Acting up | 20 April 2017

Gemma Arterton’s new film, Their Finest, is about second world war propaganda. Her character, who is bookish and sensitive, is allowed — because of war — to write film scripts. She discovers two girls — two ordinary, pale, unhappy girls — who steal their father’s boat and sail to Dunkirk for the rescue. She thinks this story will swell hearts: and so she, and her collaborator (Sam Claflin), make a British Casablanca about Dunkirk. They know there must be loss, or nothing has value.

I marvelled over two things in Their Finest, even as I dislike the title. First, how the pale, unhappy girls are transformed, for the film inside the film, into beautiful actresses, all lipstick and ankles, with shadow brushed away. And then how the Arterton character fights, against her nature, for the girls to rescue themselves at the climactic moment: they mend the propeller. The other film-makers don’t understand her, for that is not what women do. Why can’t the dying man (Bill Nighy) mend the propeller; or the other dying man? Why can’t the dog mend the propeller?

Gemma Arterton has just abandoned a career as a Hollywood film actress, who was always in lipstick, and without shadow. She wanted to make this film, she tells me, in her beautifully elocuted voice — she sounds like a Hollywood actress of the 1930s playing an Englishwoman — because ‘often, with female-centric films, we feel we need to have these bold characters and sometimes women aren’t like that. They are quiet and reserved or a bit shy — or they don’t know what to say.’

She was born in Kent and left school at 16 to, essentially, join the circus: a theatre school. Her first part was Tallulah in Bugsy Malone — though Tallulah was 12, you would struggle to find a better part in Hollywood today — and she loved ‘the silliness’ of acting.