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academy interview
"I like to transform, that’s what I think is good and interesting about this job"
leading from the front
From Sixth Sense and Civil War wife to union leader, it’s all just a question of roles Olivia Williams tells Anwar Brett
Olivia Williams defies expectation. You might think from reading the cuttings and potted biographies of the 34-year-old star, she’d be a dour blue stocking with a taste for dusty academe.
She is, after all, the daughter of two QCs – with her older sister also being a lawyer – and gradu- ated herself from Cambridge with a degree in English.
“The irony is that within my fami- ly of lawyers I am the crazy Bohemian one” she smiles, “I am the actress here. So how other people perceive me is not how I necessarily perceive myself. But I can see that within the fraternity of actors I am ultimately ‘the lawyer’.”
There is a twinkle in the eye, and more than a hint of self dep- recation to much of what Williams says. The last six years has seen a
major change in her life and career, since Kevin Costner plucked her from theatrical obscurity to cast her in The Postman. The film was a critical and financial disaster though, with Williams just about the only person whose screen career remained unaffected by the debacle.
“There is a tragedy to that,” she sighs. “There was some beau- tiful work done on that film – the cinematography, and the work of costume designer John Bloomfield. There were some incontrovertibly talented people who worked on it, but because the film was rubbished their work went down the plughole with it. I was very lucky that mine wasn’t.”
Williams has subsequently built upon these inauspicious Hollywood beginnings by starring in a genuine blockbuster, The
Sixth Sense, and the cult hit, Rushmore. More recently she has had leading roles back in her native UK in Dead Babies, Born Romantic and Lucky Break.
And in the past few months she enjoyed back to back roles in two very different British films, the aus- tere 1930s relationship drama, The Heart Of Me, and the swashbuck- ling Civil War tale, To Kill A King.
Both her recent films in their own ways typify different aspects of the British film industry. The Heart Of Me is archetypally English in the emotional frigidity it explores and features domestic actors at the top of their form in Williams, Helena Bonham Carter and Paul Bettany.
The same might be said of To Kill A King, which is based around the ascent of Cromwell and the execution of Charles I, and – the vagaries of the British industry
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Photos from left: Olivia Williams in The Heart Of Me and To Kill A King