Why silent star Sally is making a big Oscars splash
SOn Tuesday, the academy presented it with 13 nominations, including best picture, and best actress for Hawkins. The 41-year-old plays Elisa, a cleaning lady at a U.S. government scientific research facility in the late Fifties. She cannot speak, but is eloquent in other ways — sign language, an inner musicality, a silent-era film performer’s physical dexterity — and that expressiveness blossoms when she forms an intimate bond with the amazon sea god that security forces are holding, shackled, in a pool at the laboratory. Elisa and her closest (and, in fact, only) friends, played by Octavia Spencer and Richard Jenkins, help her liberate the creature from his chains. The film is an homage to the silver screen, from the silent era to splashy musicals, to sci-fi B-movies and Cold War thrillers. ‘Fred astaire and Ginger Rogers were what I watched as a child. I mean, I was obsessed,’ Hawkins told me, as she recalled a sequence in the film, where she’s in the kind of dress Ginger might have worn, that captured ‘the Busby Berkeley musicality of it all’. The Shape Of Water’s director, Guillermo del Toro, references practically the whole history of motion pictures in his gloriously made film. Hawkins observed that Charlie Chaplin, laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton were big influences on her, too. ‘Guillermo was using those silent films as a source for Elisa — and as far back as I can remember, those same films were big in my life,’ she said. ‘Guillermo and I talked a lot about Elisa having this music in her head, and she dances through life until love takes over her heart . . . and sort of explodes.’
DEl Toro wrote the film with the actress from South london in mind, having watched all her movies — particularly the three she made with Mike leigh: all Or Nothing, Vera Drake and her break-out feature Happy-Go-lucky.
He made contact with Hawkins, explained the premise of the film, and she was hooked. Not least because, unbeknown to the director, she had been writing a story... about a woman who’s metamorphosing into a mermaid.
‘Very different to Guillermo’s film, but strangely overlapping,’ she mused, adding she hoped to turn her tale into a short film.
Hawkins didn’t hear anything back after that initial approach. ‘I thought it would go away; go to someone much better, bigger, shinier . . . as they tend to do in Hollywoodland,’ she said.
But del Toro had not forgotten her. ‘I came to understand that once Guillermo has a set idea, and a vision, and knows who he wants, he’s very loyal and you feel like you’re part of his family for ever,’ she told me.
The film-maker and his leading lady were ideal collaborators. They already had the shared obsession with film history and both were writing screenplays featuring an aquatic character.
‘There’s a kind of creative soup out there somewhere — there are moments of synchronicity like that,’ Hawkins said.
She finds it hard to comprehend that, thanks to Elisa, she has now garnered her second Oscar nomination (her first was for Blue Jasmine in 2014). ‘I didn’t think I would be at the Oscars once, let alone twice,’ she said.
She knows, too, how fleeting awards fame can be. ‘you’re only as good as the last thing you did,’ she said — which in her case is a Godzilla sequel.
Before that, though, she made Maudie, The Shape Of Water and Paddington 2, virtually back to back.
‘These things can go a different way suddenly. One day it’s there, and the next it’s not. you have to take it with a pinch of salt,’ she said, before telling me that her next project is a film called Eternal Beauty, directed by Craig Roberts, with whom she appeared in the indie movie Submarine.
HaWKINS is very clear about working on projects that ‘you’re really drawn to’. ‘you just make sure you’re with the right people, and you tap into your own needs, and try not to be overwhelmed — which is easier to say than do.’
Discipline is important, because Hawkins has health issues. ‘I have lupus, the chronic fatigue syndrome. I do get quite tired, but I don’t let it stop me,’ she said.
‘I’ve been very lucky with it, for the most part. It comes in waves. I’m not crippled with it, like some people. I just have to be aware and take it steady.’
The actress plans to stay in the U.S. for the Directors’ Guild awards, but will be home in time for the Baftas on February 18, where The Shape Of Water has 12 nominations. (Paddington 2 is also in the running for Outstanding British Film.)
She’s looking forward to seeing her parents, the prolific author/illustrator team Jacqui and Colin Hawkins, and her brother, the writer and creative director Finbar Hawkins. ‘I’m the runt of the family, to be honest,’ she joked.
Surely not, I protested. ‘If only you knew, it’s true,’ she replied. ally Hawkins was born to play Elisa, the heroine of the poetic fantasy love story The Shape Of Water — the most nominated film at this year’s Baftas and Oscars.