ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, April 17, 1997 TAG: 9704170007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 7 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LONDON
SOURCE: MATT WOLF ASSOCIATED PRESS
Britain's Janet McTeer becomes a fearless, feisty Nora in ``A Doll's House.''
Actresses don't get much feistier than Janet McTeer, which is why the English performer readily admits she was astounded at being cast in ``A Doll's House.''
``Anyone who knows me goes hysterical at the idea of me playing that girl at the beginning,'' a forthright, chatty McTeer said over brunch one sunny morning at a cafe near her northwest London home.
She was referring to the celebrated ``doll-wife'' of Ibsen's 1879 play, who starts the drama subservient, even kittenish, and ends it in search of a kind of emancipation that has emboldened women ever since.
McTeer's interpretation nonetheless was one of the talking points of the recent London theater season. In February, it won the 35-year-old actress an Olivier - London's Tony - over formidable competition from Dame Diana Rigg, Eileen Atkins, and Vanessa Redgrave.
It is now on Broadway for an 18-week run at the Belasco Theater. In addition to McTeer, Anthony Page's acclaimed staging has arrived in New York with three men from the London supporting cast - Peter Gowen, John Carlisle, and, as her bank manager husband Torvald, Olivier nominee Owen Teale.
While some performers play down their strengths, McTeer speaks with refreshing directness of her triumph in the part.
``I have no idea how I managed to have so much confidence about Nora, but I did,'' she said, her short hair and black-clad casual chic suggesting an unusually tall catwalk model - McTeer stands almost 6-foot-1 - not a leading classicist of her generation.
``I know I did an incredibly brave performance; I just know it happened.
``As far as I'm concerned, `A Doll's House' was a brand-new play that had never been done before,'' McTeer said. ``If you start off the play knowing something, it's a shame. It's much more interesting to discover absolutely everything from beginning to end.''
The key to her performance was a restless physicality that showed her attraction to Torvald, and occasionally her fear.
``Nora was married because she was young and pretty - the perfect daughter brought up to be the perfect wife,'' said McTeer. ``She's bought into the deal and when it works, she loves it.''
And when it doesn't? ``There is no emotional maturity there at all, no ability to actually cope or discuss things. So then, of course, it all falls apart until eventually she realizes, what am I doing here? I've made a terrible mistake.''
Said McTeer: ``It's terribly frightening.''
The actress' intensity and risk-taking have led to comparisons to Vanessa Redgrave, her competitor for the Olivier.
``I never sit back and rest,'' said McTeer, her no-holds-barred performance style comparable to Redgrave's. ``I can't shortchange people when they come; I can't do it.''
By the final weeks of the London run, she was battling the flu but missed only two performances: ``I had an asthma sprayer hidden on stage because my chest never got a chance to recover. By the end, I was just on my knees. At the final performance, no one could believe I was still there. I virtually had pneumonia.''
Still, such agony exists in the service of an art that has long captivated her imagination.
The younger of two sisters, McTeer was raised in the northern English cathedral city of York, and decided at age 16 to try her luck as an actress. (Her father, now retired, worked for British Rail.)
With one school play behind her, she got the acting bug from a front-of-house job at the local theater in York.
``I thought, those are the people I want to hang about with; they're my kind of people. I think I'll do that then,'' she recalled. ``It was just one of those moments of revelation you have in your life.''
With her parents' approval, she applied to - and was accepted by - London's prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where McTeer was the same vintage as Sean Bean, Fiona Shaw, and two-time Oscar nominee Ralph Fiennes.
Working steadily on the London fringe and on the regions, McTeer began getting the higher-profile roles. In 1992, she received her first Olivier nomination as the languidly beautiful Yelena in Chekhov's ``Uncle Vanya''; Antony Sher (``Stanley'') and Sir Ian McKellen were her co-stars.
The next season she and Mark Rylance made a memorably sparring Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare's ``Much Ado About Nothing'' on the West End.
TV audiences have seen her as Vita Sackville-West in ``Portrait Of A Marriage,'' based on the Nigel Nicolson biography, and as the prison official of the title in ``The Governor,'' the role for which she remains most frequently recognized by London cabbies.
Looking ahead, she hopes soon to direct a play, and would love to play Shakespeare's Cleopatra, perhaps opposite Owen Teale's Antony.
Whatever McTeer's choices, they are unlikely to be safe.
``I'm very brave, ridiculously brave; I'd jump off that tree,'' she said, pointing out the window at a tree arching over the canal and in the first bloom of spring.
``Otherwise, what's the point?''
LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) McTeerby CNB