Tatler - September 2000
Great Ormond
Hollywood glamour is lighting up the London stage once more but, this time, the talent is home-grown. John Walsh meets silver-screen goddess Julia Ormond, Surrey's answer to Audrey Hepburn
It is Sunday afternoon and I'm waiting outside a door in the middle of Covent Garden's clamour and bustle. From the piazza comes laughter and jeering, as a handcuffed droll struggles to emerge from a blazing sack. From the market come the strains of John Lennon's `Imagine', sung by an alopecic loser with a steel guitar. But from the squawk box by Julia Ormond's front door, no sound emerges. Perhaps she hasn't heard the bell. Perhaps she's out. Or perhaps she doesn't deign to speak to squawk boxes - or talk to the street - any more. But maybe when you are one of the world's most beautiful women, whom Steven Spielberg once compared to Audrey Hepburn, and the LA trades can't decide if you're the new Vivien Leigh or the next Julia Roberts, you could be forgiven for getting a bit grand...
And then I see her, arriving through the crowds, smiling, weighed down by two bags of shopping. It's like that famous tracking shot of Julie Christie walking through the streets in Billy Liar. But Ormond's isn't a glamorous entrance; she is a handsome but surprisingly ordinary young woman in jeans and clogs, her hair pinned up sensibly, her face innocent of make-up, her demeanour as practical as that of Mary Poppins. `Sorry,' she says, brandishing her keys. `Give me a hand with this bag, would you?'
Her flat is a surprise, too: a top-floor eyrie, comfortable but puritan-churchy, with few colours, lots of solid wood, spiky metal objets from Turkey, fat candlesticks and a sensational `Genghis Khan throws a dinner party' rivetted oak table that she got in Liberty. Outside the kitchen is a white-tiled passageway lit by a skylight that reveals the grotty back elevations of nearby offices, all exposed wiring and laundry chutes. `I really wanted to get a flat with a scullery feel,' says Julia. `I nearly bought a place in Beak Street, Soho, which was an old brothel. You could clearly see what used to go on: the set-up, the beds, the closets and washrooms. It had a very, ah, funky atmosphere.' Miss Ormond is getting less ordinary by the minute.
A dabbler in eastern philosophy, she had a feng-shui consultant round to look at the place, to study the energy levels, assess the chi resonance, relate her life to her environment, all that. They stood together in the bathroom. And this,' said the expert, `is where your career is.' And I thought, "Does she mean it's going down the toilet?"' Ormond permits herself a tinkling laugh. Her career is doing no such thing. After the Hale-Bopp-style coruscation of her rise in the mid-Nineties, when she leapt from British provincial repertory theatre to the dizzy pinnacles of Hollywood, and a period of retrenchment in the past two years, she is returning to where she began: the theatre stage. This month, she appears at the Royal Court Theatre in My Zinc Bed, a new play by Sir David Hare, co-starring Tom Wilkinson as an entrepreneur who hires a poet (Steven Mackintosh) to help out his Internet business. Instead, the poet falls in love with the man's wife (Ormond). Both Hare and Ormond are oddly reluctant to discuss their joint venture, although Hare has said Julia was cast `because she could say my lines. It's a musical thing. She really has an ear for my dialogue, in the same way that Maggie Smith delivers an Alan Bennett line so perfectly.'
Julia is reticent. `I'm looking forward to the rehearsal period,' she says, cautiously. `I feel it would be foolish to try and sum her up now. But she's somebody struggling with addiction...'
Ormond hasn't acted on stage for a long time. `The last thing I did was Playing The Wife by Ronald Hayman, which Tim Pigott-Smith directed about seven or eight years ago - so, yes, since you ask, it is kind of terrifying doing this.' But the combination of Hare, the Royal Court and the addict role was apparently too `jammy' to turn down. Jammy, indeed. A constant cry from Ormond is `Why me?'. Why was she, of all her year at acting school, picked for the star treatment? Why did she get all the glittering prizes? How come she was the one who got to kiss several handsome princes?
She does her best to come across as a downhome girl from Epsom, Surrey, where she was born in January 1965. Her father John was a stockbroker turned software designer. Julia's parents split up when she was only four (her father left to live on a boat) and she was, she recalls, `a terrible tomboy' at school. At 16, she moved from Guildford High School for girls into the sixth form at Cranleigh, the boys' boarding-school, where she encountered pack-male behaviour for the first time. `It was a very vicious environment. Not a happy time at all,' she says, through clenched teeth.
Former contemporaries have hinted that Ormond learned early on to be a serial heartbreaker. And when you've spent a couple of hours looking into her huge hazel eyes and inspected that beautiful round face, the tiny, precise nose and firm jawline, and tried to interpret what lies behind this display of studied normality in her piled-up chestnut curls and the hint of black knicker that peeks out above her jeans, you might conclude that, yes, this is a girl who could drive the boys wild through aloofness rather than sensuality.
