Ten Olivia Colmans don’t amount to diversity on screen
Have you reached peak Olivia Colman? Over the past few years, the actress has been very hard to avoid. Recently, there was her mumsy interpretation of the Queen in middle age in The Crown (“Oh dear”); then she took on a more complex maternal figure in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sublime film, The Lost Daughter. We have seen her as an unworldly murderess in real-life crime drama
Landscapers, and as a bereaved, broken landowner in the cinematic adaptation of Graham Swift’s
Mothering Sunday. She has joined the cast of Wonka (a Roald Dahl “origin” story), and last week it was announced that she would play Miss Havisham in the 717th TV adaptation of Great Expectations.
I do not begrudge Colman her success. She is a versatile actress who can both light up a screen with humour and mine the darkest depths, and ever since I first saw her spar with David Mitchell and Robert Webb in the sitcom
Peep Show, it was obvious that she had talent to burn.
But I also can’t help feeling that other actresses of her generation deserve a chance. You would think that the entire roster comprised Colman, Sheridan Smith and Maxine Peake, yet off the top of my head I can think of several female performers who deserve the kind of ubiquity that Colman enjoys. Kelly Reilly, Lydia Leonard, Nadine Marshall, Rachael Stirling, Rakie Ayola, Nancy Carroll, Indira Varma, Hattie Morahan, Denise Gough: at least three of them would have made great Miss Havishams. I can easily imagine Morahan, for instance – so brilliant as Elinor Dashwood in the BBC’S Sense and Sensibility around 15 years ago – trying to metabolise all that inner torment.
The acting industry, of course, has never been a fair one. There’s a muchquoted statistic: 90 per cent of actors are out of work 90 per cent of the time. More sobering still is a figure that came from a study at Queen Mary University of London, stating that only two per cent of actors are actually able to make a living out of their chosen profession. This report was published in 2019, and you can only imagine that in a post-pandemic world, where theatres in particular are having to tighten their purse strings, the figure must be even smaller.
Perhaps I am living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Actors are as much at the mercy of market forces as anyone else, and ever since the birth of cinema, executives have needed “stars” to sell their films. Indeed, you could argue that it was even worse in the Golden Age of Hollywood, when performers were almost exclusively hired for their looks, not for their actual abilities. The principles of the cinema were founded on selling a fantasy, and the untouchable allure of those early movie stars was part and parcel of that.
But today, the problem of seeing the same old faces is exacerbated by the fact that the call for diversity is greater than ever. Big pushes by companies such as the RSC (who have consciously assembled diverse casts for their
The industry has a ubiquity issue. Want someone young? Lily James. Old? Judi Dench
productions) have highlighted, and tried to rectify, the fact that certain minority groups do not have a fair chance of winning roles. But in TV and film, in particular, such decisive action is not being made.
It remains to be seen whether the industry’s ubiquity problem will be changed by the increasingly modish (and in my opinion, wrong) assertion that actors should only play parts reflecting their own experiences. If you think about it logically, although most actors would argue that versatility is a prerequisite for the job, it is unlikely that someone is so chameleonic that they deserve a CV as packed as Colman’s, and it’s clear to me that casting directors need to get off their backsides and into the theatres, where so much great work is being done.
Their job, then, is both to spot talent, and to convince the fat cats that an unknown who has brought the house down at the Lyric Hammersmith will make their project sparkle.
The problem manifests itself among all generations of actresses. (For some reason, it seems as though film and TV makers cast a wider net when it comes to men.) If you are a casting director looking for someone around the 30 mark, cast Lily James (which to me doesn’t seem terribly fair on Phoebe Fox or Ophelia Lovibond).
Or do you want an octogenarian? Go for Dame Judi. Far be it from me to knock a national treasure, or a titan of the acting profession, but she is one of a handful of actresses in their 70s and 80s who appear to be gainfully employed. You might think that very few are still going at that age anyway, but you would be surprised by the number of old-timers plying their trade on the pages of Spotlight.
I have lately been enjoying the current TV adaptation of Adam Kay’s
This is Going to Hurt, in which Ben Whishaw plays a junior doctor. I was particularly taken with the performance by the actress playing Mrs Winnicka, a salty pensioner intent on making Adam’s life even more difficult.
She looked familiar, and I realised as the credits rolled that it was none other than the great Sara Kestelman, one of the finest stage actresses of her generation – I remember her in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and a host of Shakespearean roles – and one-time acolyte of Ken Russell who never quite received the mainstream success that she deserved. Unfortunately, less than halfway through the series, Mrs Winnicka dies. That says it all, really.
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