Telegraph - 9/9/2000

Outside favorite

For a heady year or so Julia Ormond was the toast of Tinseltown and a leading lady to both Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford. Then she disappeared as quickly as she arrived. Now she's back where she feels most at home - on the London stage. Maria Alvarez talks to an actress who refused to play the Hollywood game.

Briefly, Julia Ormond was the actress who seemed to have it all. Her overnight adoption by Hollywood six years ago read like a modern fairy tale. Plucked from a promising stage career in the UK, she landed a staring role in the $25 million epic, Legends of the Fall, and from there her ascent seemed unstopable.

But after two years of high-profile, big-budget films which met with varying degrees of success, suddenly the brouhaha and media adulation stopped, and, inevitably, the sniping began. Almost overnight, Julia Ormond's career was said to have gone down the pan.

Ormond, however, was keeping her head down, quietly carving out new ventures and pursuing a path which, ironically, has taken her almost full-circle back to her working roots. For she is on the London stage again, the place where her reputation first took off and where, as a virtual newcomer in 1989, she won a London Critics Award. Her appearance at the Royal Court in My Zinc Bed - a new play, written and directed by Sir David Hare, which opens on Thursday - is her first theatrical role for nearly a decade. She must be the envy of many other actresses. The part is great, the cast is great and as for Hare, he's about as top-notch as you can get theatrically. But she admits it's scary: 'I've always found theatre terrifying. If it isn't, what's the point of doing it?'

Ormond plays a woman struggling with addiction who falls in love with a poet (played by Steven Mackinstosh) employed by her entrepreneur husband (Tom Wilkinson). `It's a wonderful assessment of our life - now,' she explains.`And the stresses and strains, politically, intellectually, emotionally. She's human. That's the point.'

Ormond has played an addict before, very successfully, in the 1989 television series, Traffik. She laughs, saying she resisted the lure of trying heavy drugs for research reasons back then. But years later she was in hospital, suffering from an ear infection: `They gave me morphine and for 20 seconds there was this calm, and then I fell asleep.' Suddenly her voice rises from a well-modulated, warm but firm Brit-thesp tone with just a hint of Estuary in the odd vowel, to a startlingly loud hysterical wail. `All I remember is I had ****ing morphine and I slept through it. It's not fair.' She pulls a face. One could put it down to an actress lapsing into the kind of comic hyperbole they do so well but there's something else - a release of some explosive emotional cocktail. It happens a few times during our conversation, and it makes for an interesting mix, but it may also account for the side of her (a stubborn directness and lack of placidity) that led to the vague rumours of `difficulty' which circulated during her Star-is-Born era.

When Ormond first arrived on the scene, Hollywood was still the big movie factory it had become in the Eighties. Talented, complex and with a healthy dollop of British repression, she must have been the proverbial square peg in the Beverly Hills hole, both physically and temperamentally. For instance, she confesses to a very genuine identification with Bridget Jones, torn between political correctness and body image. At one point Ormond - she is now 35 - puts on a sensible pc voice when discussing this. `Big bums are just as relevant.' She pauses. 'And then you catch sight of your bum in the mirror and think, "WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN?"'

Not that Julia Ormond lacks her fair share of beauty. She has a magical ability to light up the screen. In fact, her dark-featured luminosity is similar to Juliette Binoche's but with more British common sense. Where Binoche is a natural to play the rapturous nurse (think The English Patient), Ormond is the perfect obsessive scientist (Smilla's Feeling for Snow). But there's something else, a chameleon-like anonymity that resists being an instantly recognisable 'face'. And she's not stick-thin.

Certainly, the woman who answers the door to me - with scraped-back hair, no make-up, T-shirt and cargo-style jeans - is a normal, exceedingly handsome, lustrous-skinned woman of a healthy size 12 or thereabouts. Her Covent Garden flat (home when she is in England) is nicely furnished in the manner of an unostentatious successful London professional's pad: white walls, a huge oak oriental-style coffee table, all mod cons but no pretension. Books by the likes of Strindberg fill the fitted glass bookcases. She offers me a drink, or something to eat, very matter-of factly.

