Culture on Friday
Frances O’connor ‘I said no to Harvey Weinstein’
Ask Frances O’connor, the Aussie-english star of tomorrow night’s much-hyped BBC drama Troy: Fall of A City, how she celebrated her 50th birthday last June, and she looks momentarily blank. “Did we go away?” she asks herself. “Did we go out for dinner? No, sorry, it’s gone,” she beams.
Not for O’connor, then, the neurosis that so often comes with confronting the half-century milestone. Just the other day, for example, she called an actress friend back in Melbourne, who answered the phone with a conspiratorial whisper: “Darling, I’m turning 50 this weekend, so I’ve gone away. I’m hoping the whole thing will pass unnoticed,” she added, much to O’connor’s amusement.
“Personally,” she says, “I couldn’t care less about numbers in that way. Like a lot of women of my generation we want to redefine age – how we are meant to be, look and act. It doesn’t happen to men, does it? “
It helps, of course, that O’connor’s a walking example of just how elastic age can be. She remains girlishly skinny, thanks to a 25-year yoga habit, and is dressed in black leather trousers, a poloneck jumper and trainers when we meet in the BFI’S Southbank Centre.
With long brown hair, smooth, un-tweaked skin and a pillow-lipped grin, she looks more like an ingénue than the veteran her CV might suggest. Her big break came as Fanny Price in the 1999 film Mansfield Park, and was shortly followed by a turn as the mother of a child-robot in Steven Spielberg’s AI in 2001; since then, among much else, she’s been nominated for a Golden Globe for her harrowing performance as the mother of an abducted child in BBC drama The Missing, as well as playing the longsuffering wife of philandering Mr Selfridge in the ITV period drama of the same name.
There any no signs of work drying up, either – forthcoming roles include horror sequel The Conjuring 2, and the US pilot of Locke and Key, opposite Danny Glover, in which she plays a widow struggling with alcoholism. This summer, she’s back in Australia to film Guy Pearce’s directorial debut, Poor Man. But, before all that, Troy.
The eight-parter, made at record expense by the BBC in conjunction with Netflix, is written by David Farr, who last hit the jackpot adapting John le Carré’s The Night Manager.
This time it’s a sword and sandals epic based on Homer’s The Iliad and the fabled lovers Paris and Helen, whose affair brought a city to its knees. Hecuba is the wife of King Priam (played by David Threlfall) – one half of a power couple who have made Troy great. She’s also the mother of Paris – a baby predestined to bring doom to Troy. “He should have been killed at birth but, as a mother, Hecuba just can’t do that,” O’connor says.
“Preparing for the role I found myself ruminating on the idea of maternal guilt – motherhood versus duty and career and whether you should sacrifice one for the other. The story is nearly 3,000 years old but, for me, it’s still symbolic of something that a lot of modern women can relate to.”
O’connor has a much-adored son, Luka, 12, born when she was 37. Career demands, she says, stopped her having children earlier.
“It’s so hard as an actress to say, “OK everyone. I’m taking the next year off!” Thank God I managed it once, whereas some women just keep working and forget to have a child. Still, I can’t deny I feel some regret about not having had another.” Born in Oxfordshire, O’connor moved to Perth aged two with her boisterous Catholic family. “I’m the third child [of four], bang in the middle, which means you have to fight for attention. No wonder I became an actress,” she laughs.
Although she now calls north London home, she returns often to Australia. Seven years ago, she and her long-term partner, actor Gerald Lepkowski, married in the same garden that she and her siblings had romped in as kids. The pair have never had “that element of, ‘I wonder if they’ll last?’,” she says, “apart from a blip in our late 20s when we separated for a while, before realising we’d made a terrible mistake. We’d been together since we met at drama school when I was 23. We’d already ironed out all the stuff that couples go through.”
There are issues particular to two actors in a relationship, of course, including the vagaries of who works and who doesn’t – O’connor being the busier, professionally – but, she declares, “it just works.”
Having Gerry, a strong, loving family and the right choice of agent beside her seems to have shored O’connor up throughout her career.
As a young actress in Hollywood, back then a hot bed of sexual harassment, she “worked with Harvey Weinstein on several occasions and yes, I did get calls from him saying, ‘Some people are coming up to my hotel room later, why don’t you join us?’ But my agent had warned me not to do that under any circumstances because she had other actresses on her books who’d had bad experiences. So when I got those calls I’d just say: “Oh, I’m a little bit tired tonight. Thanks for the offer.” More recently, she has worked on
Mr Selfridge with the actor Jeremy Piven – another Hollywood luminary at the centre of sexual misconduct allegations made by various women. Piven has denied all allegations.
“All I can say is that Jeremy never seemed predatory to me,” she says.
“Yes, he’s someone who’s been a star in Hollywood for a very long time, someone who liked to be treated in a certain way as a result, which could sometimes make him a pain in the arse. He’s also someone who ‘loves’ women, obviously. But I don’t think that makes him a predator and working with him I certainly never got that creepy vibe.”
She welcomes the new climate of honesty in her industry. For far too long, she says, women have been afraid to speak out. “The problem for actresses is that the stakes are so high and in a world where it’s already so hard to get a job, the last thing you need is to be branded difficult or a trouble maker. So women chose to protect their careers and to keep silent. But if we could have a climate where there aren’t career ending consequences for speaking out, and one where actresses of my generation are prepared to support and mentor younger actresses, then that would be so great.”
As a mother of a young son, she wonders about the future for boys, too. “At the moment it’s all about empowering girls – which is long overdue – but I worry that boys are getting overlooked. It must also be confusing to be growing up in a world where you’re not sure if it’s OK to give a girl a hug or tell her that she looks nice.”
She is working hard to make sure her son grows up happy, whole and empowered – not least because her role in The Missing brought the pain of losing a child so sharply into focus. “Emotionally I felt wrecked by [the show].” As you go through your life, she adds, “experience shapes you and it probably makes you a better and humbler person. I think it almost certainly makes you a better actress, too.” Another reason for O’connor to love being 50.
‘Boys are confused, growing up in a world where you’re not sure if it’s OK to give a girl a hug’