Two-year trauma of actress playing the first British woman to swim the Channel
FOR most actors, learning to ride a horse or adopt a different accent for a film role is likely to be as tough as it gets.
However, for big- screen newcomer Kirsten Callaghan, training to play the first British woman to swim the English Channel was a traumatic experience.
The 32-year- old pushed her body to the limit to play Mercedes Gleitze in the forthcoming film Vindication Swim.
She put herself through three months of gruelling stamina training in the sea at Brighton, and then spent much of the next two years shooting in the freezing water without a body double or any camera trickery.
Ms Callaghan, who lives in the city, also wrote the film’s theme song. She said: ‘I suffered severe cramps on very cold days. There was a moment I was nearly pulled down by a huge mound of seaweed two miles out. When I found it tough, I would say, “What would Mercedes do?”. It would always be, “She’d carry on”.’
She posted on Instagram: ‘Even though I am clearly traumatised by the cold, cramp and seasickness, I am endlessly grateful to have played such an extraordinary woman.’
Vindication Swim, out this Friday, tells the story of forgotten sporting heroine Ms Gleitze, 26, who made history when her eighth attempt to swim the Channel paid off. She emerged from the water barely conscious at St Margaret’s Bay near Dover on October 8, 1927.
But four days later another woman, Dorothy Cochrane Logan, claimed she completed the swim first. She was later revealed to be a hoaxer but the scandal undermined Ms Gleitze’s victory, forcing the typist to embark on a ‘vindication swim’ to prove herself. The water was so cold she couldn’t finish it, but she convinced her doubters that her record should stand.