Is Carey Mulligan
about to become the face of 21st-century British feminism? It’s not too fanciful
a notion: after something of a break from lead roles in the cinema, Mulligan is
about to return with an attention-grabbing double header.
First, she is playing
Bathsheba Everdene in a new adaptation of Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd,
due for release in May; and in the autumn she will be seen in Suffragette, as
part of an impressive ensemble cast telling the story of the votes-for-women
campaign that rocked British society before and during the first world war.
The feminist
credentials of Suffragette are not difficult to ascertain – Mulligan doesn’t
play one of the Pankhursts, but rather a lowly footsoldier called Maud – but it
is in Madding Crowd that Mulligan shows her cards. When Julie Christie played
the same role in 1967, her interpretation of Hardy’s heroine – typically
described as “headstrong” – was an impulsive free spirit, seemingly baffled as
to the effect she had on the men around her.
Mulligan, in contrast,
plays Bathsheba as a more poised, restrained figure, her resistance to marriage
and determination to run her own farm born out of a refusal to kowtow to
patriarchy. She delivers certain lines with relish – when she tells her would-be
suitor Gabriel Oak: “I hate to be thought men’s property” and, when faced with
another, William Boldwood, she murmurs pointedly: “It is difficult for a woman
to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express
theirs.”
Mulligan, 29, is not
one to campaign explicitly for causes, and told the Guardian last year that she
was “not particularly interested in politics”. Her charitable interventions have
so far been devoted more to humanitarian and medical organisations, such as War
Child and the Alzheimer’s Society – though she did come out as a feminist in the
media last year, telling Elle magazine: “I believe in equality … Celebrity
culture has made people afraid of expressing how they feel about things because
no one ever wants to say the wrong thing, but I’d happily describe myself as a
feminist.”
But perhaps Mulligan
lets her work do her talking for her. She is currently on Broadway opposite Bill
Nighy in David Hare’s Skylight, a transfer of the production that electrified
London’s theatregoers last year. Mulligan plays a socially concerned teacher
scrapping with her rich former lover (Nighy); though it does not overtly take
sides, Hare’s play is about political and social polarisation, and Mulligan has
to make a rousing speech defending social workers. The Observer’s drama critic
Susannah Clapp described her acting as “both innocent and ironic, appealing and
irritating. Her most extraordinary quality is that she seems constantly only to
be receiving, while powerfully transmitting.”
Hare, who first staged
the play in 1995, said that Mulligan is “very quiet, very purposeful, and steely
in the way she goes about a part”. Calling her “the best”, he also confirms that
Mulligan’s interest lies less in ideology than in character. “It isn’t what
Skylight says which animates her, it’s what she can be. She loves the character
of the dedicated teacher working in the East End, and it shows.”
Though it is cinema
that has made Mulligan’s name, theatre is clearly her first love and
inspiration. Landing the role of Nina in 2007 in a Royal Court production of
Chekhov’s The Seagull (opposite Kristin Scott Thomas and Chiwetel Ejiofor)
remains a career benchmark. Describing Nina as “the ultimate female role”, she
said: “I think I was looking to play her again in various incarnations.”
Hare, who saw the show
on Broadway in 2008, is outspoken in his admiration: “Carey was the greatest
Nina of my lifetime … I’ve seen two dozen, often in very great productions, but
Carey is the only one who has ever convinced me. She had an access to what she
convinced you were her own feelings – as if she wasn’t acting, but simply
existing on the stage.”
There is little in the
way of traumatic childhood or difficult adolescence to rationalise this affinity
for a character “desperate to be loved and always reaching for something she
couldn’t get”, in Mulligan’s own words. She appears to have had a childhood so
prosperous and conventional as to be anodyne: her father a hotel manager, she
lived in Germany until she was eight, before returning to England and attending
a private Catholic girls’ school in Surrey.
Although disapproving,
her parents did not actively stand the way of her youthful desire to be an
actor; she got early support and encouragement from Kenneth Branagh (after she
sent him a fan letter) and Julian Fellowes (after he gave a talk at her school).
The one thing marking her out is a deeply felt religious conviction during her
teenage years; she no longer attends church devotedly, but in 2012 ended up
married to the musician Marcus Mumford, whom she met at a Christian youth camp
as a child, and whose parents run the UK branch of the Association of Vineyard
Churches, an evangelical-Pentecostalist movement.
