Telegraph UK: Eight Installment of 'My Week'
My Week: Olivia Williams
By Olivia Williams
7:00AM BST 03 May 2012
The actress on making movies in South Africa...and her fantasy birthday party
I’ve been in South Africa, visiting my husband while he films a television show - and avoids the school run for six months. I know I’m a bit late on this, but did you know that Desmond Tutu had an 80th birthday party, and invited the Dalai Lama? Now that’s a party I’d like to be at. One where the planet’s jolliest spiritual leaders, who meet the cruellest challenges with inconceivable forbearance, would surely sing happy birthday and maybe play a version of pass the parcel where the person left holding the parcel has to give it up as a rejection of material wealth.
Well, I wasn’t invited. But I got to visit South Africa, which is more than can be said of the Dalai Lama, who was refused a visa because it was believed this “dangerous separatist” would jeopardise Chinese investment in the country. It reminded me of what a “dangerous terrorist” Nelson Mandela turned out to be.
I’ve made three films in South Africa, and both its triumph and tragedy in film-making terms is that it is never itself. In Tara Road it was New England, in Krakatoa, Krakatoa, and in Flashbacks of a Fool it was everything from Clacton-on-Sea to Malibu. The landscape provides almost every terrain and the population almost every race, from the Indonesian tribe required to run screaming in Krakatoa to the Pakistani terrorists in my husband’s show, Strikeback. Unlike the iconic views of LA or New York, the camera has to be turned away from Cape Town’s unique assets, the minute-by-minute transformations of Table Mountain as its tablecloth of cloud drifts towards the ocean. In Flashbacks of a Fool I chalked my third Bond. Years ago I was Young Seductress opposite George Lazenby in a low-budget movie in LA, then Pierce Brosnan’s wife in The Ghost. In Flashbacks I had to age 30 years to play Daniel Craig’s mother. If I can nobble a role as Sean Connery’s granny I’ll feel I have the set.
You may remember I was making a film about the first ever visit to the United States by a reigning British monarch. I played Eleanor Roosevelt to Bill Murray’s FDR, and the cast and crew screening was in the perfectly anti-glamorous Holloway Road Odeon at 9.30 on Saturday morning. We’re so used to watching films where laughable foreigners try and cope with incomprehensible British customs involving fish knives and toilets, it came as an entertaining relief to watch some impossibly formal Brits being confounded by American informality. And I think Eleanor would fit right in at that fantasy birthday party. She would declare the rules of “pass the food parcel”, and serve hot dogs.
source
By Olivia Williams
7:00AM BST 03 May 2012
The actress on making movies in South Africa...and her fantasy birthday party
I’ve been in South Africa, visiting my husband while he films a television show - and avoids the school run for six months. I know I’m a bit late on this, but did you know that Desmond Tutu had an 80th birthday party, and invited the Dalai Lama? Now that’s a party I’d like to be at. One where the planet’s jolliest spiritual leaders, who meet the cruellest challenges with inconceivable forbearance, would surely sing happy birthday and maybe play a version of pass the parcel where the person left holding the parcel has to give it up as a rejection of material wealth.
Well, I wasn’t invited. But I got to visit South Africa, which is more than can be said of the Dalai Lama, who was refused a visa because it was believed this “dangerous separatist” would jeopardise Chinese investment in the country. It reminded me of what a “dangerous terrorist” Nelson Mandela turned out to be.
I’ve made three films in South Africa, and both its triumph and tragedy in film-making terms is that it is never itself. In Tara Road it was New England, in Krakatoa, Krakatoa, and in Flashbacks of a Fool it was everything from Clacton-on-Sea to Malibu. The landscape provides almost every terrain and the population almost every race, from the Indonesian tribe required to run screaming in Krakatoa to the Pakistani terrorists in my husband’s show, Strikeback. Unlike the iconic views of LA or New York, the camera has to be turned away from Cape Town’s unique assets, the minute-by-minute transformations of Table Mountain as its tablecloth of cloud drifts towards the ocean. In Flashbacks of a Fool I chalked my third Bond. Years ago I was Young Seductress opposite George Lazenby in a low-budget movie in LA, then Pierce Brosnan’s wife in The Ghost. In Flashbacks I had to age 30 years to play Daniel Craig’s mother. If I can nobble a role as Sean Connery’s granny I’ll feel I have the set.
You may remember I was making a film about the first ever visit to the United States by a reigning British monarch. I played Eleanor Roosevelt to Bill Murray’s FDR, and the cast and crew screening was in the perfectly anti-glamorous Holloway Road Odeon at 9.30 on Saturday morning. We’re so used to watching films where laughable foreigners try and cope with incomprehensible British customs involving fish knives and toilets, it came as an entertaining relief to watch some impossibly formal Brits being confounded by American informality. And I think Eleanor would fit right in at that fantasy birthday party. She would declare the rules of “pass the food parcel”, and serve hot dogs.
source