Spirit of youth impresses Stevenson
Actress Juliet Stevenson, 61, tells Victoria Lambert why she prefers the attitude of the next generation to her own.
‘Women are definitely judged morally very, very differently to men,’’ says Juliet Stevenson, managing to sound both indignant and perfectly reasonable at the same. ‘‘You would have expected things to change over the years, but they haven’t, not fundamentally. We make progress and things slide back again.’’
Stevenson, 61, one of Britain’s best-known actors, is well-placed to comment on how hard it is to be a woman in this or any other age. She delivered a barnstorming, sexually awoken Gertrude in
Hamlet, starring Andrew Scott, earlier this year, and also starred in Wings at the Young Vic as Emily, a fiercely independent aviator and wing walker whose reality is destroyed by a stroke.
Meanwhile, in the Nazi legacy drama Let Me Go, she plays Helga, a woman abandoned by her concentration camp guard mother in 1941 at the age of four, who passes on this sense of rejection to her own child. The film, based on the memoir by Helga Schneider, follows four generations of women as they deal with the legacy of abuse and trauma.
‘‘It is a riveting, extreme story,’’ says Stevenson. ‘‘Helga loses her mother at 4, and then learns it was to go off to be a camp officer at Auschwitz. And when they finally meet up, decades later, Helga discovers her mother is unrepentant. She is a monster.’’
Stevenson adds: ‘‘It is such an extreme story, but it pulls at fears we deal with every day: isolation, terror, and feeling unloved or unparented. And it shows how abuse can be passed down generations, because the abused know no other language. In Helga’s family, she relates best to her own granddaughter. She clings to her.’’
In real life, north London-based Stevenson, who has two children with her long-term partner, anthropologist Hugh Brody, is part of a four-generation family, too. Although not yet herself a granny, her 91-year-old mother Virginia has great-grandchildren thanks to Stevenson’s brother Johnny (who died in a car crash aged 48 in 2000). ‘‘I adore babies and tiny children,’’ she says, ‘‘I can’t wait to be a grandmother.’’
The family is very close – there is another brother Tim – perhaps because they moved around every two years thanks to their father Michael, an army officer.
‘‘My experience of life has been utterly and completely different to my mother’s. She had no opportunities. I had loads. I was free to make my own choices. My mum had to sacrifice her entire working life, trailing around the world as an army wife.’’
She adds: ‘‘But then my age group were the first generation of women with full-time careers and working lives, combined with hands-on parenting; really juggling like crazy.’’
Perhaps this is why Stevenson feels closer in life experience to son Gabriel, 16, and daughter Rosalind, 23.
‘‘I think Rosalind has had the same freedoms I have had. In some ways, it is easier for her generation than ours. You don’t have to cut through politically at home the way we did, or certainly the way I did with my dad. We don’t have the same arguments. Our generation had a lot to resist; they don’t have so much.’’
So does she recognise any truth to the ‘‘snowflake’’ tag often applied to current youngsters, implying they are too delicate for their and our own good?
‘‘No, not at all. I seem to have a houseful of young people all the time, friends and colleagues, university mates of my daughter, and I am completely inspired by them. There is so much hope in them. In fact, I feel much more at home with them than my own generation.’’
Stevenson’s peer group included Alan Rickman, with whom she starred – can it be 27 years ago? – in the much-loved Anthony Minghella film Truly,
Madly, Deeply. Both Rickman and Minghella have died since, with Stevenson saying last year of Rickman’s death:
‘‘We feel we’ve lost our leader, we’ve lost a king. We all feel like we’ve lost the steering wheel in our car.’’
But she is grateful for her new young work colleagues: Hamlet was directed by 30-year-old Robert Icke; Wings was the creation of 36-year-old Natalie Abrahami, who also directed Stevenson in the critically acclaimed Happy Days in
2014. ‘‘I feel at home, that I have found my tribe.’’
She appreciates, she says, the way young people are ‘‘very engaged with world affairs. They have no patience with our parliamentary system. They say, let’s make something happen here, roll up their sleeves and to hell with it. No sitting around on committees, they do it through social media. I love that spirit.’’
Does she see them having a
1960s social revolution of their own, then?
‘‘In a way, it is already happening: sit-ins outside St Paul’s, environmental activism, anti-globalist protests. There is a revolution going on but it’s not John Lennon and Yoko Ono sitting in bed, or putting flowers into the barrels of guns. It is much more. Social media has freed young people, and so they’ve learnt to use it to raise money really quickly.’’
Stevenson has seen this at firsthand though her work supporting refugees with Citizens UK’s Safe Passage project in Calais. However, she also sees the downside to social media which she believes creates a cult of the individual.
‘‘The selfie world means endlessly participating in narcissism and materialism. They don’t look out but in. I was standing on top of a mountain in Canada earlier this year and watched a couple come up slowly to the top. She was so dolled up. And they sat at the top, took a selfie, and started walking down. At no point did they look at the view.
‘‘I saw the same thing in Austria; a couple taking a selfie of themselves in front of by Gustav Klimt. It’s an insidious culture which makes people obsess about themselves and think individualistically. And once we behave as individuals, it is easier to divide us. Individualism is being encouraged because it stops people coming together.’’
This need for unity is partly what inspired her to get involved with the young refugees in Calais.
‘‘If we don’t show them what it means to receive compassion and to be welcomed, how do we expect them to grow up be kind to others?’’ She sees a parallel to Helga and her daughter here – the way trauma can become like a fault-line running through generations: ‘‘What kind of adults will they grow up to be if they feel abandoned and lost?
That Stevenson is politically earnest is no surprise, but she points out that her family life is as madcap and demanding as anyone else’s.
‘‘Our house is very busy – there’s a lot of human traffic through and that means it’s quite untidy. I do love spaces to have beauty in them but it’s a losing battle. So I am hellish busy, picking up between midnight and 2am, restoring the house to order – doing my chores.’’
She laughs: ‘‘Maybe I like order at home because my life is chaotic. I’m always running up escalators and tubes, getting to places by the skin of my teeth.’’
❚ Let Me Go (M) is now screening in cinemas.