“She must be hungry,” Rosemary says.
He turns to find his wife standing behind him. “I’ve got her. Go back to sleep. I’ll warm up her bottle.”
Rosemary wobbles back to their bedroom as Andrew carries his daughter to the kitchen. Hanna’s bottle of formula milk has already been prepared for a late-night feeding like this. He puts the bottle in the sink, runs hot water over it for a minute, then tests the milk by pouring a little on his hand. Happy with its temperature, he takes a seat at the kitchen breakfast nook. Holding Hanna on his lap, he places the bottle in her waiting mouth. She wraps her tiny pink fingers on the bottle as if to say to her father: “I can hold it myself, thank you.”
As she sucks on the bottle, her brown eyes — the exact shade of her father’s — focus on him. Hanna tilts her head up slightly as if trying to remember who the man with the bottle is. Then her little red lips curl into a big grin in recognition.
6 great many things and many great things
Sarah has heard many film actors complain about the endless hours spent preparing for a scene rather than actually doing one. She is beginning to understand the source of that frustration. Working in film, she has discovered, is a lot like getting ready for a battle — the preparation long and boring and the actual battle brief and overwhelming.
Today, for instance, the driver picked her up from the hotel at six in the morning, and now at nine-fifteen, they have yet to film a single frame. She has already been to the wardrobe trailer, already had her morning meeting with the director as she was getting fitted for her costume for the big climactic confrontation scene for which he gave her several suggestions that are the complete opposite of her vision for how the scene should be played.
The scene in question is the emotional centrepiece of the film in which Clifford confronts Constance about her lover. It is a long, complicated sequence riddled with many shifts in tone and points of view requiring a great deal of coverage, and they only have two days to shoot it.
In this adaptation of the novel, Clifford’s confrontation with his wife takes an interesting, unexpected, but wholly believable turn at the end. What drew Sarah to the script, what made her decide to play the part, is this very scene she is getting made up for now. It is a scene of heartbreaking realization on Clifford’s part. After the anger and betrayal subside, without words, without a tedious monologue, he lets Connie, as he likes to call her, know that as much as it hurts him, he would rather see the woman he loves happy, even if it is with another man.
This bittersweet gift to his wife, her lover, and their future child — and the silent gratitude with which Constance accepts Clifford’s bestowal of understanding — is what made Sarah take the role. She read the script in the London subway on her way to a matinee performance of the play she was doing in the West End, and when she got to the final page, she burst into tears, prompting the woman next to her to get up and sit a couple of seats away from her.
Another thing Sarah loves about this version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is that unlike the previous screen adaptations, which have been period pieces with a capital P, this one is positively modern. The corsets, for instance, are far less frilly, the hair less ornate, and to Sarah’s delight, there isn’t a goddamn bonnet in sight.
Everything about the production, from the art direction to the costume design to the cinematography, is lean, almost austere. Sarah has always hated those earnest period films in which the actors are mere models for the elaborate costumes and the women all sport precious little bonnets to match their frocks.
Sitting in the makeup trailer in front of a large vanity mirror and sipping green tea, Sarah reads the day’s newspaper. Sandy, a heavy-set woman in her late twenties with long, silky hair and soft, baby-like skin, is busy doing Sarah’s face, while Vita, a muscularly compact woman with a shaved head and drawn-on eyebrows, blow-dries Sarah’s hair, which she then lengthens by attaching extensions.
Sarah likes to read the newspaper while the hair and makeup department work their magic, which can take anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half, depending on the scene. During this process, some actors read the script as a last-minute preparation. Sarah, on the other hand, knows her lines beat by beat at this stage of the game, and instead likes to read the morning paper, which has the unique effect of taking her out of herself and immersing her in the lives of others.
When she is in a play, her prep routine is different. As she does her own makeup in the dressing room, she likes to listen to the chatter of the audience as the theatre fills up. Sarah uses the sounds of each night’s audience as a soundtrack, an audio portal into the emotional journey she is about to take. The one thing she asks the stage manager to do is to feed the noises in the theatre directly into her dressing room, which can usually be achieved by putting a discreet microphone in the auditorium and connecting it to a speaker in her dressing room. While preparing for the night’s approaching performance, she drinks in the voices of the crowd, absorbing the energy as if by osmosis and making a connection with the audience even before she utters her first line.
Working on a film set, however, presents a different set of challenges that requires another kind of ingenuity. In the absence of a live audience with whom to give and take from, she exploits the technological demands of the medium. Sarah loves to confine her energy and release it slowly like an IV drip, according to the size of a shot. For a close-up she releases emotional energy in microscopic bursts, intensifying the audience’s thrilling, beat-by-beat discovery of her character. In a master shot, though, she can afford to be more liberal, allowing herself freedom of movement, of gesture, of play, by using her entire body to tell the story, something she has tried to learn from her idol, Meryl Streep. Sarah is astounded by Streep’s ability to summon every limb to play a character while never compromising that character’s inner life. Many times she has watched the actress on film and whispered to herself: “How does she do it?”
By the time Vita finishes putting in the hair extensions, Sarah has reached the last pages of the newspaper, having taken her time with the articles and op-ed pieces in the politics section while merely skimming entertainment. She has little patience for the way entertainment is covered in most newspapers. The sort of who-is-screwing-who chatter that passes for entertainment journalism revolts her. As for the sports section, she couldn’t tell rugby from hockey to save her life, so she skips it altogether.
Sarah finally reaches the obituaries and takes her time there. She got in the habit of reading the obituaries several years ago when her father passed away suddenly from a severe brain aneurysm. Sarah took it upon herself to write his obituary. The following day she bought the newspaper, read her father’s obituary, and then scanned all the other ones published that day. Since then she has been inexplicably drawn to them. No matter which city she is in, what is happening in her life, whether she is happy or sad, she checks every obituary in the paper. She always feels better — no, not better, somehow less alone, more connected to others. It is as if through the act of reading about the departed she can silently pay tribute to them, be a witness to the fact they were once here.
Finally, Sarah comes to Ella Christiansen, the last obituary of the day. She continues to read, not recognizing the name. Only after she finishes does it hit her. She studies the obituary again as if to confirm what her eyes are telling her:
CHRISTIANSEN, Ella Kotsopoulos, of Toronto, Ontario, passed away on Monday, September 6, 2004, at St. Michael’s Hospital. Ella was the daughter of Frank and Edna Kotsopoulos. She was also the beloved wife of Gregory Christiansen and the loving mother of Andrew and Natalie Christiansen. A former stage actress and