In her song, "Why?" Annie Lennox has a dialogue with herself regarding her interaction with the press. She understands that navigating a public life requires participation in the folly of media, but she laments it at the same time. She reads what her life is like, what her regrets are, what she dreams of, how she manages from day to day, a book she's read. "But none of it's true," she has said. "Certain aspects are truthful… but it's generally someone else's idea of who you are." The whole process of celebrity, according to Annie Lennox, is rather dehumanizing as strangers ask very personal questions and demand intimate details. And yet, she knows this is the game she must play to a certain extent because she has chosen to live the creative life and has been rewarded for it with tremendous success. "Why?" asks the press, and indeed the audience, " do you know how I feel?" and in its own reply concludes, "I don't think so."
For the painfully shy artist, celebrity bears a bit more than the typical double-edged sword might glean. Every person in the public eye must understand that they have given up a part of their selves in exchange for the spotlight. Perhaps their sole intention was to do the best work they could, without the hubris needed for thinking of the ramifications of celebrity. Because she is a songwriter and singer, Annie Lennox bears her heart and soul in much of her music - no need to dig through her waste bin to discover her demons. There they are in "Walking on Broken Glass," "You Have Placed a Chill In My Heart," "Bitter Pill," "Loneliness," "The Gift." Her lyrics are revelatory with depths of emotion rarely experienced in pop music, and yet she is not wonton for publicity. Simply, she does what she must in order to maintain her livelihood even though she knows it's a dangerous exchange.
To experience the music of Annie Lennox is much like experiencing the acting of Jodhi May, both deeply intelligent, fiercely private women; both creative artists working at the heights of their genius. For Jodhi May, however, her means of creation is rooted in public communication. We can sing to ourselves, but the art of acting requires an audience. Jodhi May knows this as much as Annie Lennox, but where Annie plays the game, Jodhi often refuses.
Having plunged into the spotlight as an adolescent with her astonishing performance in "A World Apart," Jodhi was immediately overwhelmed by the glitter of paparazzi. Here was an untrained 12 year-old more than managing the heart and soul of one of the first films to successfully tackle Apartheid. The racial atrocities of South Africa as seen through the eyes of a white child at once trying to grow up and trying to gain her activist mother's attention, "A World Apart" took critics and audiences by storm. Her performance was rewarded with the Best Actress award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, Jodhi May was the darling of the cinema world, with offers pouring in and the media pressing down all around her.
I once saw a small pen and ink drawing of a lioness on the prowl. The caption was "Working Mother." With the protective guidance of her own mother, Jodhi was removed from the buzz and firmly grounded in their London-via-Paris based reality.
It is reported that Jodhi's French mother did not fully appreciate her daughter's desire to act, but we know she embraced it; otherwise, we would not have the host of films Jodhi made as a minor. Most notably, we would not have her as " Alice " in "The Last of the Mohicans." With a performance still so haunting a dozen years after it was made, it is the cliff scene of that film that everyone remembers. She'd grown from the gangly youth of "A World Apart" into a beautiful young woman so terrorized by the circumstances she finds herself in that she makes a drastic, irrevocable decision that leaves the audience stunned and weeping.
While still in high school, Jodhi joined Joely Richardson, Julie Walters and Sophie Thursfeld in one of the most disturbing films I have ever seen. "Sister My Sister" revisits the spiraling madness of the incestuous Papin sisters who, in 1930's France , beat and mutilated their female employers to death for no immediately apparent reason. This same crime has been used as the basis of Jean Genet's "The Maids" and most recently in the French adaptation "Les Blessures Assassines " ( aka "Murderous Maids"). The performances in this film are nothing short of brilliant. As the sisters, Jodhi May and Joely Richardson create one of the most powerfully fragile screen couples in film history. Reviews were rave, and an audience success in both the UK and the USA seemed to have put Jodhi on the verge of major stardom. But just as she could have embarked on any number of film projects that would, no doubt, have driven her star even higher, Jodhi instead accepted an invitation to read English at Wadham College, Oxford University, effectively putting her film career on hold. Always a smart girl (the intelligence quotient of the average Oxford student is 130) , she has reportedly said she felt her life would be incomplete if she did not finish her education. By refocusing her energies to academics, Jodhi ultimately hoped to have an acting career beyond her twenties. While at university, limiting her film work to weekends, she managed to make appearances in a handful of films, taking the leads in only two, "Signs & Wonders" with James Earl Jones and "The Gambler" with Michael Gambon .
Perhaps following the lead of her first costar, Barbara Hershey, Jodhi May has cultivated a particular distance between her private life and her public persona. Michael Gambon's lessons a decade later then, of remaining anonymous so the audience may fully believe you as the character you are playing, could not possibly have been lost on her. Much to the chagrin of her interviewers, Jodhi often comes across as quite reticent and steadfast in her determination to not give away many of her secrets. What she consistently holds close to her breast are the details of her family, her parents, her loves, her life as a child. As "Why?" poses, "some things are better left unsaid." These unspoken details may confound the press, grown so accustomed to disclosure by celebrities, but they tend to leave her fans applauding her tenacity - even if we sometimes do want more than she is willing to give.
