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Only a decade ago she was a struggling actress, famous by association with her father, barris- ter and author Sir John Mortimer, who, of course, so memorably adapted Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited for television.
Which rather neatly brings us to another important rung in his daughter’s career – as one of the stars of writer-director Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things, the lat- est screen tilt at Waugh.
Mortimer admits that the char- acter of Nina Blount sprang almost fully formed from the page of director Stephen Fry’s own adaptation of Waugh’s sec- ond novel, Vile Bodies.
Although this is the ubiquitous writer, comedian and actor’s debut behind the camera, his leading actress is quick to praise his instinctive grasp of the job and its requirements.
“Stephen was so deft and he knew when he’d got what he wanted, which is rare for any director. He seemed to really have extraordinary wells of confidence, he was incredibly economic with what he needed, which I think really shows when somebody knows what they’re doing.
“But then my experience of writer-directors has been good all along. Bright Young Things, Young Adam and Lovely & Amazing were directed by their screenwrit- ers and I think that there’s some- thing terribly reassuring about working with a writer-director because – weirdly enough – they are much more open minded.
“They’ve lived with it in an incredibly intense, intrinsic, organ- ic way before they come to the set to direct it. They’re very open to suggestion, you can talk to them about things, you can sug- gest things and they can take them on board much more quickly, and assimilate things much more quickly because they
know the monster that they’re dealing with.”
A weekend of rehearsal in the classic environs of Cliveden gave the cast the chance to get up to speed themselves with the authentic ‘bright young thing’ environment.
“It was so grand,” Mortimer beams. “I couldn’t believe it when I found myself in this grand suite of rooms there. We all got very drunk and tried to live up to the film but we were all quite shy of each other. If they’d done it three weeks into the shoot we would probably have been carousing all night, but as it was we went to bed fairly early and behaved rather conventionally.”
She now has time to reflect on her career to date which has seen her flit regularly between London and Hollywood in films like Disney’s The Kid, Scream 3, Lovely & Amazing, Love’s Labour’s Lost and 51st State.
“Actors are hired hands,” she nods, “so it’s very hard to kind of pretend that you really have any control at all over the choices you make. But one pretends that one does, and justifies them in retrospect things that you did that were the only things around just as a career choice.
“And actually in the last cou- ple of years I have been able to slightly pick and choose in a way that I hadn’t before.”
“I don’t want to be just one thing, I’m a little scared of that, so I really like the fact that I was a Liverpudlian hit woman and then I was a neurotic LA actress, and then I’ve gone from this Glaswegian beatnik to this upper class party girl. And in the film I’ve just finished, Natural History, I played a working class, unem- ployed single mother in Greenock. All that’s great.”
In the past few years Emily Mortimer has rung the changes in her rapidly developing career,
but her next role is certain to be her most important yet.
For the 32-year-old is about to become a mum for the first time, and is looking forward to putting acting on hold while she and her husband Alessandro Nivola attend to weightier matters.
In all sorts of ways this is a very good time for Emily Mortimer to sit
back and take stock, with two startlingly different roles in a pair of contrasting films standing as testi- mony to a talent that continues to blossom as she counts down the days to her own happy event.
Goods things, after all, are supposed to come in threes.
ScottishHighlands
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The Film Commission is part of the Planning and Development service of The Highland Council.We provide a free and confidential service to production companies wishing to locate in the Highlands and Islands for film, television, video, stills or commercials work.
We offer
● access to a digitised library of 4,000 locations
● advice on locations and permissions
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Contact Trish Shorthouse or
Jenny Yeomans on: tel:01463710221 fax:01463710848 e-mail: trish@scotfilm.org
Inverness Castle Inverness IV2 3EG
The Scottish Highlands and Islands Film Commission is a partnership of The Highland Council, Argyll and Bute Council,The Moray Council, Orkney Islands Council, Shetland Islands Council and Comhairle nan Eilean Siar(Western Isles Islands Council).
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