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Interviews
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"The most exciting thing is not being me" Philip Fisher talks to Janie Dee about Shadowlands and her career As an interviewer, it helps to empathise with one's subject. In the case of Janie Dee it would be so easy to go one step further and fall head over heels in love. This is not merely a physical attraction, though the actress is striking. It is the fact that she is so incredibly open, honest and filled with enthusiasm; deeply concerned about her character, her colleagues and even a journalist who is occupying the actress' dressing room and preventing her from commencing her warm-up routine as Joy Gresham in William Nicholson's marvellous, Anglo-American weepy Shadowlands. Shadowlands tells the tale of the prototypically reserved English writer and theologian C. S. Lewis and Mrs Gresham, an American literary critic with whom he almost reluctantly falls in love. As Miss Dee explains, her character Joy "is a Jewish, communist, American, Christian... who was converted to Christianity through reading C. S. Lewis's work. She was probably better read than C. S. Lewis which is really saying something". Mirroring the actress who is playing her and thereby possibly explaining why this Englishwoman got the part of a noble, Christian New Yorker we hear that "She was an active person, anything she believed in she got behind". Joy Gresham and C. S. Lewis had "a special relationship, a good friendship, a true friendship; a relationship that is not consummated until he thinks she is going to die. "He is a complicated man too. He is a great intellectual but it seems from what we've looked at that he hasn't ever had, at this point in his life which is when he was 55 years old, a proper relationship with a woman". Janie Dee had the good luck to be cast opposite Charles Dance, who gives one of the finest performances of his career as Lewis. It was not all plain sailing as they began to seep themselves in the lives of their characters and attempted to recreate a relationship that seems so unusual a mere fifty years later. It is also interesting to hear about the stresses that a pair of top actors went through before finally opening themselves up on stage. "It has been very stressful. I remember three nights when I didn't sleep because I thought I'm not getting this part and I've got to do something, I've got to find her, it's no good blaming the director, he can't tell me. On the third night, I was up all night and I suddenly thought of the idea of what she looked like. Every intellectual you meet, every bookish person you meet, has spectacles, they just do because they're using their eyes so much". Just like your interviewer! There was an additional bonus in the glasses in that they enabled the actress "to not be me. The most helpful thing I find, and the most exciting thing I find in being an actress is not being me. I don't really like playing parts that are like me. It's exciting to transform yourself into somebody else. "The actual working on it has for some reason been really, really stressful and exhausting. I have two children now. I try to give them at least equal if not more of my time and this play has been so demanding that I have felt really tired and thought bugger! I'm looking so old, about five new wrinkles are appearing every day because I am so tired and stressed by doing it. The stresses have been in getting it right." She has, however, been pleased with her leading man. "Charles Dance to me is a huge star, a glamorous, gorgeous film star at that. He gives a magnificent performance but it hasn't come for either of us without some degree of battle. I don't think I've ever been so thrilled to work with anyone but we've had to go through some" - she hesitates meaningfully - "times. "We adore each other but it's been hard for us both. We've come to what I think is a rich relationship but not without a struggle. The play and the way we've worked on it has caused disharmony and that has been exhausting but worth it too". Charles Dance also seems pleased with the outcome and while accepting praise for his efforts was keen to emphasise that his partner's portrayal of Joy Gresham was "magnificent". Pleasingly, the actress concludes by saying that "it is now what we hoped it would be. It's a great play. You see productions of Hamlet and in Much Ado, I would put this play in that category. It's about such profound questions we ask in life and it doesn't answer them all but it makes you feel less alone in asking those questions". Miss Dee draws what seems an unlikely comparison between "Jack" Lewis and playwright Alan Ayckbourn with whom she has worked regularly. "Alan Ayckbourn, whom I love dearly, is one of the cleverest and one of the most at ease people when he is speaking publicly or when he is directing; certainly when he has written to me his letters are just so warm and friendly. If you're on your own there's an awkwardness sometimes. It's less so now because I've known him so long but certainly at the beginning there was a terrible awkwardness physically." And it is this awkwardness that Charles