Fox foils the stereotypers
It is one of the stranger ironies of Kerry Fox's acting career that her best-known performance (as Janet Frame in Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table) closed more doors that it opened. Critics raved about the intensity and humour she brought to her role as the introverted red-haired New Zealand writer, but casting agents confused the character with the part. "I didn't work for over a year," she sighs.
Fox (whose new film The Sound of One Hand Clapping screens in competition today) was written off as incapable of playing anything other than eccentric oddballs. Only when Gillian Armstrong cast her in The Last Days of Chez Nous in 1991 did she manage to escape the typecasting. "People were amazed at how thin I was!"
As if to make up for the long months of unemployment, Fox has been working at a prodigious rate ever since. ("Jobs have started popping up of their own accord.") She opens next week in a new stage play at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Quite apart from One Hand Clapping, she has two other new films waiting for release - Thom Fitzgerald's The Hanging Garden (shot in Canada) and British thriller, The Wisdom of Crocodiles, in which she co-stars with Jude Law.
"He is an extraordinary man -intelligent and compassionate, and with a great respect for humanity," she says of Richard Flanagan, the Australian writer-director of One Hand Clapping, a harrowing family drama charting the experiences of immigrants in Tasmania in the 1950s. She wrote him a letter after reading his script and he wasted no time in casting her. "The strange thing was that they didn't even send me the script at first because they thought I would turn it down." GM
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