It’s noisy here in the bar at the Old Vic; the air is teeming with thespy gossip and laughter and clinking glasses.
It’s noisy here in the bar at the Old Vic; the air is teeming with thespy gossip and laughter and clinking glasses. I’m sitting in a corner with the actress Rachael Stirling, who is drinking white wine and talking about her new play, An Ideal Husband. Luckily, Rachael has that actress’s knack for projecting her voice without shouting. I can hear her clearly above the din. She has a very fine voice, in fact, smooth and husky at the same time. She sounds like a public schoolgirl who has smoked too many cigarettes.
Rachael is excited after a long day of rehearsals. Taking a script from her handbag, she thumbs through it impatiently. ‘I think this must be Oscar Wilde’s fullest work,’ she says. ‘It’s just so bloody good — so rich and so human. It’s such a shame that our idea of Wilde is still so heavily associated with triviality: that’s just not who he is.’
An Ideal Husband is about politics and corruption, and Rachael finds the play relevant today. ‘It’s about the career trajectory of a young, ambitious, political man,’ she says. ‘You literally read it and go, “Oh, hello, David Cameron, hello, Nick Clegg, how’s it going?”’
She takes issue when I describe her part — she plays Lady Chiltern — as ‘an adoring, trusting woman’. ‘Lady Chiltern is much more than that, actually,’ she says, defensively. ‘She is wonderfully strident. She’s a high-minded puritan whose view of love is rather naive. She takes a journey through the course of the play and by the end of it she comes to understand the meaning of love.’
Am I making Rachael sound like a luvvie? She isn’t. She doesn’t take herself seriously at all. ‘Don’t get me started on all that stuff,’ she answers, when I ask her about the art of acting. ‘You can’t talk about acting without sounding like a total dickhead. If I were to talk about it, somebody somewhere would feel as if they were sucking a lemon. There’s simply nothing I could say that isn’t ball-breakingly boring.’
She is more interested in having fun. ‘Let’s see this stuff you’ve got here,’ she says, leaning over the table and inspecting my messy notes. ‘What? Harvey Voices? I am not even with that agency any more.’ She cackles, delighted by my lack of professionalism. ‘Your research sucks! I love it!’
Rachael is beautiful. She has strong cheekbones — inherited, no doubt, from her mother, Diana Rigg — and a seductive, slightly mocking smile.
Best of all, she is happy to talk about how she shot to fame in 2002 thanks to her lead role in the BBC adaptation of Tipping the Velvet, which featured some seriously steamy lesbian action. ‘It was very weird and very funny,’ she recalls. ‘On the sports pages of the Sun, or maybe it was the Mirror, they actually minuted the moments when men could flick over from an England football match to catch a bit of full-frontal nudity. They said, on 53 minutes, turn over and you’ll see a bit of left nipple.’
The media exposure did not prompt further success. ‘My tits were in the tabloids for a few weeks and that was about it,’ she says. Is she abashed about it now? ‘No, I don’t really care. I’ve just done D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love for BBC4, so they’ll be getting a lot more of that. You can’t do D.H. Lawrence and not get naked, baby!’
After Tipping the Velvet, Rachael tried to crack Hollywood, and failed. ‘I went out there with a waggy tail,’ she says, ‘and came back with my tail tucked firmly between my legs. I did the whole pool lifestyle thing, hanging out with Beyoncé or Leonardo di Cappuccino, as my dad calls him…there were endless, hilarious parties. It was heaven, in its way, but as for making a career out of it — no, not my bag.’
The problem, she adds, was ‘that I am a terrible networker…I just can’t remember people’s names. In LA it was appalling because I often couldn’t remember the names of even the people I’d worked with.’
She was recently ‘unceremoniously dumped’ by her ‘hot shot’ LA agent. ‘Basically, if you tell people like him that you want to do theatre in London, you might as well say you are going to live in Ulan Bator for the amount they give a shit. He just sent me an email saying, if you’re not in America, I can’t help you.’
At 33, Rachael thinks she is now ‘too old’ to make a splash in Tinseltown. She doesn’t mind. ‘Once the stars fall from your eyes,’ she says, ‘they never quite go back.’
It’s not as if her life is on hold. Her reputation as a stage and screen actress is growing, and her film career has begun to take off. She has a big part in the forthcoming film of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, directed by Lasse Hallström and starring Ewan McGregor and Kristin Scott Thomas. ‘That was amazing,’ she says. ‘Kristin Scott Thomas is terrific. She has a career in France and a career in England: how cool is that? I wouldn’t mind that.’
Rachael seems happy with her lot, though. She has a good side career interviewing well-known people for Radio 4’s Loose Ends. ‘I love radio interviews; it’s all about multitasking and, like all good women, I can do that.’
We finish our drinks and walk out on to Waterloo Road. Rachael gives An Ideal Husband one last plug. ‘It really is a wonderful play,’ she says. ‘Right up every Spectator reader’s street, I would have thought…Sorry, I’ll shut up now.’ With that, she buttons up her coat, says goodbye and strolls purposefully into the night.
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