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IT IS with great sadness that we announce today the death of a dear Glass friend and collaborator and a true visionary and creative. Jules Wright, curator, commissioner, art director, supporter of creatives and all-round fire-starter, was a one-woman powerhouse of drive, zest and wit. She was renowned for her championing and nurturing of young talent and was one of our earliest supporters when we were just a fledgling team with a dream of creating a magazine.
A qualified doctor of psychiatry, she was the first female director of the Royal Court Theatre and turned down the offer of directing the Sydney Opera House in favour of setting up the now renowned Wapping Project – the groundbreaking restaurant/gallery space she founded in order to have complete freedom in the range of works she commissioned.
Jules was a formidable character, fiercely intelligent and not one to suffer fools lightly. I couldn’t help but laugh when I googled her name to read her tributes and found a Tripadvisor review of The Wapping Project, describing her as “rude and self-important”. She was of course none of these things, provided you didn’t ask an obvious question.
She was completely selfless in sharing her extraordinarily comprehensive black book of contacts to us. And it was through her that we interviewed some of the greatest names in photography, dance and film in our earliest issues, including Maggie Cheung, Charlotte Rampling, Deborah Turbeville, Kristin Scott Thomas, Sarah Moon, Lillian Bassman, Yohji Yamamoto and Paolo Roversi, to name a few.
She was warm and fun and, considering that she counted some the biggest names in fashion, art and architecture – from Carla Sozzani to Peter Lindbergh and Diane Von Furstenberg – among her close friends, I was always flattered that she took the time with a young editor like me, to ask what I needed and whether she could help.
I will always remember sitting with her in Starbucks, making long distance calls to LA celebrity agents or plotting how to get a ludicrously famous artist for the next issue; or eating in her restaurant and watching her laugh with delight as her staff acted out mock arguments or performed strange gestures just because a famous choreographer owed her favour so she asked him to choreograph her staff for the night, just for the fun of it.
So many of today’s biggest names owe their success in part to Jules and we have lost one of the industry’s most impressive and truly awe-inspiring people. We will miss her dearly and will continue to be inspired by her tremendous vision, determination and love of all things creative.
by Nicola Kavanagh Editor-in-Chief, Glass Magazine
A fresh, spring Thursday morning in Paris. The telephone rang and the taxi company explained that they had no telephone number and no name, just the address of the person they were collecting. The driver was there but no passenger in sight. A protective PR had declined to give the photographer, Thomas Zanon-Larcher, her number. Martine de Menthon, the stylist, luckily had a private number. A quick phone call and seemingly seconds later a door slammed.
Kristin Scott Thomas arrived exactly on time, burst into the room, trousers, a T-shirt, wild hair, no make up, looking tired, wired and striking. She greeted her make-up artist warmly and Martine de Menthon, a familiar friend, and shook hands with the young woman who was to do her hair. “La langue aujourd’hui?” she said turning to shake hands with me and then Thomas. The room was full of electricity. It had arrived with her. “English,” we chorused. “Are we going to a studio?” “No.” “Nobody told me that. I hate being photographed in public,” as she slumped into a sagging chaise. “Not in public, in Martine’s garden and then in a gallery.” “Let’s get on then.”
Speedily she cast her eye over the rails of clothes. “That,” a printed Prada dress, “and that,” a deep yellow, linen dress; not Martine’s first choice. We stayed at a discreet distance. Then out into the ante room, in front of a mirror and Kristin instructed the hairdresser while beginning to dial out on her mobile. Thomas and I needed to visit the garden and the gallery. “You know Lisa Makin I think?” She looked at me. “Yes”. I was a director at the Royal Court Theatre from 1981 to 1992 and Lisa is still my favourite Casting Director, and it was she who had helped me to secure Kristin for this shoot.
And so we began to talk theatre. The profound experience of playing Masha in Chekhov’s Three Sisters was an experience which had changed the course of her career and how she thought about who she was as an actress. Later, at the Royal Court, the sheer joy of playing at the doll’s house of a theatre in which you could almost touch the audience. Breaking off to share the details with others in the room, giving a picture of the scale of the Court, while recounting the stretch of Arkadina, the character she had played.
Later, dressed, we marched one block down Rue de Grenelle, still talking theatre. Quietly Thomas explained how he worked, that he would move in and out as she worked, that she should not play to him, that she should not pose for him and that she would play a role, a wealthy, single and successful gallery owner. This was her garden. She was waiting for a car to take her to work. It was sunny. She had tea. A chill in the air and Kristin threw a cardigan over her shoulders to keep warm – not a fashion shoot, but a role play, natural and at ease, playful and funny. “Where is that bloody taxi?” A half an hour later and the first scene was on film – unposed and unposey.
Basking in the April sunshine, we crowded at a small table to eat sushi and indulge in the blue, silent skies – no planes flying yet, the ash from Iceland keeping them grounded. Kristin talked about her love of silence, repose, working too hard without breaks, the pace of doing what she does and turning off our mobile phones. She talked about bees, and their disappearance, about fish and our responsibility. Thomas wondered what we would do should the fish disappear. She was at ease and so were we all.
Back to shooting and into the bright yellow dress she had chosen for the scenes we would make in the gallery. Mischievously she perched her glasses on her nose and complained that one’s eyesight starts to go, “at 42 years, exactly”. The glasses were perfect for our gallery owner. We piled into two taxis and Thomas shot the journey to the gallery, while Kristin, who is immensely droll, managed to make us laugh a lot, while achieving the look of a woman being driven to work with work on her mind and playing precisely with the camera.
