THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, April 7, 1995 TAG: 9504070057
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E12 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 107 lines
T. S. ELIOT, one of the most prominent literary figures of our time, might have committed his wealthy wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood, to a mental asylum, but he wouldn't have messed with Miranda Richardson.
Richardson, who received an Academy Award nomination for her performance as Vivien in ``Tom and Viv,'' the film chronicling the real-life traumas of the poet and his wife, declares that the film is of a different time, and a different place, when it comes to women's rights.
``To a certain degree, Viv was put away because she was troubling to men,'' Richardson said.
``Tom and Viv,'' which co-stars Willem Dafoe, plays at the Naro Expanded Cinema in Norfolk through Sunday.
Eliot and his first wife met in 1914 and began to become famous in the late 1920s. Such poems as ``The Waste Land'' and ``The Four Quartets'' made him, arguably, the greatest poet of the 20th century, but she spent the last 10 years of her life in an asylum after he stood by and allowed her brother to commit her under England's Lunacy Act. She died in 1947, a calm and sane woman even though she was still in the asylum. The next year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
``I had Vivien's diaries with me,'' Richardson said. ``I read them daily. They were a kind of support. I grew to like her a great deal. She was a seeker of truth, and she dared to say what she thought. His literary crowd didn't like her and encouraged him to think of her as an embarrassment. She even dared to say she disliked Cezanne.''
Vivien also trashed hotel rooms and generally made scenes.
``The same behavior would have been tolerated from a man,'' said Richardson, not nursing any visible wounds over losing the Academy Award to Jessica Lange. ``Today, her troubles are known to have been a hormonal imbalance that could easily have been treated medically.''
The interview began on an edge when Richardson overheard me comment on a drink her aides had brought into the room before her. ``It's a peculiar shade of orange,'' I said. Richardson, overhearing the comment, thought I was talking about her new hair shade.
``Haven't you ever heard of hair coloring?'' she queried, in a mild huff. ``Women don't keep their hair the same color, you know.''
The drink, incidentally, was carrot juice.
Richardson grew up in Lancashire, England, and progressed through the Bristol Old Vic Theater School and London's National Theater. As a child, her favorite movie was ``True Grit,'' starring John Wayne.
``I saw it a dozen times. I loved his slow, deliberate delivery. He made the audience wait. He didn't spoon-feed them,'' she said.
She rose to quick fame in the United States with her Marilyn Monroe-style reading of another real-life role - Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged for murder in England in the 1985 movie ``Dance With a Stranger.''
Richardson co-starred in Steven Speilberg's ``Empire of the Sun'' (1987) and the surprise hit ``Enchanted April.'' She had a big year in 1993 as both an Irish gunwoman in ``The Crying Game'' and as Jeremy Irons' wronged wife in ``Damage.'' For the latter, she received an Oscar nomination.
``They've at least heard of me in Hollywood now,'' she said. ``Three years ago, they hadn't. It's difficult, very difficult, to find anything worth doing here. I really feel sorry for actresses here, in a way. There is much less work, but more good work, in England. Of course, the money, the big money, is here. So there you go.''
She's out to prove that she can play American roles. ``Accents, after all, are a part of what actresses do,'' she said. ``I can do accents. I can be American.''
As for Vivien Eliot, the actress reasoned: ``She was expected to be mad, so she played that role. She was a free spirit, in a way. There is evidence that she helped him with his writing and, even, to some extent, she was responsible for it. There are editing notes written in her handwriting on the margins of some of his work. Yet, she isn't even mentioned in most of the early biographies of him.
``He never visited her in the asylum. Not once. Yet, even to her death, she refused to say anything against him.''
Co-star Willem Dafoe is more sympathetic toward Eliot but is still loath to defend him, saying: ``An actor doesn't make a moral judgment on the character he plays. I think Eliot sacrificed his life for his work. This is a classically tragic story. After all, he did live with this woman for 24 years, and I don't think there is real evidence on whether the marriage was ever consummated.''
Dafoe has the quiet, understated speech of his usually complex characters. It was he who played Jesus in the controversial ``The Last Temptation of Christ.''
He said that both Jesus and Eliot were roles he was reluctant to take, explaining: ``I had to be convinced that I could do them. Making a movie is like going on a journey. You never know where you'll end up. You grow with the role. It's unlike a stage role, where you prepare the entire part before it's presented. With a movie, sometimes it changes as you go along.''
He read ``The Waste Land'' and ``The Four Quartets,'' but he says he couldn't sit through ``Cats,'' the Broadway musical based on poems by Eliot. ``I walked out after 10 minutes. It was insipid,'' he said.
He finds that Eliot ``hid his emotions. He even felt that emotions should not be shown in his poetry.
Richardson and Dafoe agree on one point - both hope the film will not be seen, as it continues its run, as ``something about two dead people who liked poetry.''
``It's much more universal than that,'' Richardson said. ``The different way women are seen today did not come about easily. In truth, I still think women are held up to different behavior than men. Men get away with a good deal more.'' ILLUSTRATION: MIRAMAX photo
Miranda Richardson plays the wife of poet T.S. Eliot in ``Tom and
Viv.''
by CNB