Emily Watson - IVTR

Emily Watson Actress Emily Watson's ability to hit the highest heights and delve into the lowest lows gets another big test in a new movie about the great, tragic cellist Jacqueline du Pre. For this interview, we decided to put her face to face with the person who knew du Pre better than anyone else - her sister, Hilary

She barely resembles the late Jacqueline du Pre. But to see Emily Watson portray du Pre in the new film Hilary and Jackie, directed by Anand Tucker, is to see the great English cellist reborn: as a prodigy; as a willful, needy sister, daughter, and wife; as a victim of multiple sclerosis. Since her shattering debut at age twenty-nine in Breaking the Waves in 1996, Watson has been quietly impressive in The Boxer and the TV Mill on the Floss (both 1997). She is as extraordinary being sulky as she is being elated or inconsolable, and there's no one else like her right now for making emotional weather palpable - rain, shine, and everything in between. Her acting in Hilary and Jackie, though, is mostly a thunderstorm waiting to happen (until it finally does), and there are innumerable moments in the film when she makes one want to run and hide from the spectacle of a human being unpeeling. Is it too early to say she's a great actress? I think not. But she's matched here by Rachel Griffiths as Hilary, the sister on whose marriage Jackie preys as she disintegrates. Their onscreen duet (which echoes that between Watson and Katrin Cartlidge in Breaking the Waves) is head-spinning stuff.

Hilary du Pre was born in Woking, Surrey, in 1942 and her sister Jacqueline in Oxford three years later. Both were natural musicians, but Jackie was the more gifted. She performed her first recital at Wigmore Hall, London, in 1961 and made her American debut at Carnegie Hall in 1965. She married the Israeli conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim in 1967. Her legendary performances, in which she and her cello seemed as possessed as new lovers, uneasily ushered classical music into the swinging '60s. But she was a fragile woman who had had intimations of her future paralysis in childhood; unhappily removed from her family by constant touring, the prodigal returned to it with a vengeance in 1971 while suffering a breakdown. It was at this time she began sleeping with Hilary's husband, Kiffer, with Hilary's consent. In October 1973, Jackie was diagnosed with MS. She never played the cello publicly again and died in 1987.

Hilary du Pre's impassioned book (coauthored by brother Piers) about her torturous but loving relationship with her sister was first published as A Genius in the Family in 1997; it has just been reissued as Hilary and Jackie (Ballantine) to coincide with the release of the movie, which is based on it. At last year's Venice film festival, Interview brought Emily Watson and Hilary du Pre together for the first time.

GRAHAM FULLER

EMILY WATSON: Hilary, how did you feel when you first saw Hilary and Jackie? Was it strange to relive your life through the cinema?

HILARY DU PRE: It was the most extraordinary feeling - I couldn't move for a half hour. Tears were streaming down my face, my neck, my chest, and landing in a puddle on my tummy!

EW: Aw!

HDP: From the very first shot of the little girls playing Jackie and me tearing across the sand dunes to that shot of you as Jackie standing by the sea, I just kept gasping. It was exactly how Jackie stood when she was in that kind of mood. I couldn't believe it. I suddenly began to realize it wasn't Jackie at all - it was you. But then it wasn't. It was Jackie. [laughs]

EW: I think we did that shot on the very last day of filming and I'd probably begun to inhabit the role by then. It's so weird talking to you because I feel as if I know her, but, of course, I never met her. And you're her sister. . . .

HDP: I would say you do know her because you got her whole essence. It's interesting to me that hundreds of cellists try to imitate the movements Jackie made when she was playing and it never works. Yet you were able to get it exactly right.

EW: You wouldn't say that if you heard the noise I was making. [laughs]

HDP: I said "move" - I didn't say "sound"! Tell me, Emily, why did you want to play Jackie?

EW: It was the first script I'd read since I did Breaking the Waves that made me feel terrified. It was like someone threw down a gauntlet. I felt I didn't have the moral right to tell so intimate a story unless I attempted to get the essence of Jackie - which was the music. I also knew I wouldn't be able to get to the center of her if we hired a hand double for the film, so I needed to play the cello myself. I began by learning a tune so I could sing it and then learned the fingering for playing it on the cello, which was a very long and laborious process. My fingers were so blistered after the first week I was wearing plasters on them, and by the end they were callused. Once I'd got the hang of a tune, I'd play it over and over again until I'd mastered a piece and then my husband Jack would videotape me so I could study it. After that, I started working with a movement teacher to try and get that sense of playing the cello with the whole body, as Jackie did.

