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Sometimes life is more important than putting on a dress and stepping out of a black car.
Even before the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch died of Alzheimer's in 1999, her husband, literary critic John Bayley, had published 'Iris'. A moving - and ultimately bestselling - memoir of his life with her, it was also clearly a therapeutic attempt to yoke the charismatic, free-spirited Iris of the pair's courtship in 1950s Oxford to the broken, confused Iris he was caring for: the one who could not remember that she had published 25 novels and three theoretical monographs, who was entranced by the Teletubbies, and who followed him around the house all day like a water buffalo' asking repeatedly, 'When are we leaving?' Digressive and ruminative, the book didn't exactly scream 'Film me!'. But Richard Eyre has had a go, based on 'Iris' and the first of its two follow-ups, 'Iris and the Friends'. The result is a small triumph; a haunting chamber piece occupying what the director rightly calls 'a poetic territory' somewhere between biography and fiction. The Oscar buzz has already started, and for once much of it is justified. Certainly, you're unlikely to witness a subtler, more refined performance this year than Judi Dench's as Old Iris -- apart, perhaps, from Jim Broadbent's as Old John. Portraying the recently deceased is fraught with problems, but they're exacerbated here by the fact that, dead or alive, Murdoch is a tough nut to crack. She was famously secretive, her unknowability crucial to her 'diabolical' sexual appeal, never mind Bayley's assertion that she possessed ' no obvious female charms'. Dench was attached to the project as early as 1999. So to play Young Iris, Eyre needed an actress who not only looked the part, but was also capable enough to synchronise instinctively with the nation's favourite Dame. Luckily, Kate Winslet was nearing the end of the year off she'd given herself after giving birth to her daughter, Mia, and on her usual quest for challenging material...
Just back from filming Alan Parker's The Life of David Gale in the US, she's relaxed and healthy-looking in a black sleeveless top, her rooty-blonde locks exuding celebrity wattage. Twenty-six now, she's confident and fluent - so much so that it's hard to get a word in edgeways. 'One of the most extraordinary things about Iris', she observes, lighting up, 'is that she was incredibly private and mysterious in certain ways, yet very open in terms of how she was about life and love and writing. And yet who she really was she kept instinctively buried. One of the most virtuous things about her relationship with John was that he never wanted to pry. He had this incredible respect for how she was.' TO AFFINITY AND BEYOND Murdoch's biographer Peter Conradi talks of her ability to make 'each friend feel uniquely befriended'. She had the novelist's gift for finding affinities, for entering others' worlds and making herself at home. Her friendships were intense, intellectual, often helplessly sexual. Indeed, it may have been Bayley's liberated willingness to share her that drew her to him. On June 30, 1954, he wrote to her: 'Darling, don't ever give me up: I could live in any contradiction indefinitely with you, and never mind the mornings when one wakes early and alone.'
'I think she found it quite easy to accept people for everything they were,' says Winslet. 'That's why she had so many relationships. She really didn't think she was doing anything wrong. She had an instinctive ability to love - even objects. There's a thing she says: ''People are precious, things are precious. Even stones.' [Murdoch collected stones, fascinated by the Platonic perfection of their form,] But that thing John writes about her not having obvious female charm' - she laughs - 'we used to joke on set and say, you know, this isn't a pretty film for any of us.' In fact, Winslet looks great in her hinged, sandy-coloured wig, flat-heeled Brevitt Bouncer shoes and lisle stockings. As it transpires, she got off lightly. 'Jim had to shave his head entirely and have small bits of hair laid on, and Hugh [Bonneville, who plays Young John] had the top of his head shaved so he looked like a boiled egg. We all wore little or no make-up, which actually as an actor is a relief because you don't have to spend so long in the makes chair in the morning.' The Bayley lifestyle was, one visitor to their house remarked, 'beyond bohemian'. The memoirs genially itemise the squalor; The soggy mattress, litter-strewn floor, rodent infestations and, most poignantly, the veal and ham pie which simply vanished from their kitchen. (After this, anything they lost was said, in the childish private language they shared, to have 'gone to pieland' to keep the pie company.) They had a wayward grasp of the world's solidity, of its ability to hurt. As the film shows, Murdoch loved water (though not bath water). Bayley dug her a bathing pond in the conservatory of Cedar Lodge, the house just outside Oxford where they lived until the mid 80's. One day, novelist Angus Wilson paid a visit, and was alarmed to notice, hanging from a piece of string directly above the bathing pond, a single-bar electric fire. 'It gets very cold in the mornings,' Bayley explained. Winslet wasn't tempted to give up washing, but in all other respects accuracy was paramount, especially on the day Bayley visited the set. 'Hugh and Jim got quite nervous. Hugh looked at him from a distance for a while before going, ''Should I go up and say hello? What if he thinks I don't look like him?" I just went up to him and said, "What do you think?", meaning "Do I look any thing like her?" And he went. "You know, you do look rather like her, though she was a little larger than you and her nose was a little more snub," He had a big thing for her nose, Very sweet.' What Iris doesn't do -- can't do - is give you a sense of why Murdoch matters in the first place. If you know the books, you notice the omission. After all, she was, as Martin Amis has written, 'the preeminent female novelist of her generation'. Never elitist, she believed novels should contain 'something for everyone', which is why hers function both as soapy satires stuffed with comically named posh people (Blaise Gavender, Bradley Pearson) and as abstruse moral fables. 