cambridge University in the 1950s. She was thrilled to be offered
the part of Melinda Maclean and is particularly proud of this project.
"I remember when I was offered the part
of Melinda Maclean, I was in LA at the time and I was screaming around the
hotel room, I was so excited. It was one of those parts that I had read and I
knew I really desperately wanted to play her," she recalls.
Her research of Melinda gave her an empathy
with the character which she feels helped her to understand the conflicts she
had gone through.
"It must have been incredibly difficult
for her to be married to a man who was so self-destructive and had to keep that
secret for that long. There are women who stay and there are women who leave. A
lot of women would have walked out of that marriage, but she stayed, because
she obviously believed in keeping the family together. She was from a divorced
family, so it was very important to her to stay."
The play was criticized in the UK for
seemingly portraying the spies as heroes rather than traitors, or perhaps naïve
idealists. Does she feel there is validity in this criticism?
"When you set out to do stuff like that
you don't think 'I'm going to be a traitor,.' you actually believe in what
you're doing. This all happened before they were 30 and at that period in your
life you do believe that you can change things by having a dream and I think
they felt that they could. They thought they were doing the right thing. I
think only later on did they begin to realize the repercussions of it."
She feels that it was only after they fled
to Moscow that they really began to understand what they had done, that their
actions were treacherous. But, she insists, they still have to be portrayed as
human beings.
"If you play them as evil people then
that's not believable. I think there was something quite romantic about what
they thought they were doing. It seemed there was a romanticism about it –
that's how they felt."
And their wives, she says, were caught up in
the web.
"Oh yes, it was terrible -- especially
for Melinda. Melinda was amazing. The fact that she actually went to Russia as
well, it must have been really hard for her. She's still alive, living in
Queens, I think."
Anna-Louise did not have the opportunity to
meet Melinda Maclean and thinks it unlikely she would want to have anything to
do with it, that she would be appalled at the idea of this story of what must
have been a terrible part of her life being dredged up again.
"She probably thinks, 'Oh please, I'm
an old woman, just leave me alone!' I can completely understand that that's the
way she would have felt. But it would have been wonderful to meet her. I'm
nothing physically like her, she was a very small woman and I'm very tall, but
that doesn't matter, because no-one knows what she looks like. As long as you
catch the essence of her."
Cambridge Spies was Anna-Louise's first acting assignment with her
husband, Toby Stephens, who played Kim Philby.
"It was nice," she says, smiling,
"because we only had a few scenes together so it wasn't like we were
acting all that time together."
But they do not deliberately seek out
opportunities to work together.
"If it happens, it happens. A lot of
the time, people don't know we're married. It almost happened recently that we
were going to be cast as husband and wife in something, but it was just
coincidental. That didn't work out, so it's fine. I think it could be tricky. I
don't want to be a 'celebrity couple'; to me if you live that kind of life, you
leave yourself wide open. I don't think it's very good for a marriage, to be
honest, and I love being married. I would do everything I could to protect
that."
Everything, it seems, including moving to
London from Los Angeles. Had she tried to persuade her husband to stay in LA?
"Oh, no! He doesn't fit there,"
she explains. "He doesn't wear it well, he can go there and he's happy to
be there, but endless sunshine for my husband with his red hair and pale skin,
it's not right!"
Trained at LAMDA, Anna-Louise subsequently
attended the Lecoq drama school in Paris, where actors, writers and directors
all work together, creating a very specialized style of theater used to great
effect by the “Théatre de Complicité.”
"It's unique, and special and I like
working in that style of theater but at the same time I did that for quite a
long time and now I'd like to go back and do more text-based work."
Obviously passionate about theater, she
feels that the famous names coming from the US acting world to star in London's
West End theaters is a good thing.
"Anything that gets an audience into a
theater nowadays is good. It's very expensive, if you are taking the family out
to the theater in London and you are coming from outside London it's a very
expensive night out. In a way it's becoming a real privilege to be able to go
and see theater and it shouldn't be that way. I really think it's fantastic the
National is offering £10 tickets – I think more theaters should offer that, or
maybe pay what you can one night a week."
Anna-Louise would love to do more theater,
and the part of Blanche duBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is in
her sights, but she feels it might be a few years before she takes on that
role. Even though Blanche, she points out, was written as a 30-year-old.
