This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
I’m endlessly cast as The Bitch,” Geraldine James sighs. “I have played so many ghastly women and I’ve absolutely no idea why.” She pauses for effect, feigning bewilderment. “I just can’t fathom it.”
Certainly, James’s 50-year career has had its share of monstrous female characters, from Lady Maud in Blott on the Landscape to Milner in Dennis Kelly’s brilliant conspiracy thriller Utopia. Those characters she declares that she is “done with” playing, tempered by all the others, have made her one of British drama’s great specialists in “difficult” women: flinty matriarchs, icy wives and widows, women with dark secrets, sharp edges and complicated pasts.
Now, in Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, adapted by Kate Clanchy for Radio 4, James plays historian Claudia Hampton, whose life and death propel the Booker-winning novel. Brilliant, selfish, uncompromising and frequently cruel – particularly to her distant, damaged daughter Lisa who sits by her deathbed, desperate for some explanation of her mother’s lifelong indifference towards her – Claudia definitely qualifies as difficult, if not outright ghastly.
“She’s dying. Why would she make compromises now?” James asks. “Why be polite? It’s rather sad that she struggles to even be kind, but I found her entirely sympathetic, understandable and believable.” Though she suspects that her reaction is not universal. “She doesn’t behave like a man thinks a woman should behave.”
Moon Tiger’s narrative circles through Claudia’s past – wartime Egypt, lost love, family wounds, an incestuous relationship – exploring memory and history, expectation, regret and loneliness. “When you get older, suddenly you’re remembering, you’ve got such a bank there, a whole lifetime to be remembered and dipped into and revisited,” James says.
When we speak, the actor is brimming with energy following a day’s rehearsals for a play that shares many of Moon Tiger’s preoccupations. In 45 Years, which opens at Chichester Festival Theatre on 12 June, Kate (James) and Geoff (Gabriel Byrne) are planning their 45th wedding anniversary when Geoff gets a letter from Switzerland detailing the discovery, in melting Alpine ice, of the body of his lover before Kate – the catalyst for an excavation of their relationship.
“The more we work on it in rehearsals, the deeper it gets and the more complicated,” says James who this year will be celebrating her own 40th wedding anniversary with her husband, actor and director Joseph Blatchley. “That’s a sign of good writing.” And James says she is increasingly finding good writing insofar as there are many more interesting parts for older actresses than there were 10 years ago. “I’ve had some fabulous characters recently.”
Why the shift? “I used to say, rather glibly, that Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren happened – but it’s true. Helen’s constantly reinventing herself, doing astonishing and brilliant things, at 80. Maggie creating her character in Downton at the age she was. Judi being endlessly brilliant. There’s no denying it and people love them. Like people loved our queen. And I have to add David Attenborough because he’s incredible. 100!”
James remembers being warned, in her 30s, that time was running out. “For quite a long time, that was absolutely the truth. When I hit 50, things got very suddenly very quiet. But since I’ve been 60, I’m like, ‘Blimey, this is amazing!’”
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If there’s a key to her longevity, perhaps it is – abundance of ghastly women notwithstanding – her refusal to play a type. After breakthrough success in The Jewel in the Crown, she was inundated with scripts for upper-middle-class ingénues. “Ten scripts a day of posh girls,” she says. Her agent urged her to resist, to do something different, so she did – specifically the role of fretting mother hen Rose in Kay Mellor’s drama about sex workers in Bradford, Band of Gold. It’s testament to her talent that she moves freely between high- and low-status characters, as compelling as a deaf prostitute in Dummy (1977) as she is as the proud, no-nonsense farmer Marilla Cuthbert in Netflix’s Anne of Green Gables reboot, Anne with an E.
“That’s been my lodestar,” she says. “I never want to be the same.” That refusal to be fixed perhaps stems from a historical sense of displacement. Born Geraldine Thomas and educated at boarding school, she remembers feeling uneasy with her own privilege and out of place in school’s rigid hierarchy. Looking from train windows at west London tower blocks as a child, she imagined a life that seemed warmer and more communal than her own: “I always felt I was in the wrong life.”
Drama school changed everything. Rejected by Rada, she instead went to Drama Centre London, where she finally “found my tribe”. “It was a real education in being a human being,” she says. “I suddenly realised, ‘Oh, that’s what I am. An actor.’”
Not just an actor but one with more work than she can handle. “I shudder to say this, but I would like a bit more time off. I have a family that I absolutely adore and would love to spend more time with my grandchildren. The trouble is, I keep getting offered these marvellous parts.”
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