http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-23976104-holliday-grai nger-and-her-hollywood-debut.do
Holliday Grainger was interviewed by the London Evening Standard:
I don't think going blonde has changed me psychologically but I think you do get a lot more attention from men," actress Holliday Grainger tells me frankly. "It's a bit weird. As a brunette I was never the one out of my group of friends that the boys went for.
Her natural light-brown hair has been dyed blonde for her latest role as murderous Lucrezia Borgia in Neil Jordan's US television epic, The Borgias, which comes to our screens next weekend.
When I meet her at the Covent Garden Hotel, it's hard to imagine Grainger, 22, as one of the most evil women in history. Tiny, ethereal, with just a trace of her native Manchester accent, she looks like a fresh-faced teenager.
A former child actress, she jokes that she tends to play tragic virgins or troubled runaways.
"Probably because I look so young - I'm constantly committing suicide or dying."
A year ago she was a virtual unknown - you might recognise her from early television roles in Where the Heart Is, Merlin and Demons (as a vampire-fighting student) - but now she's about to become a major Hollywood lead.
Named after Billie Holiday - her mother's favourite singer when she was pregnant - she fell into acting by accident, aged six, when a friend of her mother was a casting director on Tim Firth's BBC1 series, All Quiet on the Preston Front: "If I hadn't got that, I'd probably never have done acting."
Firth cast her again in his children's television series Roger and the Rottentrolls. She had an agent by the age of nine but managed to attend normal school, "so I'm quite grounded".
There's no denying Grainger has had to learn to grow up fast. She is super-bright, articulate, but careful. All her spare money goes on travel and accommodation, she laughs, although whenever she is filming in London, she couch-surfs at friends' houses.
Dressed today in jeans and a trailing scarf, she's no fashion addict although she can turn on a kittenish sensuality when the camera rolls.
Photographer Rankin, who made a short film with her last year, has just done an extraordinarily sexy shoot with her.
And Grainger does make an impact on men. I first saw her on stage at the Donmar in 2009, in Athol Fugard's play Dimetos, where she was sensational as the teenager trying to navigate her uncle's incestuous passion for her.
For her entrance, she had to be lowered by rope in her underwear onto the stage to rescue a horse from the bottom of a well. It had male critics gasping. "I really had to decide not to look at the audience, who were sitting literally a foot away," she recalls.
Certainly it changed perceptions of her as an innocent child and led to more adult roles, in William Boyd's Any Human Heart, as the sexy, doomed lover of Matthew Macfadyen, and in Jack Thorne's cult film, The Scouting Book for Boys, as a flirtatious teen runaway.
The producers of The Borgias, a 10-part US series which also stars Jeremy Irons and Derek Jacobi, saw numerous Hollywood and European actresses but it was Grainger they wanted to play Lucrezia.
In the first episode alone we get torture, sexual corruption, incest and poisoning. It could easily have descended into another period romp, but thanks to Neil Jordan (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, The End of The Affair) it becomes a nuanced crime drama. After strong reviews in the States, they are already filming series two.
For Grainger, it was a chance to tell Lucrezia's back story and get beyond the image of her as a murderous femme fatale. At the beginning of the drama, her character is only 13 but she's already fascinated by power politics. Her father, a Catholic cardinal who schemes to become Pope, uses every trick in the book to advance his family.
"I love playing Lucrezia," Grainger enthuses.
"Because she starts off so pure, but she's not at all naive. She knows what's going on around her."
Grainger devoured biographies about her character and began to see her as a powerful, independent woman who was ahead of her time. "I hope people will feel a lot of sympathy for her, especially when you realise she is living in a gilded cage."
After the Borgias first aired in America, Steven Spielberg asked to see Grainger's audition tape.
London audiences will see her next in Cary Fukunaga's dark, surreal Jane Eyre, released in September, and she's just filmed Bel Ami in London and Budapest opposite Twilight star, Robert Pattinson, which comes out this month.
She is in awe of the way Pattinson has handled his meteoric rise to fame. When they were filming in Budapest, the Hungarian radio stations constantly broadcast their location, so Pattinson had to keep changing hotels.
Arguably, Grainger's biggest break will be playing Estella in David Nicholls's new screen adaptation of Dickens's Great Expectations. You sense she will be terrific as the ice maiden who breaks Pip's heart. According to the film's producer Elizabeth Karlsen: "She is just an incredibly fine actor and has the beauty that is needed for Estella as well as an extraordinary technical ability."
As for Hollywood, Grainger seems surprisingly sanguine about the pressures and claims she's never been asked to lose weight for a role. People need to see more natural body shapes, she insists, especially with a character such as Lucrezia in a time when women were depicted with ample bosoms and rounded stomachs in many Renaissance paintings.
Grainger has been doing an Open University degree in English alongside filming but, as she says, she's been living in the 19th century for the past year with Jane Eyre and Bel Ami. "It kind of feels like I've been having a parallel education."
Having spent a lot of the past year filming Bel Ami, has she had time for a personal life? "Oh yes," she says, raising an eyebrow. "There's time to have the life of a normal 20-year-old. We're all really close as a cast. Last year we were all living in the same apartment block so it did feel like a prolonged holiday."
With its period-perfect architecture, Budapest is full of visiting film crews -which means they get to party a lot, she explains. "It's a bit like, 'The Borgias are in this bar tonight, but we could always go to that bar because all the Birdsong and Titanic actors will be there'. And you can spot the Birdsong men a mile off," she blushes, "because they all have their little First World War taches."
The Borgias is on Sky Atlantic from August 13.
Holly with Rob in The Bad Mother's Handbook:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_frjCPpXN_Us/S2dzXOACb4I/AAAAAAAAFtE/7RrEIeIE FHA/s1600-h/bad_mothers_004.jpg
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