The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘People feel threatened by clever women’
In her new play, Olivia Williams is cast as a brainy high achiever. It wasn’t a huge stretch, she tells Chris Harvey
‘Some people are frightened of intelligent women,” says Olivia Williams. “They feel threatened by them.” The 47-year-old actress is about to play a particle physicist in Mosquitoes, a striking new play by Lucy Kirkwood, who wrote the award-winning Chimerica. Olivia Colman will play her defiantly anti-intellectual sister, Jenny.
Williams has appeared as a snobbish, superior aristocrat in ITV’s period drama The Halcyon, and as the botanist wife of an atomic scientist in the American TV series Manhattan (available here on Amazon Prime). For Kirkwood’s play, there seemed little doubt which actress would take which role. Why do we assume Williams will play the clever sister? “I’m the middle-class daughter of lawyers, and went to Newnham College, Cambridge,” she says, noting that the all-female college’s first students were referred to as bluestockings. “It’s not a huge stretch.”
On the emotional vs rational spectrum, she tells me, she would be “a bit further towards the end where the rational people are”. But she admits she didn’t take science subjects at O-level, and couldn’t answer any of the science questions that the National Theatre’s marketing department set her. In fact, she says: “I am the Jenny of my family… actress, luvvie, can’t be relied on to turn up on time, can’t say what she’s going to be doing this time next week.” She laughs.
She is, however, on time to meet me at the National Theatre, whose new artistic director, Rufus Norris, is directing the play. She cycled from her home near Regent’s Park, and is recharging by munching on a muesli slice as we talk. She’s happily sweary, and shoots from the hip. She and “Colly”, as she calls Colman, have worked together before, on the 2012 film Hyde Park on Hudson. “We fell in love with each other. I said, ‘I’d love to do a play with you’ and she – I hope I’m not being indiscreet – said she didn’t like doing plays and didn’t think she’d go on stage again… but Rufus went to her with this, they came to me, and it was like all the bells ringing at the same time.”
Kirkwood’s play is set at the Swiss headquarters of CERN. Williams has drawn heavily on her research for Manhattan, for which she went to Los Alamos and met nuclear physicists. I ask if she thinks there is a disjunct between what scientists do and how their work is communicated to the public. It’s a problem, she says, especially when deciding who to believe on topics such as the environment. “I remember years ago reading an article in the Daily Mail with a picture of a melting iceberg, which said it was faked, and on the same day the Guardian saying climate change was happening… and going, ‘ Who do I believe?’”
Like her character, Alice, Williams has a sister, Sophie, who followed their “leftie” parents into a career in law. To find conflict between them, she has to reach back to the time when, having been tormented for being “posh” at a state junior school in “the days of Marxist education” during the Seventies, she turned the same insults on her sister when she left to attend a fee-paying girls’ school in Hampstead – though she was soon to follow her.
Does she think that girls’ schools equip women to deal with the opposite sex? “I’m terribly oldfashioned on this one,” she says. “I went to a central London girls’ day school that profoundly believed in educating women. I had plenty of interaction with boys, just not during school hours. I’m closer to the heterosexual end of the line of sexuality, so when the hormones went insane they weren’t impacting on my schoolwork. I think single-sex education helps women. It’s been shown that co-education helps boys but I feel that’s the girls involved being thrown to the lions.” She pauses, then adds: “I’ve said it now.”
Williams has been married to the American-born actor Rhashan Stone since 2003; they have two daughters, Esme, 13, and Roxana, 10. She describes herself as an interventionist parent. “We’re pretty controlling over screens and, particularly, access to the internet – for me, when you let kids on the internet, that’s like saying ‘Open the front door and wander around’. ”
Williams has an English Literature degree from Cambridge and was on the Man Booker Prize panel in 2016. “I’m never reading another book in my life – 156 novels in six months,” she laughs. At school, she says: “I wasn’t a particularly diligent student, but I was that kid in English who read Tess of the d’Urbervilles in a day, then sat there in class with the rest of the works of Hardy under my desk reading the next one and the next one, while everyone went through Tess sentence by f------ sentence.”
She was once the girlfriend of Radoslaw Sikorski, the Oxford University Bullingdon Club member turned Poland’s foreign minister, a pal of Boris Johnson and David Cameron. Would she have wanted to be in the all-male club herself? “Definitely. I was a fully paid-up, wannabe Sloane Ranger. I reinvented myself as one for a couple of years – there’s very little photographic evidence (and no social media), so I could revert to Doc-Martens-wearing, mueslieating north Londoner with no one saying, look here’s a picture of you
‘At school, I was that kid who read
in a single day’