Two things were very helpful to me. You'd written in your book that when Jackie played, she slipped into very deep concentration. And I remember Piers saying that when he was very young he sat in the front row of a concert Jackie was playing and stuck his tongue out at her, but she just smiled and carried on. Bill Pleeth [Jackie's teacher at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London] told me the key to understanding where she was going when she was playing was the look in her eye. Obviously, I couldn't approach her musicianship from a technical point of view, but I tried to get the spirit of it. To me, acting is very imagination-based - it's full of pictures - and the type of music Jackie played was very romantic and very felt, you know? And for an actor that's easy to relate to.

HDP: What intrigued you about Jackie's personality?

EW: One of the things that fascinated me was that in the very early stages of her story, before any of the complications began, Jackie seemed like an ordinary, simple girl, not very good at talking about emotions - although she was always able to communicate with you, wasn't she?

HDP: Yes, and by the end it was telepathic. We knew what the other was thinking all the time. After she died, it was terribly difficult to be without that. When she was young, her only method, really, of communication with people was through the cello and that was exactly what saved her for so long. She knew how to play with people's emotions and would sometimes do that through her playing, although not consciously. It wasn't until she got MS that she got better with words.

EW: Did it ever alarm you as a child that she was suddenly capable of Haying something like the Elgar concerto, which is such a mature expression of melancholy?

HDP: No, I took it completely for granted because she had always had that gift. And she hardly ever practiced - it bored her stiff. I remember she did an interview after MS was diagnosed, and the interviewer - presumptuous little man! - said, "This can't be too bad for you, Miss du Pre, because you've achieved so much." And Jackie said, "I've achieved nothing at all because I've never had to work." That was how she related to the music - she could always just do it. It made life difficult for her because she was literally carrying this great thing around with her all the time and it set her apart from children of her own age. They didn't know how to react to her and she was ostracized. It was the best thing in the world for her when she left school because she didn't have to be with children anymore. Emotionally, she had a very old head on her young shoulders.

EW: Do you think the cello ever became a prison for her?

HDP: The cello was her liberation. Jackie's prison was that she couldn't be understood by other people, and her genius, or whatever you want to call it, was a huge burden for her, although I don't think she ever identified it as such.

EW: Were you similarly gifted in that you didn't have to work hard at the violin?

HDP: I didn't practice much. We could just play and we loved doing it. It was a completely natural thing. It was like sitting down and eating a meal but it was always exciting. I don't take any particular credit for it. [pause] How did you approach playing Jackie when she had MS?

EW: I had to learn about all the different stages of the illness and the progressive loss of the senses. The role was a huge physical challenge. I met with a lot of patients, which was both amazing and heartbreaking. One man I met with wanted to tell me his story because I think he knew I was making a film about Jackie. He could hardly speak and he was very, very slow, but there was nothing wrong with his brain at all. He basically blamed himself for having the disease, which was very hard to take. He said, "This is what I did in my life and that's why I'm ill." It was difficult to have a conversation with him because his whole body was in motion except his eyes, which he fixed on me. I was kind of speechless - I didn't know how to begin. So I just started asking about his physical condition and he said to me, "I can tell by your eyes you have more questions." And I had to be honest then and ask him about what it was really like to have multiple sclerosis. One of the things he said is that everybody wants you to take it really well and behave like a saint. And be marvelous and be brave. That really hit home to me. For Jackie, losing the ability to play must have been like having her tongue cut out.

HDP: Yes, it was. But the one thing she was really terrified of losing was her hearing, and she never did. Her hearing was actually more acute than anyone's I've ever come across. If someone was whispering in the next room she'd hear what they were saying. You know, Emily, Jackie was overwhelming to most people, and they could only stand her for a day or two before they had to leave to give themselves peace. So while you were doing the film, were you able to cope with becoming her? And what happened to you when you went home at night? Could you get out of the Jackie mode?

EW: Yes and no. I don't deliberately go around in character all the time, as some actors do. I worked with Daniel Day-Lewis [on The Boxer], who went around in character for the whole period of the shoot. I'm more myself. In fact, we worked so hard on this film that I would just go home, eat, and go to bed. That was really all I had time to do. With a part like this you get very raw emotionally and very tired.

Obviously, Hilary, you've been able to write down and analyze everything that happened between you and Jackie and Kiffer [played by David Morrissey in the film] and Danny [Barenboim, played by James Frain] and why they happened. Do you think Jackie ever came to an understanding of her relationship with Kiffer?

