Pain and pleasure grist for actress’s mill
In reading poems of Sylvia Plath, Rampling mines her own dark memories about her late sister
Charlotte Rampling and Sylvia Plath: it’s a marriage made in purgatory.
The husky-voiced actress with the basilisk stare and the death-drenched author who finally lived out her suicidal fantasies.
It took Luminato to combine them, along with cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton, for an evening of music and poetry called The Night Dances, part of the 7 Monologues series, this one presented at the Fleck Dance Theatre on June 20 and 21.
“I first discovered Plath in my early 20s,” says Rampling from her Paris home about the American poet who killed herself in 1963 when she was 30 and became more famous after death then she ever was before.
“And then years later, Sonia and I were looking for something to do together and she said, ‘Do you know Sylvia Plath?’ ”
The question is whether Rampling chose Plath or vice versa.
There are points of congruence between the British-born actress known for a career spanning from 1966 movie Georgy Girl to TV series Dexter, in which she appeared in 2013, and the tortured poetess who gassed herself in the kitchen on a wintry London morning while her children slept upstairs.
“I tend to get close to people who have lived on the edge that I lived on and been to the dark places that I’ve been to,” says Rampling.
The darkness started early for both Rampling and Plath, with their fathers.
Plath’s father was a stern German professor who died when she was 8. Rampling’s British father was an army officer and Olympic gold medallist who “brought me up very severely. I went through what a lot of young women go through with their fathers. The burden of their expectations.
“In the end, when we were both older, I had a positive relationship with my father, but it took a long time. The problem with your parents is that you only get to see pieces of them when you’re growing up. You can never understand them.”
But a greater darkness was waiting. When Rampling was 20, her 23-year-old sister gave birth prematurely and committed suicide. It remains a memory she has never been able to eradicate and performing the work of Plath is a constant reminder of it.
“Sometimes when you have something that hurts, you keep returning to it, you go and scratch it. Let’s make it bleed some more.
“You have to go to hell to be able to extract the pain that life will give you and use it to give you incredible moments of clarity. Those violent contrasts in your life enable you to feel things deeply.”
After a starry start to her film career opposite James Mason, Alan Bates and Lynn Redgrave in Georgy Girl, she went on to a pair of highly decadent works that coloured everyone’s perception of her from then on: Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), about a dazzlingly corrupt Nazi family, and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) where she played a concentration camp survivor involved in a twisted sado-masochistic relationship with a former SS officer, played by Dirk Bogarde.
“At the time, everyone thought it was so controversial and they thought the life I was living was so scandalous,” she says, alluding to the ménage à trois with Bryan Southcombe and Randall Laurence she shared during that period.
“We just thought we were having something normal, but there is no such thing as normal anymore. So much is being exposed. You can choose how you want to live and no one can say that much about it.”
But Rampling was always regarded as an outlier, someone who flouted convention with her nude modelling assignments, her X-rated films and her not-forprime-time personal life.
Bogarde, who starred with her in several of her most infamous films, credited her with having “The Look,” a take-noprisoners gaze she used both onscreen and in real life.
“Did I know I had ‘the look’? Not until people told me. Then I looked for it and saw what they were getting at. It has to do with the intensity of looking and being at the same time, and that is always what I’ve radiated. What you see may not be what you get, but it was what I am really thinking and feeling.”
She looks back on her life with a pleasing detachment. “You only know what you’ve lived through, especially as a young person. I lived in the time that I lived in. I did the things that I did. Young people today are living in the time they live in now and doing the things that they do.
“We’re different, but we’re also somehow the same. That is how the world goes.”
The world has continued to provide Rampling with an ongoing source of surprises, some good, some bad.
She had been married to the French composer Jean Michel Jarre for nearly 20 years when she picked up a tabloid newspaper one day and discovered that he was having affairs with other women.
“At first, I had a complete breakdown. I fell apart totally. Then I said to myself, ‘This is matière, this is modelling clay, I will turn it into whatever I choose.’ ”
What she chose was a whole new midlife career, starring in bold films such as Swimming Pool, Heading South and The Eye of the Storm.
She suddenly became a star to a whole new generation of North American viewers when she appeared in the final season of Dexter as Dr. Evelyn Vogel, Michael C. Hall’s tragic therapist.
“Anything that connects with your being, with who you are, makes for a rewarding journey. Dexter did that for me. I suddenly pinged and said, ‘This is what I want to do next,’ and it was a very neat chapter in my life. Now people who never knew me before come up to me in grocery stores to tell me they like my work. That’s strangely rewarding.”
But her current work with Plath means so much more to her.
“I dive into these words and these situations every time, and they continue to have enormous resonance and meaning for me. Yes, they are personally painful. They remain a raw experience every time and it takes what it takes from me, but somehow it also gives me strength.”
Her favourite poem is “Lady Lazarus,” with its searing declaration: “Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.” Rampling pauses. “Not much you can really say after that, is there?”
As for what happens after death, you can almost hear the Gallic shrug before she speaks.
“It’s just the end. Fin. They used to put that at the end of films. They don’t anymore. Pity.” The Night Dances can be seen at the Fleck Dance Theatre, 207 Queens Quay W., on June 20 at 8 p.m. and June 21 at 4 p.m. Go to luminato.com for information.