"At that time obviously a 30-year-old
was considered over the hill, 'faded' but now most women play it when they are
45 or so. And Stanley has got to be a few years younger but not too much
younger. It's got to be in a five-year range."
She agrees that there are difficulties in
taking on a role that has one iconic version against which every subsequent
performance may well be compared.
"But," she argues,
"Shakespearean plays are the same. Every audience member will have their
memory of their favorite, which is usually their first, so I will be for some
people in the audience their 'first' if I ever get to play it and for other
people I won't be what they expected, I might be something else. But if we were
always frightened of that we would never do anything."
Anna-Louise is delighted to see the good
dramas being produced on British TV, both ITV (UK commercial channels) and the
BBC.
"ITV is making a lot of good dramas at
the moment and I'm really pleased to see that. The BBC is doing some as well
and thank god for the BBC, because they make costume dramas like no-one else.
They do it beautifully. I think television is reinventing itself. I think
shooting on digital cameras is probably going to help them shoot quicker and be
a bit more experimental."
Another recent role was that of Caroline
Spalding in the costume drama, He Knew He was Right, adapted for
TV from the novel by Trollope, an experience she clearly enjoyed.
"I loved doing that, it was great. She
was really witty, as well as fun. Trollope had an American mistress and I think
possibly he might have been writing about her in Caroline Spalding. She had
some wonderful lines and she talked about the difference between the English
culture and the American culture and it's still the same! There's a speech about
the Old World and the New World: 'We might be polite to each other in society
but deep down you believe we are an inferior race and we think you are
old-fashioned and out-dated.' You know, it's no different to the way Americans
think about the English and the English think about Americans now!"
Anna-Louise feels it is not always a good
idea for actors to read their reviews, because it can be destructive to the
creative process.
"When you have to go out the next night
and do something and you are trying to achieve something and if you feel you
are not achieving it, then you have got to change your performance. But I don't
need a reviewer to tell me what to do, that's about my relationship with an
audience or a director. If I'm out there and it's not working I'm going to do
something new."
This is only Anna-Louise's second
convention, following her appearance at the SFX event in 2004, which she admits
she found slightly overwhelming.
"This is much more low-key than the
last one. I have had fun. Everyone is really nice and it's nice to meet people
who like the show as well because I don't meet them and I don't get to watch
the show."
Her husband, a Star Trek fan, had never seen
Stargate SG1 until he watched “Wormhole Extreme,” she laughs.
"He said, 'It's really funny!' and I
went 'Yeah, this is the spoof one.' He does watch it sometimes but he doesn't
sit down and avidly watch my work."
She believes there is still potential for
Sarah Gardner to return to Stargate SG1, that she still had a
story to tell.
"Daniel said, 'We'll work through it.'
I am absolutely up for coming back. It depends whether they invite me
back."
Playing Osiris was great fun, she says, and
gave her the opportunity to do something different, something that was out of
her usual spectrum of roles.
Was it a challenge for her to play a male
character in a female body?
She laughs at the thought. "It was
quite funny! I thought what are they going to do with it? But it was never an
issue. They just said 'That's the way it is' and left it there. They could have
played it up a lot but then, sometimes you don't need to signpost things."
As it was, Osiris turned out to be a man
with great dress sense. Anna-Louise grins.
"Exactly! He's the King-Queen of the
Nile!"
With grateful thanks to Anna-Louise Plowman
for her time, and to Katherine and Karen of Wolf Events for arranging the
interview.
Biography: Anna-Louise Plowman is a graduate of the London Academy
of Music and Dramatic Art and the Lecoq School in Paris. Originally from New
Zealand, she has worked in theater, film and television in London, Tokyo,
Hong-Kong, Dublin, Sydney and Paris.
More information at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0687491/
Anna-Louise Plowman website (unofficial): http://mitglied.lycos.de/anloplo/index2.html
Wolf
Events organize conventions and
events around the UK and in other European countries. Full details of their
current program of events can be found at: http://www.wolfevents.com/php/
Interview
© Carole Gordon May 2005 / Website copyright © Our Stargate, June 2005, All
Rights Reserved. Our Stargate thanks Graculus and Amy for the use of their
graphic creations.
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