Lightening quick, Kristin slipped into the office, played with the bookshelves, settled down to improvise with a light, intelligent touch, believable and simple, the mark of a fine actress willing to imagine and play. She has a fluidity and directness which is evident even within this simple, quick scenario we’d plotted. Later working her way through the austere contemporary gallery, escorted by the owner Kamel Mennour, she managed to bring the necessary sense of dignity and ownership.
In our final sequence, dressed by Lanvin, whose work Kristin loves, she played the woman on the phone, delighted by a call which had to be taken in private away from her staff, warmth, humour and sexiness infused every gesture. We imagined who she imagined. In the middle of the improvisation, her phone rang and she took the call. Again, she assumed that skilled double act, performing intelligently for us while dealing with a mundane domestic issue on the telephone.
In a quiet fun-filled few hours, she had been generous, intelligent and comical, working and moving with the delicacy of a butterfly dancing on the surface of a lily pond.
Three days later we spoke at length on the telephone about key roles in theatre and film. In 2003 Kristin played for the first time in theatre in the UK, Masha, in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. The impact of the role itself – a young woman who feels she has missed out, who yearns for a future but takes no action to bring it about and who is left with regrets. Kristin assumed this role a year or two after the birth of her third child. In playing the role, she considered who she was and where she wanted to be. What she didn’t want was to regret choices not made, opportunities passed over, and actions not taken. She decided then that she would do more theatre and that she would make choices which took her in different directions as an actress, more challenging directions. “I wanted to play the maid, not the mistress.”
A casual meeting with Ian Rickson in 2007, then Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre, led her to ask Rickson to cast her as Arkadina in Chekhov’s The Seagull – the part of an actress, self possessed, self obsessed, the mother of a desperately unhappy and unfulfilled son Constantine who, overshadowed by his vain-glorious mother, urgently requires her approval and finally, chillingly, kills himself. Was Arkadina responsible? How is that moment to be played? As Kristin played her, she carried a deeply buried concern for this fragile son, one that she could not allow to come to the surface, and at his death she permitted a total numbness, an emptiness, to engulf her, while allowing that life goes on.
She brought the refined, complex touch of Chekhovian tragedy to this role, playing the extremes of hilarity to an enduring deep sorrow and won the Laurence Olivier Best Actress Award. And yet, playing the part in front of her family who “screamed with laughter because they saw only her” led Kristin to ask who she was when she acted, how different from her, what part of her played out within a role. For any actress with the ambition she has, to be really good and original, this is a searching question. As she elaborated, “The danger is to allow yourself to use a great part to exorcise your own traits.”
In the film I’ve Loved You So Long (2008), as Juliette, a woman imprisoned for 15 years for the murder of her son, Kristin had to play a woman who does not defend herself and who keeps to herself that she has killed her child to save him the excruciating pain of a terminal illness. How did she deal with that? She explains that in performing the part she understood that she had to nurse the pain of her action, that prison was a punishment and that her knowledge of her action was like a precious diamond, something that was for her alone.
This is an intellectually difficult, but psychologically accurate appraisal and not easy to play. Kristin/Juliette had to deal with the knowledge that a mother’s core role is to care for and nurture a child and that to kill that child is to deny her core role, to behave outside the circle of her sense of self; it is in this gap between sense of self and action that guilt resides. In a powerful and moving scene Juliette tells her sister the facts of her son’s death and it is in this telling that she is able to look forward, to begin to let go of her guilt. Unlike the performance in a theatre when the arc of a role is played each night, Kristin explains that in film the accumulation of scenes over time adds up and is brought to bear in the playing of a single scene. As an aside, she recalls that this was a tough film and that it took her somewhere else as an actress and that at times, when the going is hard, she is likely to take the pressure out on the director.
The conversation turns to Kristin’s “strange day, last Friday” when she had to watch two of her new films back to back. Strange because she sees only the same person and we return to her question of how different she is in the roles she plays and her determination to push the boat out. Her desire to play more testing roles that confound who she is, and with this we touch on her latest film, Leaving (Partir) which takes her far away from herself to a woman who loses her rationality, falls in love and leaves her children, a passionate woman without a sense of right and wrong. Fleetingly we touch on Gosford Park, “I thought at last a film with Bob Altman and then I played … I wanted to play a servant.”
When an opera singer has done the work that Kristin Scott Thomas has done, she gets to sing the great arias. We consider what parts this means for her. Not Mrs Alving in Henrik Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ because, “A woman is much more than motherhood”. Perhaps Cleopatra which is still to be tackled and won? We discuss the work of the great Gena Rowlands, an actress whom Kristin admires and of whom Kristin reminds me in her mercurial, intelligent fluidity, her swift creativity and her great sense of comedy, so clear in the breadth of her performance of Arkadina. But as we agree, Rowlands’ ‘arias’ were made possible by her film producer/director husband John Cassavetes.
We are yet to see Kristin Scott Thomas’s major work. She will play ever more dangerously with the roles she chooses and it is tempting to list those parts one would wish to see her play – Blanche DuBois (A Streetcar Named Desire), Martha (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)? But what is most clear is that Kristin is the architect of her own future, a decision made when she played Masha, and that may be brought to fruition in work commissioned by her specifically for her; she is a puppeteer, not a puppet.
by Jules Wright
All photographs by Thomas Zanon-Larcher
From the Glass Archive – Issue 2 – Rapture