Arts
30 years! You get some roles and you lose some
“I did a major film when I was about 19,” Caroline Langrishe says, “It was a Western which we filmed in Mexico called the “The Eagle’s Wing” with Martin Sheen. And Charlie Sheen – his son, you know the naughty one – was nine years old at the time and was running around the set. So I was given the job of looking after him whilst his father was working!” She laughs, “When I tell people that story they say, ‘Oh so it’s really all your fault!’”
Caroline’s biggest breakthrough: Playing Charlotte Cavendish in the TV series Lovejoy
Adrian Lukis and Caroline Langrishe, have spent the best part of 30 years honing their craft. Both have spent the past five years touring ‘An Evening with Jane Austen’ (a collection of dramatic readings from the works of Jane Austen) which is how they found themselves in Sri Lanka at the Fairway Galle Literary Festival back in January. However, their work together goes back decades to a series called ‘Peak Practice’. Lukis, by then a regular, was also responsible for the writing of the episodes. “I just turned up,” Langrishe remembers, “and I thought he seemed rather serious and I think he thought I was rather tiresome. He was always wanting to rework scenes and I was thinking ‘Oh god!’ We just didn’t connect.”
Three or four years later, both appeared in a series called ‘Judge John Deed’ and in the midst of filming Langrishe got asked to be Lukis’ onscreen wife for an adaptation of a Joanna Trollope book, ‘Marrying the Mistress’ – “This time we got on very well!” Third time’s the charm.
But the trajectory of both their careers hasn’t always been so smooth as is the case for many actors, “You don’t work for six months and then you sort of get three jobs all at once.” Rejection is common and something, Langrishe states, she had to get used to from an early age.
Although she trained from a young age to be a ballet dancer, Langrishe made the move into acting from the age of 17, calling it a “wiser career option”, playing roles such as Kitty in the TV mini-series of Anna Karenina and later on, Isabella Linton in Wuthering Heights. Her biggest break however, was probably Charlotte Cavendish in the TV series Lovejoy with Ian McShane. In general her entire career has consisted of appearances in all major British TV series including Hollyoaks and Casualty. She attributes this success in part to her theatre training – “I really do believe and history tells us that if you do a lot of theatre you will have more longevity in the business because to be in a play takes a lot of bottle; it’s a lot of energy, skill, stagecraft, confidence, and an ability to adjust when the audiences are different every night.”
She uses the careers of Maggie Smith (also a participant at the Fairway Galle Literary Festival) and Judi Dench, both of whom started out in theatre, as examples of powerful women who have had great longevity in an otherwise fickle industry. I comment that this is also remarkable given how films rarely focus on stories about women above the age of 40! I ask her whether she has found, as time goes by, that the roles being offered to her have decreased or alternatively, become two-dimensional. “You have any number of parts when you’re in your early 20s. And then in the 30s, masses of parts. 40s – quite good, because then you start to play mothers. And then for me, a bit of a dearth, late 40s, early 50s. You sort of fall between two or three categories. You’re not old enough to be the wise old woman, you’re too old to be a mother of an 18-year-old. It’s tricky – it’s just the lack of roles before anything else.”
This is perhaps not the case for Lukis who has managed to secure a wider variety of roles over the past few years which have included appearances in ‘The Crown’, ‘Black Mirror’ and ‘Downton Abbey’. Breaking through the industry with a role in the 80s TV series ‘After the War’, he is perhaps more well-known for playing the scrupulous and manipulative Mr. Wickham, opposite Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy in the 1995 adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’. I asked him about his process of getting into character- “I remember the principal thing was not to play him oily or like a villain because if you play him like a villain it makes Elizabeth looks stupid and she’s very bright. As far as I remember I tried to bring a sort of gentleness and sincerity to it but honestly, I’d rather spend an evening with Wickham rather than Darcy I can tell you that!”
Back together again for the past five years: ‘An Evening with Jane Austen’
Indeed, the late 90s and early 2000s welcomed the rise of Jane Austen adaptations. There were some, like ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility’, which remained faithful to the source material and there were others, like ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’ and ‘Clueless’, which put their own spin on Austen. What makes people come back for more and more?“People think nothing much happens in Austen, but an enormous amount happens,” Lukis says, “The stories are full of humour, caustic one-liners, observations about people. She’s got human nature.” Perhaps part of Austen’s appeal lay in painting relatable characters too to which Langrishe adds, “She wants these women to have a voice and a choice…there’s definitely a feminist tone there.”
There’s something remarkable about the fact that Langrishe and Lukis have been able to have successful careers on stage, television and film in an industry that can perhaps be unforgiving towards its actors. “The business has changed radically. Nowadays, because agents are so greedy to find the next star, there is such emphasis on getting young people working as soon as they can,” Langrishe says, quite wearily. “Everything is to do with viewing figures. I didn’t get a job because I didn’t have more than 50,000 Twitter followers!”
It’s a far cry from the 80s and 90s when audition processes were smoother and interference from production executives were virtually non-existent. “Now the director has no power at all,” Lukis comments, “The producer can come in and say, ‘Yeah we’ve got this other girl who’s just been in a very popular series’ and the director could object and think she’s not right for the part but the producer may say ‘That doesn’t matter’. And so in the end it’s the execs who make the decision.” There’s a sort of finality to Lukis’ tone which makes me think that, because both have spent so much time working in the industry, to them change is inevitable and they have no option but to adapt.
It makes going into the industry that much harder but Lukis points out that “It was always hard for actors. If you read about actors travelling about in the 20s and the 30s, they would be travelling for 40 weeks of the year on minimum money, finding awful digs, huge hierarchies from the lead actor down to the lowliest actor – but they did it because they loved Shakespeare or they wanted to be with likeminded people.”
Lukis continues, “I would say you’ve got to have a strong overriding feeling that this is what you do. It’s not only that you don’t work from time to time. It’s that you know you’re perfect for the part, you work your tail off, and you go in and read and the director says, ‘I love what you did, it’s fantastic. I think you’ll be hearing from us VERY soon.’ And then you don’t get the job and that happens a lot.” Langrishe laughs and says, “I mean my god so much of [this business]is luck!”She pauses before finally saying “But you keep on doing it. Hope, it’s just hope!”
Caroline playing Isabella Linton in Wuthering Heights
Adrian Lukis: Playing Mr. Wickham, opposite Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy in the 1995 adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’
Caroline Langrishe at FGLF: Rejection is part and parcel of an actor’s life. Pix by Indika Handuwala
Adrian Lukis at FGLF: A wide variety of roles over the past few years