| When mummy finds a new love |
| Actress Alice Krige admits her own childhood was safe and warm. In her latest film, she faces the traumas that confront many families in reality. |
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| Alice Krige confesses that the next time she feels broody and wonders if it may be time to have a baby, she will remember making the film See You in the Morning and ask herself whether she is really ready to face up to the responsibility of bringing a child into the world.
"It is something I have always found terrifying anyway," she says. "But the experience of being involved in this film really brought it home to me how vulnerable children are. So many things can go wrong with a relationship and the adults themselves may not understand why their needs can be satisfied at one time, but not another. How, then, can children be expected to understand? What do you tell a child of five about divorce? How do you explain? How do you make that kind of upheaval better? I don't think you can. There aren't any rules to help you. It's different for each individual and it changes as you go along." Alice, a South African actress, is best known in Britain as the mysterious opera singer in Chariots of Fire, and for her two-year stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company in starring roles such as Cordelia in King Lear and Miranda in The Tempest. Indeed, with her flowing hair and mermaid-like looks, she looks as though she has never quite left Miranda behind. In See You in the Morning, she plays the part of Beth Goodwin, beautiful, talented and fraught with guilt after her concert pianist husband kills himself. Left to bring up two children alone, Beth has no intention of getting into the agony of another relationship...until she is introduced to Larry Livingston, a New York psychiatrist, played by Jeff Bridges (of The Last Picture Show Fame). He too is alone. He used to be part of the perfect family, with a perfectly-beautiful wife, Jo, played by Farah Fawcett, and two perfectly-adorable children. Then, one day, Jo utters those earth-shattering words, "We need to talk." When he and Beth fall in love and eventually marry, Larry comes to grips, perhaps for the first time, with what many of his patients go through: he must face the task of building a relationship with two new stepchildren; he must get used to living in another man's house (and with another man's dog); and he must still find time to be father to his own children, whom he misses deeply. Spelled out in those stark terms, it is a wonder any of us survive. Larry and Beth barely do. "I found the film moving because it explores all of that territory without providing pat answers," says Alice. "At the end, you know they go off together-but not into the sunset. I think you think that in ten years' time they will probably still be together, but it's not going to be easy. It's going to be good just some of the time, and to me, that's what happens with relationships." "I don't have any experience of divorce in my own family, but I do have friends who haven't been able to work it out. It is such a painful process, yet we put children right in the middle of it. In the film there is one moment when Larry's little girl says to him after he's paid a visit home, 'You and mummy were so nice to each other, I pretended you were away on a long journey and had come back, and if you divorced mummy, why can't you divorce Beth?' She doesn't understand, you see. How can she?" There is another scene when Larry goes home for his mother-in-law's funeral. When it's time to go back to New York, he turns on the aeroplane steps for a final wave, but his children have already forgotten him and are playing with their new daddy. "I know," says Alice, "that it happened to Alan Pakula who wrote, produced and directed the film. We all spoke very intimately about ourselves in the rehearsals and promised we wouldn't reveal the details. But yes, it happens. And when it does, on the one hand you should be pleased because you love them, and on the other, it is the most terrible wrench to feel you, as a father, are dispensable." "For Larry, in the film, it is all made both better and worse by the fact that the moment he gets home, his children are on the phone wanting to know the name of the dolphin he told them about. And asking him to sing the song he always sang to them at bedtime, See You in the Morning. I found that unbearably sad. There are such conflicting and ambiguous feelings on everyone's part in a situation like that - the parents about each other, the children about the parents and indeed, about themselves." "In studies that have been done, it has been found that children always feel responsible for the parents' break-up. They think it is because the parent who leaves didn't like them. That happens when one parent dies as well. In the film, young Petey, who palys the cello, practises at every given moment. His mother understands, and says, 'He thinks that if only he had practised harder or had been better, his father wouldn't have killed himself.'" Petey, played by Lukas Haas (from Witness with Harrison Ford), and his 14-year old sister Cathy (Drew Barrymore, the kid sister in E.T.) have plenty more traumas in store. When their mother Beth, reluctant to leave them, is finally persuaded to go to Russia as a professional photographer, Petey accidentally discovers that their house, his precious father's house, is up for sale. He goes to commune with his father's grave and returns very late and soaked to the skin. Sister Cathy yells at him for scaring everyone and a frantic Larry yells at Cathy for yelling at Petey. Teenage Cathy is caught shoplifting the next day. Are we meant to think that Beth should have stayed home like a good little mother to look after her brood? "On the contrary," says Alice. "It was important that she went and left Larry to cope. Larry, at some cost to himself, even encouraged her to go, something he couldn't do in his first marriage. The disintegrating factor then was that every time his wife went away to work, he couldn't cope with it, so it's good that he learned that lesson." "No, the reason why things go wrong while Beth is away is because she didn't level with the children over the house. She is so over-protective, so over-anxious to make it good for everyone that she ends up doing the wrong thing. She should have told them the truth. They felt left out because she didn't tell them." Alice Krige's own childhood was a million miles away from such angst. "I just remember it as being supremely safe and very warm," she says. "It was an absolutely golden childhood. Perhaps that is why I feel I don't want a baby myself just yet. I don't see how I could have children and continue working. My mother was at home all the time when I was little. She didn't go back to work until I was 13. We had a wonderful family house in South Africa, with an enormous garden, an irrigation canal at the bottom of it, and a great tree where we used to sit and throw things at people." Her father and two older brothers were doctors and her mother was a clinical psychologist, so it was natural that Alice should follow them. "But when I announced I was going to be a doctor, my father and brothers were horrified," she says. 'What a dreadful waste,' they said. 'You will spend seven years training, then get married and have a child.' So they dissuaded me." "As it turns out, I spent four years at university and three at acting school, so I did seven years of training anyway. But I didn't get married until last May and don't have a child. So much for their prediction of waste if I'd taken up a place at medical school which they thought should go to a man." Alice, 34, met her husband, Paul Schoolman, while she was making the film, Chariots of Fire. He was an actor-turned film-maker, a student at the National Film School, attached to Chariots to see how it was made. It was love at first sight and five years ago, she joined him on his pet project - turning the prisoners of Dartmoor Jail into writers and actors through daily workshops. "While Paul was still an actor," explains Alice, "he wrote a lot of his own work, including a play about the early life of Julius Caesar which was put on at the Edinburgh Festival. Before Caesar became a great soldier, he was a wastrel, a debtor, and showed no promise of what he subsequently became. Once he had done the play, Paul wanted to turn it into a film and it popped into his head one day that the place to explore that kind of criminal behaviour would be a prison." The Caesar film is still awaiting funding, but since the project started, one prisoner has written a play which was put on at the Edinburgh Festival and has been commissioned to write an episode for the TV series The Bill. Another has become an actor, accepted at the Glasgow Academy. Alice and Paul have set up a charity to help prisoners like them make it in the outside world. "It has been an illuminating experience for me," says Alice. "In a way, these men have become my babies, I suppose. I feel very responsible for them. I am aware the no-one is in Dartmoor without good reason, but Paul and I can always walk out at the end of the day and as the gates clang shut behind us, there is nothing so sad." "We have never asked the men about their crimes or their backgrounds, but sometimes they want to talk about it. And more often than not, you find they come from broken homes, battered homes, homes bereft of love and understanding. It is then that I see once again a vulnerable child tossed aside in the bitterness and confusion of adult relationships and left to find the way forward alone. Is it any wonder that many of us take the wrong direction?" Source: An unknown UK publication Circa: 1988/89 |
| Words: Alex Palmer Pictures: Alistair Morrison |
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| Alice with screen husband Jeff Bridges and their combined family. |