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tion. “Although you describe her as ‘long-suffering’ she learns to cope with what he gives her which is endless affairs – he was quite famous for liking the women – but I think over time she learned to deal with that.
“He must have loved her too,” she points out. “He could easily have got rid of her but he never did. I think they had a nice friend- ship with each other.”
Years ago, when they starred together in the TV series Hamish Macbeth, Robert Carlyle gave Henderson a valuable piece of advice. He told her to work on her remarkable facility for accents and then things would start to open up.
Being Portuguese, Catharine is another role in which she doesn’t
get to use her own accent but she disputes there is any facility there.
“It’s hard work,” she laughs. “I’ve never been to Portugal and I imagined it sounded like Spanish but it’s nothing like Spanish. It sounds very Slavic or Czech. You forget everything, that’s the prob- lem,” she says wistfully. “Everyone thinks I speak fluent Portuguese but I can’t speak a word.
“My real concern was for the scenes where I was speaking Portuguese. If you’re speaking in English you can improvise if you forget a line, but here all I could do was lapse into some kind of gobbledegook. Often they would say ‘That sounds great’ but I would have to tell them they couldn’t use it because it was just rubbish.”
Carlyle’s advice has stood her in good stead and it is rare that Henderson gets to use any- thing approaching a Scottish accent on screen. One notable exception is the upcoming Wilbur (Wants To Kill Himself), the touching but dark romantic comedy for director Lone Scherfig. It is certainly her most substantial and perhaps her finest screen performance but again she is disarming.
“Wilbur was such a great part. I didn’t think I would get it because it was so nice, and was a big part. I was amazed to even be seen for it.”
There is no game plan in Shirley Henderson’s life. She takes the John Lennon view that life is what hap- pens while you’re making plans.
“It would be nice if you could plan everything and everything happened the way you planned but it just doesn’t work. You often have to be prepared to take another route to get where you’re going and it might take longer.”
So the big films like Harry Potter sit cheek by jowl with mini- budget films such as Afterlife, which she only did because she had a free week. If the part had been bigger she couldn’t have done it.
But after a remarkable year she is learning, dare I suggest finally, that sometimes it’s good to say no.
“I’m learning to listen to my body now, and say ‘Right you need a break now, you cannot do every single thing which is asked of you’.
“I love working but you can’t do everything and sometimes to get to the next thing you have to relax and do some fun things. Learning you can’t get every- thing and that you’re not right for everything and understand- ing that your time will come is really important.”
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