SISTER RUTH HAS SOME VERY BAD HABITS, SAYS AISLING
THE sisterhood on the set of Black Narcissus clearly took no vow of silence when it came to discussing their costumes. ‘The habit? I hated it by the end of the shoot,’ said actress Aisling Franciosi, who appears with Gemma Arterton and Diana Rigg (in one of her last roles), in the three-part mini- series based on Rumer Godden’s classic 1939 novel about nuns and repressed sexuality.
Sisters from an Anglican missionary order travel to a remote part of the Himalayas to establish a school and a medical outpost in a mountain-top palace known as The House of Women, because it was once where a warlord kept his harem.
Franciosi, 27, who plays psychologically fragile Sister Ruth, said the running joke during filming in Nepal ‘was that we’d burn all the costumes by the end of the shoot’, though she stressed that the hated habits did in fact survive. ‘It was our little fantasy.’
The wimple and veil affected their hearing — ‘we were all saying: “Sorry, what?” at each other, much like today wearing masks’ — and stuck out so far ‘that you really had to turn your head if you wanted to properly look at someone or talk to them’.
But then maybe that was the point of them, she noted, ‘you shouldn’t be averting your attention’. But looking where they shouldn’t is exactly what gets the nuns — in particular Sister Ruth, who has lustful, unrequited feelings for Alessandro Nivola’s land manager Mr Dean — into trouble.
She becomes insanely jealous when she imagines that Arterton’s Sister Clodagh, the Sister Superior in charge of the mission, also has feelings for Dean.
Sister Ruth ‘just wants to be seen’, Franciosi said. So when Mr Dean gives her the tiniest crumbs of acknowledgement she sees them for something much more than they are. ‘She’s a tragic figure rather than just a crazy person.’
Franciosi will be familiar to many thanks to her seductive performance as Katie Benedetto, the teen babysitter embroiled with Jamie Dornan’s killer in The Fall.
She went on to deliver a knock-out performance as Clare, an Irish convict in Tasmania seeking to avenge her family in Jennifer Kent’s searing film The Nightingale. And she has been much in demand since. When we spoke she was just completing work on an untitled film for Netflix starring Sandra Bullock and Viola Davis, adapted from Sally Wainwright’s drama Unforgiven.
Before her audition for Sister Ruth, she hadn’t seen the 1947 cinema version of Godden’s book by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell starring Deborah Kerr and featuring an iconic, unhinged portrait of Sister Ruth by Kathleen Byron. (Interestingly, Pressburger’s grandson, Kevin Macdonald, is a producer on the new version that will be unveiled on BBC1 from December 27.)
She was nervous about watching the original, but found it ‘beautiful’. ‘It’s a really good story, but we have a new take on it for a new audience,’ she told me. When the Pressburger-Powell film came out Sister Ruth was condemned for being a malignant force, ‘ crazed with sexual desire’, as Macdonald recounts in his biography of his grandfather.
But Franciosi said she saw Ruth’s downfall through a more humane lens. And in fact the mini-series as a whole is much more sympathetic to the female characters than the movie.
Director Charlotte Bruus Christensen and writer Amanda Coe’s collaboration, plus Arterton’s strong involvement, give the 1930s-set story a few modern brushstrokes, while keeping it true to the time — and the social conventions of the region, as barbaric as they might seem. Another welcome change is that the locals are no longer played by white actors in dark make-up. (Jean Simmons performed the part of the nubile native girl Kanchi in the original.)
Franciosi describes herself as ‘Irish, but with Italian blood’. Her parents — Irish mum and Italian dad — lived in Italy before her birth.
‘My mum has a lot of sisters in Dublin and she flew home and I was born slapbang in the centre of Dublin.’
Initially, her interest in acting was sparked by Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones. ‘That made me want to be an archaeologist, because he got to have these amazing adventures,’ she said. ‘Then my mum explained that wasn’t what real archaeologists did.’ She still liked what Ford did, though, and set her sights on acting instead, studying in Dublin and quickly finding work i n London.
To start with she was cast as teenagers all the time, but The Nightingale changed that. And so, I predict, will Sister Ruth.