There's rarely a dull day in the acting career of Emily Mortimer - or in her life, as she tells John Hiscock
Like her father, the author, playwright and barrister John Mortimer, Emily Mortimer has a delightful sense of humour and cannot be serious for too long.
Fellow Britons: Emily Mortimer and Chiwetel Ejiofor in David Mamet's Redbelt
Now with a hefty five films on the go, the 36-year-old actress has that most English of traits, a tendency towards self-deprecation, and occasionally collapses into fits of giggles, usually when recalling a particularly embarrassing or humiliating situation involving herself.
She cannot resist telling the story of her disastrous first-night performance as Portia in a stage production of The Merchant of Venice in the early Nineties, and also had no qualms about telling it to David Mamet when she met him to discuss her role in his new martial-arts action-drama, Redbelt.
"It was the first night," she says, "and I was so bad because I hadn't concentrated in rehearsals because I'd fallen in love with the guy playing Bassanio.
"At the interval, I told myself I had to pull myself together and be confident. So I stormed back on to the stage for the second act with my ladies-in-waiting but I was so busy trying to be confident that I completely forgot that this 20ft fibreglass pillar denoting Belmont, where I lived, was coming down from the ceiling, and I collided with it and was knocked unconscious and broke my nose.
"The next thing I knew, I was backstage with someone slapping me and saying I could go back on, so I did. I was actually much better after I'd been knocked out but, as I did my 'quality of mercy is not strained' speech, I got these two enormous black eyes emerging like a panda." Then there were her Russian love affairs which began when she started studying the language while a pupil at St Paul's Girls School in London.
"We had a glamorous Russian teacher who had escaped from Leningrad in the hold of a ship with her boyfriend and she had gold teeth and red stockings and she was the most glamorous person I had ever set eyes on and I just fell in love with her," she recalls.
"She taught me for two years and then I got into Oxford to study English, but I'd fallen so in love with Russian that I went off to Moscow to live there for a year and I got a Russian boyfriend called Dennis, which I was rather annoyed about because if you're going to be a Russian poet you should be called Vladivostock or something. Dennis wasn't quite good enough, but I had a crazy, wonderful time with him." Certainly, Mortimer's life right now is anything but dull. In Pink Panther 2, she returns as the hopelessly incompetent secretary Nicole, who is once again involved in a series of comic and sexually provocative scenes with Steve Martin's clueless Inspector Clouseau.
She also co-stars with Ryan Reynolds in the relationship drama Chaos Theory, has the crime thriller Transsiberian awaiting release and spent six weeks in Los Angeles filming the low-budget Redbelt, which co-stars fellow Briton Chiwetel Ejiofor. And now, she's filming Martin Scorsese's thriller Shutter Island with Leonardo DiCaprio, playing a murderess who escapes from an asylum.
"I've worked with three of the greatest directors and writers of our time - Woody Allen [on Match Point], Mamet and now Scorsese," she says, "and what's interesting about all three of them is how very little they impose on you as directors. You think that when you enter the world of these auteurs they're going to tell you exactly what to do and you're going to be given the most amazing clues as to how to find the part; but instead they leave the acting up to the actors and trust them to do their job. They've been doing it for so long and they have an ease about them and a supreme confidence and take a huge pleasure in what they do."
Now the man in her life is the American actor Allesandro Nivola, whom she met while they were filming Love's Labours Lost. They married five years ago, live in Brooklyn and have a son, Sam, whom she takes with her on her film locations.
She also remains very close to her father, and, when we meet in Beverly Hills, is about to fly back to London to see him in hospital. "He's been the most wonderful dad and somebody I adore," she says. "Being with him now he's 85 is still more fun than being with most people. He's a treat to have as a dad and always has been. I miss him terribly because I'm so far away."
Emily Mortimer made her screen acting debut in 1995 in the mini-series The Glass Virgin, after an Oxford classmate's mother who was a talent agent started sending her on auditions. Subsequent TV and film roles followed, and her big-screen debut came in 1996 as Val Kilmer's wife in the adventure The Ghost and the Darkness.
She played Cate Blanchett's devoted lady-in-waiting in Elizabeth and a spoiled, doomed actress in Wes Craven's Scream 3.
Those who saw her in Lovely and Amazing applauded her bravado in shedding her clothes for a full-frontal nude scene, but she insists, "It wasn't sexy, it was just me being nude." Other films have included Young Adam, Windtalkers, Dear Frankie, Bright Young Things, Match Point and, last year, Lars and the Real Girl. For the past year or so, she has been on a hectic work schedule, but when she finishes filming Shutter Island she plans to slow down and take things much easier.
"It's good working a lot but you can reach rock bottom. It's like being an alcoholic. At some point you just think, 'Ugh, that's too much.' I want to get to a point where I can pick and choose and do things that are fascinating when they come along.
"I definitely feel right now that I'm ready to be a bit quieter this year."
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