'Under the Net', her 1954 debut which features fleetingly in the film, was modishly existentialist; but she improved with age and was arguably at her peak in the late 70s, when 'The Sea, The Sea' won the Booker Prize. Her trick was to reconcile the lofty and the quotidian; to bring the weight of her learning to bear upon dilemmas everyone could grasp: the difference between sacred and profane love, for instance, or between nice people and good people. For Eyre, this lack of context isn't a problem. His intention was to be inclusive, to make a film you could enjoy without 'bringing on board special baggage'. Winslet admits she only dipped into the novels, preferring to research by reading Bayley's more accessible books and watching videos of TV interviews Murdoch gave. 'I watched them constantly. She wasn't comfortable at all. She'd hang her head slightly to one side, be a bit lopsided in her chair, fiddle with her hands. She was confident in what she was saying, but you do sense she'd rather not have been there.' She pauses. 'I very much had to think about how to play her. I really wanted to get it right. I couldn't wing it, though of course I never do that.' WEIGHTY ISSUES You could say that Winslet had a tricky 2001. Amid much media tub-thumping, she split with her husband and the father of her daughter, Jim Threapleton, and is now with Sam Mendes. Then there was the issue of her fluctuating weight. 'Oh God,' she tenses. 'Eyes to heaven.' As the most successful young actress in Britain, did you mean it when you said you'd never get cast again unless you lost weight? 'No. Of course not. OF COURSE NOT! Would I say that?' I don't know. Did you say it? 'No! Okay. Right. Record straight. I was pregnant. I gained four stone. I gave birth to Mia. Weight does not drop off. So OF COURSE I'm not going to get the parts I was getting before when I'm sitting around at 13 stone. Any woman who has a baby gains weight. You want to get back to where you were before. I got back to where I was. That's all it was. I remember saying, "Oooh, need to get the weight off so I can get back to work." It was an offhand remark that got twisted.
'I read somewhere that having said it was great for actresses to be curvy, I then "promptly lost four stone" - I DID NOT PROMPTLY LOSE FOUR STONE! I lost the weight I gained when I was pregnant. And it's bloody hard work and it's fucking boring.' (Thought: If Winslet was really that hung up about her weight, she'd hardly have consented to Iris's numerous, not to mention far from glamorous, nude scenes.) Her marriage split coincided with the premiere of Enigma, the Mick Jagger produced Bletchley Park thriller in which, five months pregnant, she played Dougray Scott's dumpy sidekick, Hester. When she failed to show, Jagger took the piss in his vanity documentary 'Being Mick'. Did you know he was going to read out your announcement in a silly voice? 'Yeah,' She nods. 'Yeah. I'd spoken to Mick and he was like [Jagger drawl] "I'm putting some bits in the doc now and you're in them", and he sent me the tape, and I just thought it was quite funny. But then I know Mick and he's funny like that. He took the piss out of Prince Charles and lots of other people throughout the film, so no, I was fine. I think people were very understanding about why I wasn't there, I couldn't have gone.' You'd have been damned if you had. 'Marriage split Kate out on tiles.' 'Exactly, I was in a no-win situation. Sometimes life is more important than putting on a dress and stepping out of a black car.' Are you surprised by the power your private life has to sell magazines? On the whole I don't read them, precisely because it isn't reality. That's not my life, that's not real I'll be much more protective of my private life from now on. Frankly, I've got bottles to prepare at home. My life and my job are two completely separate things and always have been.' I wonder if this is strictly true. It certainly won't be if Mendes persuades her to let him have his way and direct her on stage, though she insists there are no plans for that at the moment. Where do you stand on the great Harry Potter versus Lord of the Rings debate? 'Um, I haven't seen either of them yet. It's hard to get out when you're a full-time mum. I'm dying to see both of them, but I think I want to see Lord of the Rings more because it's Pete [Jackson, who directed Winslet in Heavenly Creatures]. I had a bit of a sneak preview, though, because I stayed with him and his wife, Fran, while they were filming and went on the set.' 'What If?', Winslet's single from the soundtrack to the recent animated Christmas Carol, was tipped in some quarters to be the Christmas Number One. It didn't make it in the end, but it's still in the Top Ten. That makes you a pop star! She laughs, 'I don't feel like I was because I was filming David Gale when it came out, so I didn't get to do "Top of the Pops". It was really bizarre. I only did it because I wanted the proceeds to go to these charities. Making the video was hilarious.' So was watching it. Especially when you opened up the box of your memories. 'Oh God, don't...' REACTION MOVIE
The last film Iris Murdoch and John Bayley went to see together was The French Connection in 1972. History doesn't relate whether they simply decided, having hated it, never to go again. Had Iris been made in the novelist's lifetime - and yes, there are clearly problems with this - it's unlikely she would even have known about it. But if she had, what would her reaction have been? A silent, enigmatic smile, perhaps -her customary response. If Eyre was worried about what Bayley would think, however, he needn't have been. The spry 77-year-old has cheerfully given Iris his seal of approval and was even overheard at a preview screening to mutter 'Wonderful'. It's a recommendation you can trust.
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