» The Interview: A rare creature
Actor and East Sussex resident Gina McKee talks to Bella Todd about the truth behind that ‘sphinx-like’ exterior
If Gina McKee has a greater than average reticence when it comes to discussing her private life, she could easily claim to have a greater than average excuse. Like most actors, the first apprehension of her own fame came when she was recognised
by a member of the public while going about her daily business. Rather atypically, she was stark blooming naked at the time.
“I was in the showers in our municipal swimming pool in Highbury Fields,” she recalls, “and this woman came running in saying, ‘have you been on the telly?’ So I stood there, naked, with suds running down my face from my hair, and I said, ‘I have actually, yeah’, and she said, ‘Oh good, then I’ve just won a bet.’
“The worst thing, though, was she then took a step back and just looked me up and down, very, very slowly. And that’s when I felt, ‘this is the weirdest thing, I don’t know how to deal with this’.”
Someone else might have at least asked for a cut of the bet. But Gina, who’s now happily resident in East Sussex and making her Chichester Festival Theatre (CFT) debut, is all grace. A tall alabaster beauty from a coal mining family whose voice is still softened by County Durham vowels, she is a curious combination of warmth and reserve, swerving questions about her homelife with the elegance of a swallow.
So it’s no surprise she’s carved a career out of making pale creatures interesting. Her performances are at once modest and magnetic. She is also the only female actor of her generation ever to be described with regularity as ‘sphinx-like’ – although those who know her well, she laughs, would find this “amusing – if not hilarious”.
“Sometimes all you want to do is scream and shout and roll around on the floor like a toddler in a strop”
Having won three Best Actress awards while starring alongside Christopher Eccleston and Daniel Craig in Peter Flannery’s landmark ‘90s TV series Our Friends In The North, Gina further made her name as the aloof beauty Irene Forsyte – costume drama’s most famous rape victim – in the 2002 remake of The Forsyte Saga.
Elsewhere she has made subtley mesmeric figures out of the quietly devoted nurse in Stephen Poliakoff’s royal drama The Lost Prince and Hugh Grant’s wheelchair-bound ex in Notting Hill, or as Kenneth Branagh’s terminally ill wife in the Donmar’s recent production of Ivanov. Earlier this year, she translated emotional remoteness into smooth cynicism to play a jaded civil servant in Armando Iannucci’s brilliant political satire In The Loop.
“In The Loop was like a shot in the arm,” she says. “Everybody else from the English cast had worked with Armando and his improvisation methods before on The Thick Of It, so on my first day, when we had a little rehearsal, I felt more like the new girl than I’d ever done before. But they were very welcoming, and so funny. Chris Addison made me giggle like a little child.”
With her latest project, Gina is on more familiar turf.
For the last three years she and her husband of two decades, Kez Cary, have lived in a village in East Sussex, where she spends her time off walking the beaches and the Downs and making her own jewellery. Now she is working at the nearby CFT, where she has just opened in Philip Franks’ production of Terence Rattigan’s ‘50s hotel drama, Separate Tables.
Proving her versatility, Gina will play two very different characters. Ann Shankland, an aging Mayfair model (played in the 1958 film by Hollywood bombshell Rita Hayworth), arrives at the Beauregard Private Hotel in Bournemouth in pursuit of her alcoholic ex-husband. Sibyl Railton-Bell, meanwhile, is a plain, nervous woman, under the cosh of her domineering mother, who has a secret crush on another of the guests. Both are in a way, Gina says, “rare creatures.“
Just as Gina’s past caginess with the press has had the adverse effect of attracting attention, it is the surface stillness of her performances that fixes your eye. Acting, for her, is about “trusting the audience’s intelligence” rather than making big shapes. But we wonder if she is as controlled with her emotions off stage?
“Well, I think one of the interesting things about control is it’s often linked to a threat or a fear of losing control of emotions,” she says slowly, measuring each word. “So many times in our lives we’re forced or feel like we ought to behave in certain ways when actually all you want to do is scream and shout and roll around on the floor like a toddler in a strop. Or, you know, you just want to cry and cry and keep crying until you exhaust yourself.
“That’s the key to it. It’s often what’s rumbling away underneath that informs the surface calm.”
Separate Tables, Chichester Festival Theatre, until Saturday 3 October. Tickets £10–£33, tel: 01243 781312.
