INTERVIEW:She has been a Bond girl – and lived to work another day – but how does Rosamund Pike fare in a film set in working class East End Dagenham? DONALD CLARKEmeets the Oxford-educated actor
WHEN I TELL you that Rosamund Pike, a well-spoken Englishwoman of glacial blondeness, has a part in Made in Dagenham,you could be forgiven for doubting my sanity. Already the recipient of much good buzz, Nigel Cole's film concerns the 1968 dispute at Ford's East London assembly plant, in which female workers bravely struck for equal pay. You may remember Ms Pike as posh Miranda Frost in Die Another Dayand as posher Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. She's a fine actor, but I can't quite see her as a car worker. Fear not. Pike plays the Cambridge-educated wife of the plant manager. In the course of the film, she takes inspiration from the strikers and addresses her own willing subservience.
Pike must have drawn a few comparisons with her personal experience. The child of classical musicians, she studied English at Oxford, before becoming a movie star. “Yes. I suppose I did,” she says in her chilled, elongated accent. “She would have gone to an all-female college, of course. The film is not about oppression, however. My character’s crise de conscience – or whatever the English equivalent is – has to do with realising she is an educated woman and she has chosen to be a stay-at-home housewife. She is genuinely inspired by these people.”
Rosamund Pike, crisply blonde, dressed in tight black trousers with complicated Emma Peel-style attachments, did have a somewhat unusual start in the business. While she was acting at the National Youth Theatre, an agent spied her and put her on the books, but, rather than try out for drama school, she decided to head for the dreaming spires.
It seems a slightly odd move for somebody who claims never to have had any ambitions other than to act.
“Not really. Actually, I was aware that it was a good place to go as agents do scout around there. They scout there as much as around drama schools, in fact. They want an untrained animal and they feel sensitive performers come out of that route.” Nonetheless, after two successful years at Oxford, Pike decided to pack her bags and launch herself fully into the profession. Twelve months later she returned to finish her degree. What went on?
“Well, remember that I put myself through college by professional acting,” she says. “My parents were singers, so they never had any serious money. I left for a year because I suddenly thought I should be at drama school. But they all rejected me. I don’t know why – it might have been to do with being at Oxford. So I went back to Oxford to finish my degree and I said: ‘I’ll show you’. ”
And she did. In 2001, straight after graduation, she secured the lead in the BBC's adaptation of Nancy Mitford's ageless novel Love in a Cold Climate. The following year, Pike was cast as an icy villainess in Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan's final Bond film. Now, if ever there were a poisoned chalice it is the glittery one marked Bond Girl. Every few years, some starlet is unveiled as the latest to carry the title – Maud Adams, Izabella Scorupco, Maryam d'Abo – and then, as often as not, she promptly vanishes back into the ether. Nonetheless, Pike survived the ordeal. Two years after Die Another Day, she popped up beside Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudiceand – more on this anon – became romantically entangled with the film's director, Joe Wright. "Yes, it's not so easy to market the Bond thing," she agrees. "It's only now that people really know how to use me. The character in Bond is so indelible that it's hard to erase. It's only now that I am getting real diversity."
She admits she suffered a period of forced leisure when, following those early successes, she spent a period in Hollywood. Unfortunately, her timing was off and she arrived just as the writers' strike was kicking into action. Suddenly, the business end of Los Angeles became a ghost town. Pike actually thought about retaking her A-Levels and training to become a doctor. But she then secured a secondary – but vital – role in Lone Scherfig's highly praised An Education. Pike is rather brilliant as the dim blonde who remains permanently puzzled by the heroine's tendency to drop high-brow cultural references.
“There was a bad time before that,” she agrees. “I was sitting round in Hollywood and not getting work and I thought: I really am too intelligent for this. I am a practical sort. I remember being invited to Ibiza with some bankers and, when they were told I was an actress, they all said: ‘Oh how’s that going?’ There was, in their tone, a natural assumption that, when you say you’re an actress, you mean you are not making any money.”
She rocks her head back with regal disdain and gazes out at Mayfair as if she owns that up-market London locale. “That’s the default position if a woman is an actor. You know? That galls me. I wouldn’t do a job unless I could make a living at it.”
She seems to have got over that hump recently, but life has not been all beer and skittles. In 2008, her marriage to Joe Wright was called off at the last minute. Newspaper reports at the time suggested that invitations had been sent out, the church had been booked and honeymoon suites were awaiting their happy arrival. (Unsurprisingly and quite reasonably, she won’t comment publicly.) One half expects to discover a Miss Havisham figure – sitting forlornly in a decaying wedding dress beside a huge rotten cake – but Miss Pike seems admirably bullish about her future.
Next year, she appears opposite Owen Wilson in a new comedy from the director of The Devil Wears Prada. After that, she will act as foil to Rowan Atkinson in a sequel to the hit comedy Johnny English.
"Doing An Educationsuddenly opened up comedy for me," she says. "Suddenly I can go anywhere. I am a neutral canvas upon which you can apply anything. Isn't that what an actor should be?"
Well, I wouldn’t dare put it that way myself.
Made in Dagenham is on general release from October 1st
