Looking Forward To Life After Death
Scotland on Sunday, 9 May 2004
By Aidan Smith
CELTIC'S bid for European glory bumped Sharon Small off the schedules, and when her cop drama returned to the box she finished the run having to eat lead. The Scots actress is now back on set filming The Inspector Lynley Mysteries for the summer, not knowing whether she'll survive the slugging. The acting game can be like that - a mystery in itself.
"I just hope I'm a cliffhanger," she says with a chuckle.
While a biblical thunderstorm rages, and office workers dive for cover from the lashing rain, Small is ensconced in a theatre dressing-room, preparing for her West End show, pondering her television fate, but also eagerly looking forward to her first visit to the Cannes Film Festival for the world premiere of her new movie.
"I'm kind of open about Lynley," she says, "and there are lots of scenarios I might like to happen. Maybe I'll live to fight another day. Maybe I'll be killed off and find myself on the dole. Or, you know, maybe something really amazing will come from Dear Frankie."
Dear Frankie is the second feature from the pen of screenwriter Andrea Gibb, whose Afterlife was a hit at last year's Edinburgh Film Festival, and will be screened in the prestigious Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.
"A small film with a big heart", according to Small, it's the tender story of a single mum (Emily Mortimer), on the run from a bad relationship, and her mute son who pitch up in Greenock. The boy pines for a father figure, forcing Mortimer to invent one who works at sea, and she fakes his letters until the lad, lovingly charting the progress of his ship on a bedroom map, starts looking forward to a reunion. But who is going to play dad? Enter Small as chip-shop boss Marie, who supplies a friend for the job then acts as a go-between for him and the boy. Mortimer is excellent, Jack McElhone as young Frankie unsurprisingly steals the show, and Small says she was just happy to be involved.
"When I read Andrea's script, I couldn't turn the pages fast enough, it really filled me up. Shona Auerbach, the director, originally had someone else in mind for Marie, so I had to do some serious lobbying to get the part."
The Glasgow-born actress spent happy teenage years on the Fife coast at Kinghorn and loved being back by the sea during the shoot. Filmed this time last year, as the brilliant summer started to kick in, Dear Frankie shows a Greenock that's a world away from the grim setting for Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen and, further back, Peter McDougall's violent dramas Just Another Saturday and Just a Boy's Game.
"Shona is very influenced by Polish cinema and the film has got a colour palette all of its own," adds Small. "Greenock is all golden and honeyed and doesn't look like it belongs in Scotland."
We meet at London's Haymarket Theatre, where the 36-year-old Small is starring in a stage version of the Nora Ephron rom-com When Harry Met Sally. Buffy babe Alyson Hannigan and Luke Perry, the peeling poster-boy from Beverly Hills 90210, take the title roles and Small plays the Carrie Fisher part, finding love immediately while Harry and Sally dither around for the next 12 years. Small's favourite line is: "Tell me I never have to be out there again."
As she gets ready to portray a neurotic New Yorker, Small displays all the usual actressy contradictions. One minute she's got her arms folded tightly across her chest, her big green eyes pulling off the impossible-seeming feat of giving absolutely nothing away, and after I tell her I'm joking when I say that most actresses are mad, she won't let it lie: "Do you think we are? Do you?" But seconds later she's all cool and knowing about work and relationships, and candid about both. Work first.
When I last interviewed Small three years ago, when Lynley was just beginning, she admitted to misgivings about appearing in a cop show. She wanted to make films and was envious of friends and fellow graduates from Kirkcaldy College such as Shirley Henderson who had already got on to the big screen. But things seem to have worked out OK for her. In tandem with her performances as spiky sergeant Barbara Havers, she has trodden the boards at the Traverse and played one of Hugh Grant's exes in About a Boy. Her West End debut has been another antidote to the occasionally boot-faced Havers.
"It's a fun, sassy American show, something different for me," she says. Now comes Dear Frankie. "My career has kind of gone in a slow curve, but it still seems to be headed in the right direction."
On TV, she made a sexy start in the gritty Bumping the Odds, but fluffy parts followed in Glasgow Kiss and Sunburn.
"Obviously I'm greedy and I wish there had been another great role in there. I've been envious sometimes if a part I really wanted has got away, but that's the kind of business this is and you just end up bitter and twisted if you hold on to that stuff."
The professional rejection the rest of us suffer maybe half a dozen times in our working lives - failing at job interviews - hits auditioning actors with thudding regularity.
"We are constantly putting ourselves up for approval. And we've got a natural propensity to say, 'What's wrong with me?', so if we don't get parts we can knock chunks out of ourselves. 'I'm too fat! My head's too small!'
"You can muck up an audition by being unconfident and stuck on the back foot and it's then that I have to have words with myself, rather than going, 'I should have been blonde.' I went up for Young Adam and Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself and lost out both times. But I try to dust myself off now, then move on to the next thing."
Three years ago, Small also spoke of her ambitions to become a mum. She had high hopes for one relationship, and for the first time in her life put the personal before the professional, but it ended last summer. She has a new boyfriend - "He's English and works in an office" - but it's early days for him. The nature of her job can undermine relationships, she says, and so can living in London. She still wants kids, but isn't anxious about motherhood any more.
"I went through a period where I was scared I was going to miss it. A while back I thought I would feel such loss if I didn't experience it and I was in a quagmire. There was a lot of pressure: 'Your fertility is declining, when are you going to have kids?' London is a very Sex and the City kind of place and I hit the age of 34 and went: 'OK relationship, where are you?'
"But when the last one ended, that anxiety was cast away. You can't control how your life will go. The job I do doesn't help in that respect, but I think I'm more relaxed about things now."
Previously, she thinks, she might have scared men away.
"I've been told I'm quite contained, closed, private, and I suppose a nice healthy guy would have gone, 'Uh oh, too much hard work.' I think I'm through that phase and I'm more open now, and more willing to accept that what will be, will be."
It's almost showtime. Small glances out of her window as the pinstripes scurry past. There are few certainties about love, but she says she's learned about one that's entirely specific to London.
"You never see the same guy twice."