Ormond's early acting trajectory seemed to predestine her for an eclectic, fulfilling career path in the style of, say, Helen Mirren - in theatre, television and small-budget arty films. She was doing exceeditigiy well by any standards. Straight out of drama school, she landed a part as Cathy in Wuthering Heights in rep. More lauded television and top-flight theatre followed. In The Rehearsal at the Almeida in 1991, she revealed a romantic quality, an ability to overlay vulnerability with an alluring aloofness. There was also the almost obligatory part in a Peter Greenaway film, The Baby of Macon (with the then little-known Ralph Fiennes), in which she was gang-raped in a horrific set piece. But then Hollywood came knocking. After what was virtually a DIY screen test, she was offered the plum role of female love interest to three men - including Brad Pitt - in Legends of the Fall, which also starred Anthony Hopkins. Who wouldn't say no? She even had to have a passionate clinch with Pitt (and there were predictable rumours of off-set romance). `It's the question I get asked most frequently, "What was it like to kiss him?" All I can say is go find out for yourself,' she says wryly.

Steven Spielberg sang her praises, other industry insiders eulogised about the new star in their midst, and within a year, from 1995 to 1996, she starred in four films as well as Legends - which she remembers as 'the most fun I've ever had'. But in First Knight she was little more than an appendage to Richard Gere's Lancelot and then there was Sabrina, a remake of the original Audrey Hepburn vehicle, co-starring Harrison Ford, which flopped belly-up. As Ormond tells it, one gets the feeling of accident rather than ambitious design, of something gathering momentum of its own accord. (She never abandoned her home in Hackney, east London, during this time.)

In retrospect it my have been a mistake for her to accept too many ingenue parts. In Ormond's scrubbed radiance one can see the reason for her being cast as Guinevere or the doe-eyed girlfriend, but such roles were a waste of her talent, as 1997s Smiila's Feeling for Snow, based on the bestselling novel by Peter Hoeg, proved. The film dragged but Ormond shone as the neurotic, chippy feminist scientist on a mission against a male cover-up of murder. She can play intelligent, emotionally dysfunetional modern heroines like few others. Hollywood, it seems, saw only the classy, costume-drama side of Ormond.

If can't have been an easy time for her. `I needed to rebalance my life,' she says. `I was washed up as an actress. I was in a daze. I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue. It took me two years before I could look at a script and get excited and it came back as a hunger, for the right,reasons.' She did, however, use the time out to set up a production company and her latest film, The Prime Gig, co-starring Vince Vaughn and Ed Harris, has just premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

Nevertheless, all along she had misgivings. `I had this sense that I was being built up in order to be brought down later, so this enjoyment of being in the moment didn't really happen. I was also on my own.' She means emotionally, without a relationship. (Ormond had married her Heathcliff from rep, Rory Edwards, but the marriage had foundered by then.) In the middle of it, she had changed agent and publicist and, somehow, in popular media mythology she became known as a serial agent-sacker.

It didn't help that she found the publicity treadmill an ordeal. She admits that she's not prime interview material and that, unlike more polished and seasoned stars, she doesn't know how to be open and engaging. `And then you can end up feeling false by trying to be extra nice to people,' she says, stretching her features comically into a forced niceness, and you see a loathing of fakeness that can probably come over as bloody awkward under stress. But it's part of a bigger problem: `I just felt that I didn't fit in and I still feel like that.'

Ormond seems too British, too private, to want to spill her personal beans; a little too proud also, I can see, to submit and play ball. `I thought that my own personal distaste for the glamour was frowned upon.' She has a very recognisably English conviction that she's hopeless at the sophisticated glam. Under the misconception that she had a choice whether to do certain glamorous occasions or not she'd say, 'No thanks, I'm fine. And it's onny afterwards I reaiised that I made a faux pas by not playing the game.' She is more sanguine now, realising it all comes with the territory, but you can sense the initial isolation and confusion.

