MY MUM WAS TOO CLEVER TO COPE WITH LIFE

Sara dives deep into her own family experience to play this tragic role

SARA STEWART has proved herself to be a high impact performer over the years. The actress has shone in West End theatre roles and in television comedy and drama, from Sugar Rush to Miss Selfridge to Fresh Meat.

But what strikes on meeting the Edinburgh-born actress with the hint of an American accent is she brings no hint of complacency to the rehearsal studio. That’s despite being in the business long enough to have filmed the original Taggart.

“You never arrive anywhere,” she says refreshingly, of taking on a new role. “It’s about starting from the beginning every night.

“All you have to draw on is yourself. And as you get older the basket of experience is more full. Of good and bad.”

Sara’s latest role will see her dig deep into the basket. She plays Martha in a new production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?.

Edward Albee’s story is searing dissection of the breakdown of a marriage – with all its bickering, savagery and character assassination. It’s a roller coaster in a living room. The actress reveals why it has been top of the roles she has always wanted to play.

“I read it 25 years ago and fell in love with it,” she maintains.

“Albee, you see, has written about people who were like my family.

“My grandfather was a New York publisher. My mother was an academic and went to Harvard, but had a nervous breakdown.

“She was not mentally stable and became an alcoholic who drank herself to death.”

Sara adds; “My mother had a genius IQ, she was incredibly beautiful, but she lived with this sense of disappointed expectations.

“She should have been a writer, but wasn’t. And her husband wasn’t quite as clever as her. I guess she felt it was isolating.

Stewart, who played Martha Wayne in movie Batman Begins, adds; “I think if you are a very intelligent person with high expectations you end up dumbing down to try and connect with someone on a wavelength.

“My mother had high opinions of herself – yet she was so under-confident at the same time.

“At one point she was on a high trajectory, she worked for Newsweek, but she kept slipping, somehow paralysed by mental illness.”

There are real parallels with Martha, played by Elizabeth Taylor alongside Richard Burton in the 1966 film.

“Martha was part of this generation of brilliant women who were frustrated because society didn’t give them an outlet, stuck behind their husbands.

“And if they are cleverer than them, how frustrating was that?”

Sara’s parents, her dad an English teacher and her mum a social worker, met during a summer course in Edinburgh. But their marriage was deeply unhappy.

“I grew up in that world of two repressed 50s American academics who were continually outsmarting each other. It was a world of verbal warfare.”

Sara adds, in soft voice; “I think there was a lot of repressed emotion in the family.”

THE family were different from the others in her Edinburgh street, she recalls, grinning. “We were quite exotic. I remember we had salad and radiators.”

Sara spent summers at her grandmother’s home in Connecticut.

Back in Scotland, her parents’ were connected to the arts world.

“We were surrounded by theatre. If anyone came to Edinburgh during the Festival we’d be involved somehow. I’d work backstage and my mum would cart me off to the theatre workshop whenever she got the chance.”

She adds, with a knowing grin: “I was a lively spark and she wouldn’t have the energy to cope with me so I’d be farmed out to theatricals a lot, to youth theatre and later on I got into