Dance so perfectly recreates on stage, at one moment almost curling up like a hedgehog when offered a typical American embrace in what is perhaps the play's most memorable image. Janie Dee must be one of the most versatile performers currently on the British stage. She started her professional life as a dancer on the end of a pier, moved into musicals and then developed a career as an actress in straight plays. To prove her love of variety and ability to cope with any challenge, she has even produced The London Concert for Peace. Her abilities have been recognized in an unusual way, since she must be one of few people to have won Olivier awards for her performances in both a musical and a straight play. Having realised that dancing on the end of a pier or even on TV was not a long-term option, this talented lady decided that her future lay in acting. "What I really wanted to be was an actor; also I thought acting will last longer. It will take me on in this wonderful profession which I truly love, which is theatre, for longer. "I couldn't sing and I wanted to sing so badly and when I was offered a teaching job in Rome I thought I will learn to sing in Rome properly and then came back to England with a voice". She quickly moved from the chorus to the front line and starred in Nicholas Hytner's production of Carousel that brought her first Olivier. While she was at the National, Richard Eyre asked her read for a straight play and "I was thrilled to bits to be asked to do a straight play, which was Johnny on a Spot at the Olivier. He said to me you must do more of this." The breakthrough with Carousel was clearly something of a labour of love. "I was in love with the musical, in love with the play. The person I was playing I thought was just wonderful, gorgeous. Nick Hytner couldn't have directed it better and it couldn't have been more thrilling to be in the rehearsal. We had Kenneth MacMillan taking us through our paces daily, we had Nick Hytner, we had Justin Brown who had been Leonard Bernstein's protégé -- it was filled with the greats and Nick was saying I want you to be the best dancers, the best singers, the best actors ever" and in the case of Janie Dee, the Olivier judges believed that she was. She also came away with the feeling that this was how she should be in life with a goal to be "the best that one can be at whatever activity you choose to undertake". On a less serious level, she also became the best android ever playing Jacie Triplethree in Alan Ayckbourn's Comic Potential, a role that brought another Olivier despite the reservations that she sometimes had about her own performance, but, as she says, she is her own toughest critic. Indeed, she is happy to tell an anecdote against herself. After what the star regarded as a disastrous performance, she was forced to accept that nobody in the audience, including her agent, had spotted that she was not at his superlative best. Indeed, more recently the cast had reacted in a similar way to their performance on the first night of Shadowlands, which has had universally positive and in some cases rave reviews. The next steps in the success story were engendered by Harold Pinter, whom she met through Peter Hall. "I had a wonderful, wonderful discovery with him (Pinter) that it could be like real life doing his work. He as well as I was thrilled to find that we could make his work really visceral and not as he hates, Pinteresque. The revelation was to discover that we could speak as we do and make it very real. Sometimes in Harold's work, you come so close to your own self, your own truth, that it can be very painful -- but it is certainly worth going there." Janie Dee clearly has a great deal of respect for the Pinter/Hall team. "Being with them both in the rehearsal is great because they have a long relationship -- and they've had their ups and downs which has formed a great friendship and they have such love and respect for each other. "It's very moving being in the rehearsal room with them, they tell each other the truth. They love each other dearly and they work brilliantly together or separately. Everything they say is like gold dust. I feel I've heard great things from them both. I've had some very great conversations with Harold which I treasure, I'll really treasure. He's truly interested in what you have to say." And what does the future hold? Janie Dee will be starring in a revival of Alan Ayckbourn's A Woman in Mind in Scarborough in autumn 2008 and has a couple of other irons in the fire before that. Interestingly, she would also love to do a TV costume drama and a film. "I don't particularly want to do loads and loads of telly but I'll do theatre till its coming out of my ears. I want to be very careful what I do on the telly because I value the anonymity and the freedom of being able to create somebody that you don't recognize, which is helpful if you're not a recognizable person". With so much talent and versatility as she demonstrates yet again in Shadowlands, this lovely, dedicated actress certainly deserves that fame, even if she does not desire it. Read Philip's review of Shadowlands
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