HDP: I don't think she was able to. There was one phone call she made years into her MS, which was sort of referred to in the film. It was when she was finding it very difficult to speak and often had to be contained in her bed because if she wasn't she would gyrate out of it. It was the worst kind of prison for her. Anyway, she rang me and said in her very heavy and clumsy tone that she wanted to speak to Kiffer. I said, "That's absolutely fine, Jackie. He's at the other end of the garden. I'll go and get him." And she said, "I want him to come to London now. I want him to make love to me." So I said, "Well, look, Jackie, I can't answer that question, but I'll go and get Kiffer - hang on one tick." I went racing down the garden for Kiffer and I said, "Kiffer, come quick. Jackie's on the phone and you must go. She needs to talk to you now." I didn't tell him what she'd said to me because it wasn't really for me to decide what he should do at that point. And he went lumbering to the phone. [laughs] I was waiting outside the door and there was a long, long silence while Jackie was talking to him. And Kiffer said, "Jackie, the answer has to be no. We can't go back. It wouldn't help you, it wouldn't help me, it wouldn't make anything better." I think it was the only time anyone had ever said no to Jackie, certainly from within the family. I know she was terribly angry about it, but by that time MS had so affected her mind that the Jackie I knew - Jackie, my sister - had died. The illness had twisted her mind and turned her into somebody completely different. She wasn't there anymore. She'd gone. So, no, I don't think she ever got to understand that entire episode, despite all her psychoanalysis.

EW: My understanding of why she had first wanted to sleep with Kiffer was she just had a need to be in a normal, permanent, loving relationship.

HDP: That's absolutely right. She never managed to cope with life without the family. And I say that in the broadest sense - not only me but Mum and Dad and Piers. She had to be there with us all the time. Kiffer - who is a very solid person, never worries, never criticizes, always takes people as they are - was so important to her because no one outside the family before him had ever accepted Jackie just as she was, no fuss, no frills. She had always been put on a pedestal so she didn't know how to behave as a normal person. And she envied the life I had enormously and longed to have children - she wanted that life more than anything. On the other side of the coin, I would have loved to have been able to play music in some of the situations in which she played. People say to me all the time, "How on earth could you let your husband sleep with your sister'? How could you do it?" When you look into somebody else's family from outside you always react, "How bizarre. How could they possibly do that?" We all do that, but we shouldn't because we don't know enough about what it's like to be in that situation. When I wrote the book I was giving my view from within and that's all I could do. I knew Jackie before she was born and so I can see, in hindsight, why these things happened. And I desperately hoped that writing the book would help Danny understand why Jackie behaved the way she did, though I don't even know if he's read it. In a sense, their breakup wasn't her fault and it wasn't Danny's. It was one of those situations that couldn't mend - or two of those situations that couldn't mend.

EW: Do you regret that episode with Kiffer now?

HDP: Not at all. My whole life at that time was geared to helping Jackie to survive. She knew far greater heights and far lower depths than any of us know. We all develop a sort of internal governor that helps us through life and helps us cope on a fairly even basis with the shock waves that we all experience. And that's how we survive. But Jackie never developed that governor: She just soared right over the mountain and right down to the bottom of hell. So if I'd turned around and said "Jackie, what are you asking? How could you do that?" I could never have lived with myself afterward. Of course it was terribly painful, but that's not the point because I could get over it.

Do you miss being in character as Jackie? Do you miss the feeling? Or are you relieved not to have to be her anymore?

EW: No, I do miss her. Though it sounds superstitious, I felt she was around in spirit when we were making the film, particularly through the music. I remember one day when I was being made up in the makeup truck, I had someone pin up a photograph of her in my sight line. You know, it's the one where she's playing and she has the most radiant, radiant smile -

HDP: Yes, a bright and pretty one. Ah, wonderful!

EW: - and I listened to her playing on a record at the same time. And that day it was as if she were on the set with me.

HDP: That's not superstitious, though. That was just Jackie. She was the music. It belonged to her. As she always said.

EW: Every time you play a role you learn something as an actor and as a person. What I learned playing Jackie was the fearlessness of her. For that reason alone, it was quite extraordinary to be in her company.

HDP: I hope you won't forget her.

EW: I never will, Hilary. What do you think she'd think of the film?

HDP: She would have been absolutely thrilled. I know that, because the three of us - Jackie, Piers, and I - always reacted in exactly the same way to everything. I think she would have particularly felt the pain of seeing herself swept away from the family when she became public property.

EW: I think one of the most powerful moments in the film is when I'm looking at my hands that certain way and the full orchestra comes in on the Dvorak concerto because that piece of music is, to me, so much about homesickness and everything Jackie missed when she began her international career. Does the film make you miss her more?

HDP: Of course. Because she's not around.

EW: Does it make the wound fresh again?

HDP: No, because it's always there. It's always there. Whenever I speak about it or see the film, it absolutely wrecks me. It batters me to bits, but I don't mind it. I love it. And I'm so grateful that I still do feel like that.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.
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