She can be very comical about it, recounting the time she was called upon late in the day to present an award to Elton John at the Oscars. Designer dresses were rushed in. I had to watch half of it' go straight out because I'm not a size zero. So it's, yes, lovely. Byee.' She chose the one dress she could f t into, and gets up to show me how ridiculous she looks walking in high heels. `My bum sticks out like this She tore the hem just as the limousine came. `And I've never seen a limo jam in my hfe. Limo rage.' The car had been hijacked by a couple claiming to be European royalty. They were sitting at the front, which was obviously going to look a bit ludicrous when it came to the grand entrance. As Ormond got in with her assistant, she could hear a middle-European voice saying, 'She's just some ****ing actress. We could get 60 people in here if you wanted.' Eventually they all bundled into the back as a compromise. `And you have to get out on stage pretending none of this crap goes on,' she laughs.

All through the rollercoaster Hollywood ride, there was a deep determination to cleave to her identity. She says, 'I know I'm resistant to being embraced by a group. The group thing terrifies me because the group can turn on you.' This dates back to her schooldays. And when she begins to talk about these - loth as she is to open up and 'manipulate' me, as she puts it - out pops the ghost of an angry young woman from time to time. When I ask her why she thinks she acts, she goes very quiet. `Oh God,' she sighs, and there's a long pause. `I know that for me it was anger. I think I was venting emotion and a lot of it was anger. And sometimes it still is. Not that it's particularly therapeutic. I hope that's changed now. I used to get more confused by riding the creative wave of anger. Instead of venting it, it brought me closer to it. Now, I hope I can access it more sanely.'

Ormond is hyper-reluctant to discuss her family or background but this much I know or gather. Born and brought up in Epsom, Surrey, she has one older sister and three younger brothers. Her father was a computer businessman named John, and her parents divorced when she was four. She grew up with her mother and sister, and identified strongly with her mother's background, which was lower-middle if not working-class. So when I say, `You're a Home Counties girl, aren't you?' she frowns with slight displeasure. `To this day I come away with the feeling that I was from the wrong side of the tracks. Everybody focuses on my father's side, but I was breught up more by my mother. I felt my schooling was in one area and my life was in the other. It was very Smilia. I'm not saying I was a victim.'

But it led at the time to her feeling, `stamped... it was an expecation from school that somebody from a broken home was going to behave badly. I think by the time I hit the boys' school I was behaving badly' She won a hotly contested place at Cranleigh in Surrey as a sixth-form boarder and the class alienation intensified. Ormond laughingly acknowledges that paranoia may have played a great part in making her reactions a self fulfilling prophecy. (The post-Hollywood media sniping can't have helped with this tendency.) A maIe contemporary of hers at Cranleigh recalls a host of besotted boys, even a blackmarket trade in Ormond photographs. She splutters at this. One could see it as disingenuousness, but her dislike of the oafish attentions comes over as frighteningty genuine.

However, after she starred in string of plays at school, a drama teacher and his wife, along with her art teacher, encouraged her to consider an acting career. It was a complete turn-around, for she had wanted to be an artist from the age of four or five. Two years later, she attended Webber Douglas Acadamy of Dramatic Art in South Kensington and then came her rapid rise.

On the personal side, she has now found her Mr Darcy. After a relationship with a gynacologist and a rumoured fling with Gabriel Byrne, her co-star in Smilla, she has been happily married for a year to John, an American-based businessman. Hence she moves back and forth between here and LA. When I say I hadn't heard about the marriage, she says it was all done discreetly, but she beams as she holds out the ring for me to see.

You must have enjoyed some of the glamour, I say.

`When I got to the Oscars I really did enjoy it.' She puts on a 'Cor blimey, look who's here' voice: 'There's Jack Nicholson, there's so-and-so; how amazing!'

Didn't it all turn your head?

At one point, Ormond found herself behaving like the Queen; used to being ferried and escorted around, she returned home to Hackney, hopped on a bus and realised she had no money, no wallet and had to walk all the way home. One gets the sense that this won't be happening again. 'My family laughed like crazy about that one.'

But one very much hopes, though it's nice to see her thaw, that Miss Ormond hasn't totally lost her feeling for anger. It's what makes her an exciting actress and intriguing human being. `So, do you have an angle?' she asks playfully, and a mite defiantly, as I leave.

Yes, Welcome back.