This Much Is True

And I wanted more. After Oliver Twist, I went through all fifteen novels — Dickens created over 2000 characters. And there is a lot more — 14,000 letters (no, I haven’t read all of them) and novellas, journalism, speeches. Words poured out of him. More than any other writer I can think of, Dickens distilled his life into his work. Though a genius, I can’t help thinking that he was a complete bastard, or I should say rather that he was an incomplete bastard, because he wasn’t totally shitty. Dickens was a wonderful friend; he was a good father; he was a good employer. But when he turned against you, he had a cruelty and viciousness that was almost unhinged. All this runs through his books.

Throughout his life he felt underprivileged. He overcompensated by being a dandy. With his big, flouncy neckties and the flourishes of his hands, when he went to America some people thought this foppish figure terribly vulgar. His signature was absurdly pretentious; rather like that of Queen Elizabeth I’s, or any twelve-year-old’s, wandering all over the page. In that respect he’s as grotesque, humorous, tragic and as manifold as any of his creations. The man interested me as much as the writer. Unsurprisingly, I chose Dickens as my special subject at Cambridge.

If I was damaged by my mother, it was because she made me over-confident rather than the opposite, because she believed in me so totally and gave me so much love. Dickens’s mother, however, never made him feel that he was important. Most men get over it, but Dickens didn’t; he never got over anything that happened to him. His attitude towards women always remained ambivalent. I find his preference for a certain type of pre-pubescent heroine, whom he invariably describes as ‘little’, or ‘slight’, ‘tiny’, ‘small’ or ‘slender’ — and all aged seventeen — more than a bit iffy. I am not little — and I am quite sure he would not have liked me.

But Dickens is the poet of the extraordinary; he pushes reality to extremes. I don’t think there are many other actresses who are as temperamentally suited to interpreting his work as I am. As I said, I’m an over-actress; I’m at home in extremes: that’s my weakness and my strength. Dickens is my element.

In the late eighties, I was lucky enough to win the role of Flora Finching in Christine Edzard’s film, Little Dorrit. Flora was based on Dickens’s first love, Maria Beadnell. Maria led him on and then spurned him; he took his revenge by creating Flora, when twenty-five years later Maria came back into his life, hoping to re-inflame his love. Alongside the pity and disgust Dickens felt for Maria, so physically altered: ‘toothless, fat, old and ugly’, he also allowed her pathos to come through in the character. That is his artistry.

The film had an enormous effect on my life. I had the chance to interpret a character using all my knowledge of that novel, and I was working with a brilliant cast: Derek Jacobi, Joan Greenwood, Alec Guinness, Patricia Hayes, Max Wall and Cyril Cusack (the complete cast numbered 242 actors — extras not included) in a unique environment which stimulated all of us to give our best work. And when I won an LA Critics’ Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress (with Geneviève Bujold) it brought me to America — but that’s for later in my story.

Christine Edzard is an extraordinary woman, one of the best directors I’ve ever worked with, and I must take this opportunity to hail her achievements and those of her company, Sands Films, and especially her indefatigable colleague, Olivier Stockman, my favourite Belgian. The interview for the part took place in the ramshackle warren of the old warehouse by the Thames in Rotherhithe that is the home of Sands Films. Christine is exceptionally quiet; and that day she hardly spoke. This always frightens me, so I kept talking, frenetically, without pausing — just as Flora Finching would have done.

She gave me the part and, in the film, the lines I speak are exactly as Dickens wrote them; Christine had the wisdom and the confidence not to change Flora’s stream-of-consciousness speeches. But there is also a sadness beneath the comedy of Flora Finching. As a fat person, I know what she went through; Flora wanted to be desirable still, and thought she was. On the outside, there is all the coquettish pantomime; inside there is the desperate, longing woman.