| ACTRESS'S WILLINGNESS TO SHARE, INNER GLOW ENHANCE HER BEAUTY
by Douglas Durden The first thing you notice about actress Alice Krige is her beauty. Even without makeup and dressed in unrelieved black, as she was for a weekend interview, she exudes the luminescent quality captured so well in the films "Chariots of Fire" and "Ghost Story." The second thing you notice is her intensity, her williness to share. Ask her about Jessie Benton Fremont, the role that brings her to Richmond, and she reels off anecdotes and accolades -- the kind of information that comes from research, not merely reading a script. Ask her about her career and she begins a list of the few performances she's pleased with and a longer list of the ones she's critical of -- a kind of oral therapy you wonder if you should be writing down. Her eagerness to communicate makes sense. Her father and brothers are doctors; her mother a psychologist. While a college student in South Africa, she herself majored in psychology as well as drama. Her latest role is that of wife to 19th century explorer/politician John Charles Fremont, played by Richard Chamberlain in the Sunn Classic Pictures' miniseries for CBS, "Dream West." It is now being filmed at various locations in and around Richmond with the help of the Virginia Film Office. "She was an extraordinary woman not confined by the stereotypes of her time and what people expected her to be," said Miss Krige of her character. Educated at home by tutors and her father, Missouri Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, Jessie was acting as her father's sounding board by age 14. Jessie's and Fremont's courtship, which culminated with an elopement, was much against the wishes of her parents. She was a mere 16; he was a mere second lieutenant. Hers was not a traditional marriage either, since Mrs. Fremont spent half her married life apart from her husband, who was off charting new territories or making new enemies. "But she always managed to bring to situations a great deal of charm and grace," pointed out Miss Krige, mentioning Mrs. Fremont's gift for management. While her husband was a general in the Union Army, she was responsible for improving conditions in the hospitals. "It's lovely to be allowed to play a woman of such accomplishment, but also such clarity of mind that she used at every phase of her life." Miss Krige's characters may not have always been given so much to accomplish, but they have always been noticeable. In "Chariots of Fire," in which she played the actress-girlfriend of runner Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), critics used words like bewitching and spellbinding to describe her. In "Ghost Story," in which she played a vengeful spirit, she came across as wildly seductive. She played Bathsheba to Richard Gere's David in "King David" and made a vivid impression in miniseries "Ellis Island" and "Wallenberg: A Hero's Story." While acknowledging that "every piece of work gives you something," Miss Krige is also her own harshest critic. She refers to an "awful" performance in "As You Like It," and only mentions "Wallenberg" and "Chariots of Fire" as work she's been pleased with outside of her stage performances. "Ghost Story," which seems to have left a vivid but unpleasant aftertaste, she admits to finding "extremely difficult. I found nudity difficult to do, which made (the movie) painful to do." Judging from the way she lights up when discussing it, the theater is where her real affection lies. She spent two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where her roles included playing Miranda to Derek Jacobi's Prospero in "The Tempest" and opposite the actor again in "Cyrano de Bergerac." She looks like someone opening a particularly choice gift when describing her work with Jacobi. "Miranda is the happiest part I've played. Every night, I'd always come out of the theater happier than when I went in." With the Royal Shakespeare Company, "you're in the marvelous position of performing two or three or four plays all at once -- and rehearsing another one. You're in the position of leaving work to lie and foment in the subconscious. It does things while you're doing other things. You come back to it after six days and you're on the tips of your toes. There's an enormous excitement to see what's going to happen." "Dream West," filming in town through December, is Miss Krige's second role with Chamberlain, who starred as the World War II Swedish hero Raoul Wallenberg last season for NBC. As she explains it, he wanted to work with her again; she, holding him in highest regard, wished to work with him. Location work is a way of life for performers. "You learn to cope with it," said Miss Krige, facing several weeks in Richmond. "It's funny the number of times I've burned myself on a hotel shower because I'm used to the last one, or the number of times I've given the number of the wrong hotel room." The crew, if it is a happy crew, "buffers you from the shock of a new place. . . . What is difficult is being away." She figures she will have spent nine months away from her home outside of London this year. "I have the biggest telephone bills anyone could have." In her spare time, she is working on a project inside an English prison with a director friend. The project, which includes acting and writing classes, has been going on for about a year. They plan eventually to make a movie inside the prison, an idea used in the United States with such films as "The Jericho Mile," but "without precedent" in England. "When I was in school, I thought drama could change the world, that theater could modify people. There (inside the prison), for the first time, I felt my skills were put to use. I felt I was making a difference in someone's life." It is an experience that has appalled her because of what prison life does to a prisoner's dignity, but it has also given her a new lease on acting. "It's taken me to the grass roots of acting. You're down there at the simple thing of making belief." Watching others starting fresh reconfirms her acting philosophy of approaching each role like "an utter innocent, like you've never done it before. That's what I need in acting." From mention of her work inside a prison, the conversation turned to her homeland, South Africa, a nation torn apart by its apartheid system. "It hurts me," said Miss Krige, whose sparkle began to dim. "I don't know what else the government needs to know it must dismantle apartheid. It is tragic folly . . . It breaks my heart because it is the most beautiful country with an extraordinary range of beauty." From the Richmond Times-Dispatch November 26, 1985 Copyright (c) 1985, 2007 Richmond Newspapers, Inc. |
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