Mulligan’s conviction
that she could succeed as a performer resulted in an introduction to a casting
director through Fellowes and then – to her family’s surprise – a small but
visible part in the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, playing the “silly”
fourth Bennet sister, Kitty. A series of increasingly eye-catching screen roles
followed, including Ada in the BBC’s Bleak House, a guest shot on Doctor Who,
the best friend in an ITV drama of another Austen, Northanger Abbey (playing
second fiddle to Felicity Jones), and that stellar Seagull at the Royal Court,
also in 2007.
But it was the 2009
release of An Education, the film adaptation of Lynn Barber’s memoir, that
really put Mulligan, then 22, over the top. An instant critical success,
Mulligan’s portrayal of a schoolgirl’s love affair with a conman in the 1960s
ended up with a Bafta best actress award and nominations for the Oscars and the
Golden Globe. It was a startling ascent up the acting tree, and cemented her
place on the A-list of performing talent. The film’s Danish director, Lone
Scherfig, points out that Mulligan was in every single scene of An Education and
says: “She seemed to enjoy every day and not feel the pressure.”
The success of An
Education opened numerous doors – not least, directly to her next major film
role, in the movie of Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian science-fiction tale Never Let
Me Go, alongside Keira Knightley, Domhnall Gleeson and Andrew Garfield. While
watching An Education, Fox Searchlight studio boss Peter Rice texted Never Let
Me Go director Mark Romanek, who was having trouble filling the role of Kathy H:
“Hire the genius Mulligan.”
With an endorsement
like that from a major Hollywood player, Mulligan’s path was assured. It meant
that she was then able to try to align herself with major directors, and to some
extent pick the roles she would go up for. That was certainly the case with
Shame, the tough, uncompromising drama in which she played the troubled,
self-harming sister to Michael Fassbender’s sex addict.
In a discussion with
the film’s co-writer, Abi Morgan, she explained how she went about it. “My agent
called me about an extraordinary role in this film Steve McQueen was directing.
By the next day, she’d managed to get me a meeting with him. So I went in hard,
campaigning for the part ... I sat down with him in a London hotel and the
minute he started talking, I was like: ‘I’d follow you anywhere.’ That’s a great
director.”
The reaction to Shame,
with its copious nudity, untrammelled rawness and explicit subject matter helped
to modify, if not entirely destroy, Mulligan’s wholesome image – she has
described herself as “baby-faced”. Mulligan could also afford to take smaller
roles for directors with clout: she lined up Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps for
Oliver Stone and Drive for Nicolas Winding Refn and Inside Llewyn Davis for the
Coen brothers.
But the biggie was yet
to come: she beat all Hollywood’s young female acting talent to the headline
role of Daisy Buchanan in the $105m (£70m)-budget adaptation of The Great
Gatsby.
Baz Luhrmann’s
giant-scale film was released in May 2013 and Mulligan then spent the autumn of
that year filming Far From the Madding Crowd for the director Thomas Vinterberg
– after previously holding out against returning to the British-set period
movie. “I didn’t want to be labelled as that,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “So I’d
avoided it. But I’d seen Festen and I saw The Hunt and I desperately wanted to
be in one of Thomas’s films. That made that decision.”
Starring opposite Leonardo Dicaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. Photograph: Warner Br/Everett/Rex
Then it was straight
on to Suffragette, which began shooting in February 2014, and saw Mulligan line
up with Meryl Streep, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne-Marie Duff. Hare’s Skylight
– in which she cooks a spaghetti meal live on stage – has occupied her since,
first in its London run at the Wyndhams, and subsequently on Broadway.
Still under 30,
Mulligan has reached a zone where she can take her time and pick her roles. It’s
an enviable position, but one she has appeared to achieve on the strength of her
feeling and talent for acting – rather than simply luck, looks and connections,
but which of course have all played a part. She has powerful allies and
admirers: Hare says she possesses a “special sort of intensity and of
completion”; more to the point, Scherfig says, “Anything for Carey.” You suspect
she will go far.
Born
28 May 1985
Career
First: Role in the film Pride & Prejudice, but major breakthrough
was lead role in An Education, for which she received an Oscar nomination.
High
point: Lead role in The Great Gatsby, ahead of every other actor in
Hollywood. The film only received middling reviews, though.
Low
point: Her first Hollywood film, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. “It
was a great experience … but it didn’t feel there was a depth to the character.
It didn’t grip me in the way I wanted.”
She
says: “I’m kind of happy, and – touch wood – nothing really awful has
happened to me. But I don’t like the idea of having to mess yourself up to be a
good actor.”
They
say: “If you want to experience the shock of illumination that acting,
at its best, can achieve – and only occasionally does – you need to see Ms
Mulligan’s performance.” Ben Brantley, New York Times