At Cranleigh, she was encouraged by a teacher to go to drama school. Her first role after Webber Douglas drama college was as Cathy in Wuthering Heights at the Crucible in Sheffield. Romantically enough, she married the guy playing Heathcliff, Rory Edwards, and moved with him to a rooftop flat in Hackney. They divorced six years later, years in which she starred in plays by Christopher Hampton and Jean Anouilh and won a Critics' Circle Award for Best Newcomer. Playing a middle-class heroin addict on TV in Traffik led to her first brush with film: the role of the virgin who pretends to have been miraculously inseminated by Christ in The Baby of Macon. `I loved Peter Greenaway's films,' she says. `I loved The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. But I think The Baby of Macon is probably his worst. He set up an atmosphere where everyone was supposedly equal but, if anything, the actors were less equal than the others. It was as if you were involving him in a side of himself that he was rejecting, and he translated it into having nothing to do with you. They were very severe filming circumstances, and I needed the other actors - like Ralph Fiennes - who were very supportive.' Then, she got the call that changed everything. `My agent said, "I'm faxing you three scenes from a film called Legends of the Fall. You have to do your own screen test." So we booked a studio in Poland Street and called Tim Pigott-Smith and said, "Help!" I was up until 3am learning the lines and trying to work out what to wear. I went in at 10 the next morning, did it, and sent it off. On the Thursday morning, I got a call saying, "Can you come to the States?" I went off on Concorde. I remember feeling sick to my boots because the stakes had suddenly shot up...
Legends of the Fall, the schlocky saga of a Montana farming dynasty - complete with snowy-maned patriarch (Anthony Hopkins) and warring sons, all vying for the hand, and warmer bits, of Miss Ormond - transformed the Surrey ingenue into a bankable star. Her screen persona was soon established. She was the embodiment of innocence, class and virtue, all savaged and trashed by experience. From the virgin/madonna who winds up being raped 200 times in The Baby of Macon, to the antiseptic prison-visiting dentist in Captives who has sex in a public lav with ex-convict Tim Roth and wipes the blood from her shoes after blowing away a badass hitman, to her current role as a seductive junkie in My Zinc Bed, the casting departments of film - and theatreland have had it in for Ormond, with her English sexiness and big, sad eyes. `I think that people realised somewhere along the line, "Oh look - she can cry", so I get sent all this stuff,' says Julia. `But I'm always challenged by a part which is, basically, a human being going through something terrible. The more severe it is, the more fun it is to play. But a lot of drama is about the battle of good and evil that's waged within all of us.'
In her time, she has enjoyed (if that's the word) more screen clinches with the Hollywo A-list than any comparable British actress: Harrison Ford in Sabrina, Sean Connery and Richard Gere in First Knight, Aidan Quinn and Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall. So tel us, Julia...
`It's a question I get asked more than any other. What was it like kissing Brad Pitt? Everyone wants some assessment of their sexuality. I feel very protective towards all of them. I have the fondest memories of working with Sean, because he's such a little kid. He just made me laugh a lot. I remember just before the wedding scene in First Knight, we were standing before each other, about to come into shot. He was making jokes, and I said, "You're very confident, aren't you?" And his face just fell. He said, "No, not really." It was very genuine and terribly sweet.'
Yeah, but about Brad...
`The kissing and bed scenes I always find a bit of a nightmare. There's the crew in there with you, and you have to get over your feelings of physical inadequacy, and what feels like a humiliating experience, while acting out what's supposed to be the most wonderful thing that can happen to you. It's far removed from actually feeling sexy'.
The close, lingering, guilty rapture of her kiss with Brad Pitt in Legends led to her to being cast in the title role of Smilla's Feeling for Snow, directed by Bille August from Peter Hoeg's celebrated novel. A second foray into the frozen extremities of Europe came with The Barber of Siberia, Nikita Mikhalkov's three-hour epic about an American adventuress falling for an army officer in the glow and wintry glitter of Tsarist Russia of 1885. But, as well as these chilly excursions, she found time to make a documentary called Calling the Ghosts, about two Bosnian women and their fight for survival in the Serbian death camps; to adapt, with Harold Pinter, a short story by Karen Blixen, The Dreaming Child, which she hopes to direct; and to start a company, Fox Searchlight [this should of course be Indican...], looking for movie projects to develop in the UK and Ireland.
`I know that, in the States, people have been saying, "Whatever happened to her?" But in the past couple of years I have executive-produced a documentary that won two Emmys and I worked on a script with Harold Pinter, and I look on those two things as the pinnacles of my career.'
So where is life taking the meteor now? `I love having a production company. It's settled something in me. I'm fascinated by the process of finding new work.' She is now thoroughly transatlantic, moving between London flat and New York company and the LA home where she's been living for the past year (bliss, apparently) with her new husband John, an Internet businessman.
Another movie, Prime
Gig, with Ed Harris, is now in the can, awaiting
distribution. Her company is taking off. She is back on
the theatre stage where she cut her flawless teeth. She
has influential friends in England (like Pinter and Hare)
and America (like Spielberg and Miramax's Harvey
Weinstein). Life is shining kindly on Ormond. But she can't
shake ofi the nagging doubt that she doesn't deserve all
this success: that she's still an artcollege kid from
Guildford, still Sabrina the chauffeur's daughter, up a
tree, watching the glamour from a distance.
`There's a guilt that comes with all this,' she says. A
feeling of "Why did it happen to me, and not someone
else?" I was in a very talented . year at Webber
Douglas, with people I learned a great deal from. It's as
inexplicable to them as it is to me.' Whereupon her big
hazel eyes widen in alarm, and it all seems perfectly
explicable to me.
My Zinc Bed opens at the Royal Court Theatre on 7 September.