Sophia Hawthorne - the private Duchess

Sophia Hawthorne says she always knew she was going to act. Picture / Greg Bowker

Director Colin McColl, in the bossy way of directors, has instructed Sophia Hawthorne to wear her coat for the photos.

It is a very nice coat, with embroidered flowers, a high collar and big faux fur cuffs.

It is not part of her costume for The Duchess of Malfi, the Auckland Theatre Company production McColl is directing and in which Hawthorne plays the duchess.

She says she doesn't know why McColl has insisted on the coat, other than that this is the sort of whim typical of a director.

The moment she puts it on you can see why. Hawthorne is transformed. She slips it over her jeans and baggy jumper and becomes an imperious lady of breeding.

This is merely a trick of costume, though. It makes getting a picture easier. If what you are after is a still. Because even in the jeans and jumper, which on most people are casual garb, Hawthorne sits for almost an hour, as if, the photographer says later, she had an ironing board strapped to her back.

She keeps her hands by her side; her face still. You can get a lovely picture of her in profile; a picture of an animated Hawthorne is more difficult.

She is capable of quite extraordinary stillness. Extraordinary because most people can't help themselves: they wriggle and grimace and gesticulate. She manages to be both still and give the impression that she is likely to spring to her feet and flee at any moment.

We are talking to Hawthorne in a bedroom of a house in Arch Hill. There is an old couch on the porch and clothes hanging on a pole in the bedroom. I had been told Hawthorne didn't want to do the interview at her place because she was a private person and that this is a friend's house. The friend turns out to be the publicist whose bedroom this is.

"What is it with you Hawthornes?" I ask this one. I tell her that I once interviewed her mother, the actor Elizabeth Hawthorne, on a wet park bench in the Domain.

"Really?" she says. "Why? That is weird." The why was because the mother, like the daughter, didn't want to be interviewed at home. The mother also didn't want to be interviewed in any obviously public place, like a cafe.

Oh, well, says Hawthorne, she just thought because she has flatmates she didn't want to intrude on them, "but that's just silly, really, isn't it?"

I have no idea whether it is or not. Or how much of this has been dreamed up by the publicist who is protective of Hawthorne to the point where she sits in on the interview (despite having agreed that she wouldn't) and then sometimes answers questions for her.

The publicist tells me later that Hawthorne insisted on this arrangement. The actor is, apparently, "painfully shy" and not at all confident in "media situations".

Certainly interviewing Hawthorne is like handfeeding a gazelle, say, which knows it should take the food offered - because publicity is sustenance - but which would really rather be off with other gazelles, in more familiar fields doing things that come more naturally to such creatures.

Which is not to say she is difficult, or not purposely difficult. She has lovely manners and you look at her and think: well, she has been nicely brought up. And she has, by thespian parents Elizabeth and Raymond. Although nicely is perhaps not the word that would first spring to her mind. It's a quiet little word and she grew up in a house which, she admits, could be a bit rowdy.

All that declaiming? "Yes, at times." That is a fairly typical answer, which is what I mean about not being difficult on purpose. She is very self-contained. She calls it being "private".

When I ask her about being painfully shy she looks startled. "I am quite shy. I don't think I'm painfully shy. Did I say I was?"

No, I say, "your mate did". She contemplates that for a moment and settles on "yeah, I suppose quite private."

I've told her about what her mother said when I asked about what is rolled out almost every time a story about a Hawthorne is written: that they are an Auckland theatre dynasty.

Elizabeth Hawthorne's response was: "Tripe. Codswallop. Poppycock." This in a very loud voice, from the park bench.

"Did she?" her daughter says, looking horrified and amused. "She's extreme."

What this Hawthorne says about the dynasty tag is: "I suppose it's like 'don't believe the hype' sort of thing."

She has a lovely stagey laugh and she laughs quite a bit when I wonder whether her shyness, or desire for privacy, might be in response to her larger-than-life mother.

"It must be, yeah."

THEY appear to be a close family, all actors including younger sister Emmeline. Hawthorne has been directed by her father a number of times; Emmeline has worked with Elizabeth and so on. I imagine it must have been quite an exotic household. She supposes it might have been but to her, of course, it was simply her family.

They are close but "we definitely have arguments and we have difficult times sometimes where we don't get on and sometimes we have periods of time where we don't speak to each other, but rarely".

Because they're all quite similar, perhaps? "Yeah, I think so."

She was stage-struck from an early age, entranced by what her parents and their friends did. I ask her when she knew she was going to act, and she answers incredulously. "I just always loved acting."

She's been around actors and acting all her life, so I suppose such questions seem odd. Either that or she has taken the idea of privacy to such a guarded extreme that she's wary of giving anything away at all.

Of course it might also be that she is not naturally garrulous, and there is no reason that she should be just because what she does involves words. When I ask her whether doing her job, which is done in public, has had such an effect on her, she says "I think that's the reason. Because it is very public so I suppose there has to be a balance for that ... I think it's protective."

So is this: she puts on her coat, and face, for the picture. This is more her milieu. She becomes a stunning portrait of a rather grand lady. To see this picture come to life you will have to go and watch her on a stage.