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Dear
Coz Look
around Dear
T, Respect her
more Dear
Worried Heart B. N, Give it time Dear
Juda, Juggling it all The Legally Blonde star tells why she has Judi Dench to thank for becoming perfectly English Reese Witherspoon
is one of Hollywood's fastest-rising twenty something actresses,
but she was reduced to silence the day she met Britain's Dame Judi
Dench on the set of her latest film. "I was
so nervous, I couldn't even speak," she says. "When I
eventually found my voice it was just a whisper. It was like meeting
royalty, in a way, because she has so much dignity." Reese, 26,
star of last year's big box-office hit Legally Blonde, plays Cecily
Cardew opposite 67-year-old Judi's Lady Bracknell in The Importance
Of Being Earnest, released last week. She filmed
in key locations around England with Judi, along with Colin Firth,
who plays Jack Worthing, and Rupert Everett as Algernon Moncrieff.
She soon realised that Judi, who'd just completed work on Iris,
for which she won an Oscar nomination, had a heart of gold. "I had
to learn a perfect English accent and I was constantly aware that
I might mess it up," she says. Judi has the most beautiful
voice and I was thinking: "I'm trying to do an English accent
in front of Dame Judi Dench." Judi was so kind, because she
said she'd used a Canadian accent in The Shipping News and knew
how hard it was to change. "She was trying to make me feel
at ease and said that she was absolutely terrified and always felt
nervous whenever she stepped in front of a camera. She made me relax.
Then she delivered eight pages of dialogue, word-perfect, on the
first take. She was so inspiring, the way she took her job so seriously
and was so passionate about her work after so many years. It made
me realise that she's the perfect role model." Reese spent
six weeks trying to perfect her English accent before moving from
her Hollywood home to London. Her actor husband Ryan Phillippe,
28, and two-year- old daughter Ava came with her. Ryan also had
filming work in England, playing the murder suspect with the false
Scottish accent on Robert Altman's Oscar-winner Gosfort Park. So
they decided to decamp here for several months. "He made a
pact from the start of our relationship that we would always be
together," she says. "We've seen so many marriages go
wrong because of the time spent apart. So one of my first considerations
on taking a job is: how does it affect my family life? I have a
daughter and husband to consider. Ryan takes exactly the same attitude." "We both
turn down a lot of work. I'm also careful about the parts I take.
I don't want my daughter watching me on screen in the future, saying:
'I can't believe you appeared as that character in that dreadful
film'. "I thought
my part of Elle Woods in Legally Blonde had a really good message
for young women - that it's possible to be girly as well as smart
and ambitious. I've had girls come up to me and say: "Having
watched that, I want to go to law school." So I wouldn't want
to be seen as some sort of vile character, sending out the wrong
message." Reese, a surgeon's
daughter from Nashville, Tennessee, was raised as part of a wealthy
family and began acting in her teens. "My southern
upbringing helped me in The Importance Of Being Earnest, because
I used to spend so much time in etiquette classes when I was growing
up," she says. "I always knew which knife and fork to
use. The thing about being southern is that you feel a lot of guilt.
You want people to like you and you'll do anything to make other
people happy. It fitted in perfectly with the character of Cecily." Reese's film
career, which started with the 1991 release of a coming-of-age film,
The Man In The Moon, suddenly soared last year. She even won a £2.3
million pay day for the forthcoming Sweet Home Alabama, in which
she plays a New York fashion designer with a secret past. In the meantime,
she studied English at Stanford University, appeared in several
low-budget films, married Ryan and gave birth to Ava. "In some
ways, it has seemed a slow process," she says. "I'm glad
that I've been acting professionally since my teens and I've been
able to build up the experience. "As a
result, what's happened in the last year has come as less of a shock
to me. So although I might seem to have come from nowhere, I've
been on film sets, trying to learn the business. "There
have been plenty of films which haven't been seen by many people,
but that doesn't matter. They've given me the chance to make mistakes
out of harm's way and allowed me to grow up in my own time." She has launched
Type A Films, her own company - "Type A personalities are driven,
ambitious and obsessive, just like me," she says - with a big-money
deal to bring new scripts to the screen. "I've
always been brought up to believe that anything is possible for
girls," she says. "There has never been a better time
to be a woman. Opportunities have opened up and, if you want marriage
and motherhood as I did, then that's possible, too." Reese's positive
attitude even won over husband Ryan, whom she met at her 21st birthday
party. "It was a setup by friends who thought we'd be right
for each other," she says. "It was
love, for me, after the first conversation. It wasn't because he
was really handsome or anything. I just thought we were compatible.
"He was
soon off filming I Know What You Did Last Summer. We hadn't even
had the chance to go on a date. So I flew out to meet him, thinking:
'What am I doing?' But it was a chance in a lifetime and I just
took it. When I became pregnant with Ava, we decided to get married.
"It appears
Judi [Dench] has lived life the same way. She was very happily married
[to the late actor Michael Williams] and has a great relationship
with her daughter, who's now grown up. She's also been working since
her teens. What a great life. No wonder one London cabbie told me:
'She's a national treasure.' " |
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