Having graduated from Oxford , Jodhi went back to work full-time, showing up in miniseries such as "Warriors" and "The Aristocrats." She also took the lead in perhaps the best film adaptation of "Turn of the Screw" to date. Rather than rely as so many previous productions had on the supernatural wickedness of Henry James' tale, this production focuses instead on the young woman's escalating madness. As "Miss," Jodhi reels from duty-bound young governess to out of control hysteric in a bravura performance that is arguably the best of her career. As Peter Wyngaurd ('Peter Quint ' of 1961's revered adaptation "The Innocents") stated of Jodhi's performance, "She was like the dying swan dropping her head because the tumour was bursting inside." For more of Peter Wyngaurd , please see his interview in the files section of this or the Yahoo group web site.
In 2000's "The House of Mirth," Jodhi steals every scene she is in and by doing so, made the "best of the year" lists by many critics. Many thought she deserved a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work as Lily Bart's (Gillian Anderson's) scheming cousin who would rather Lily die in poverty than allow her the eye of the man for whom she harbored an unrequited love. It is a small but pivotal role, as they say, and the film's director, Terence Davies, says their final confrontation is his favorite scene in the whole of the film and would not allow the editor to cut a single frame from it. Watching Jodhi and Gillian in that scene is seeing "two maestros working at the heights of their talents." This scene can be viewed in the film section of this web site. Davies' entire commentary can be heard on the film's DVD.
Jodhi May seems to be on a steady course of progressively mature material. Since 2000, she has become a fixture in the UK television costume drama line-up, making appearances in "Daniel Deronda ," "The Mayor of Casterbridge ," "Tipping the Velvet" and "The Other Boleyn Girl." While the first two are more traditional, although excellent, screen adaptations of literary triumphs, the latter two are anything but traditional. Closely based on the novel by Sarah Waters, "Tipping the Velvet" is a coming of age romp through Victorian London's lesbian society. What is keen about this adaptation is that it is treated just as any corseted drama might be -- a straightforward love story that explores the protagonist's identity and sexuality without pandering to the lowest common denominator. In "The Other Boleyn Girl," quite loosely based on the novel of the same name by Philippa Gregory, Jodhi joins Natascha MacElhone and Jared Harris for an experimental glimpse at the bedroom politics of King Henry VIII's court. It is the life and death of Anne Boleyn that Jodhi bites into with gusto. In ninety minutes we watch as she grows from naïve young lady in waiting to the vicious, unstoppable Queen of England eventually remorseful (and beheaded) for her actions. This is my personal favorite Jodhi May vehicle to date. Knowing that the cast used no scripts, but were instead given outlines to work within during rehearsals before their improvised performances were let loose with cameras rolling, this is an extraordinary production.
Theater junkies take note, Jodhi's also found her place on the boards in the French language premiere of Caryl Churchill's "Far Away," a brief but genius commentary on how society grows to accept evil absurdities as being the natural progression of life. In Christopher Hampton's "The Talking Cure" she was 'Sabina Spielrein ,' hysterical patient turned lover to Ralph Fiennes' 'Carl Jung.' And in Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" at the 2003 Edinburgh Festival, she was Chekhov's seminal bird, Nina, at once free and utterly destroyed. Garnering largely rave reviews for these and other performances, it is my suspicion that her best work in the future will be found on the stage.
But before we can put her in one particular box and wrap it up with a label, I am reminded that Jodhi May has also stretched her wings in writing and directing. While at Oxford , Jodhi directed her fellow students in a production of David Mamet's sexual politics drama "Oleander." Her short film, " Spyhole " is her own adaptation of the Raymond Carver short story "Neighbors." She later received a grant from the British Film Fund for the writing of the feature film, " L'Amour Fou ," although no other details have been revealed as of this posting.
Like Annie Lennox before her, Jodhi May is perhaps the best in her generation doing what she loves to do. Having an apparent desire to excel, they both have pushed the limits of their talents and discovered layers of their selves to put to use in their respective creations. With each new role, it seems Jodhi challenges herself to root about her psyche to depths that she may not have unearthed before, and has certainly never revealed to the chroniclers of the press, or the strangers in the audience, anxiously awaiting her next acting foray.
If remaining as anonymous as possible is the only way Jodhi May can conceive of doing what she does, what we all love her for doing so well, then cheers to reticence and stoicism. With good fortune, it will grant Jodhi May a long, fulfilling career.
Jill Patrick
21 July 2004
© JodhiMayDomain.us, 2004
