Keira Knightley's profile has helped make a movie about Dylan Thomas, penned by her mother, in which the actress makes her screen singing debut. Helen Barlow reports
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As the number two money earner on Forbes's latest list of Hollywood's highest paid actresses, Keira Knightley, the English star of Pirates of The Caribbean, Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, is now using her considerable clout to get films made at home. Her latest movie, The Edge of Love, was particularly close to home, as the screenplay was written by her mother, Sharman MacDonald.
"I thought it was a fascinating piece of work ... two women in love with one man, and that combined with the mischief of Dylan Thomas," she says.
Keira had been a 17-year-old teenager doing cartwheels on a Caribbean beach as her mum initially began her screenplay, as MacDonald deftly puts it, "over a lot of lime daiquiris". By the time it was completed, Keira was working on John Maybury's The Jacket and managed to show it to the film's producers, who were keen to take the project on.
Knightley almost did cartwheels again to enlist Maybury as director, and when Lindsay Lohan bailed from the film, Maybury cast Sienna Miller as Thomas's free-thinking wife Caitlin. While MacDonald had envisioned her daughter in that role, Keira insisted on portraying Vera, Thomas' teenage lover who rekindles her love for the Welsh poet after her husband (Cillian Murphy) goes off to war.
"I like that Vera's a quieter character than Caitlin, and that she becomes completely tragic and beautiful by the end," Knightley says.
Initially we see the impoverished, heavy-drinking Dylan (Matthew Rhys) and Caitlin take in Vera as a boarder. As they share the experience of the London Blitz in their cramped bedsit, they become close, and when they move to Wales they live in adjacent clifftop houses.
When Vera's husband Killik returns shell-shocked from the war and discovers his wife's affair he's naturally far from happy. His ensuing altercation with Thomas culminates in a court case that would blow their friendship apart.
"I'd been reluctant to do the film because I felt I'd covered the story of a dysfunctional artistic genius before," says Maybury, "but I'd never made a chick flick and here we have two strong lead roles, which is quite unusual."
Coming late to the film, natural wild child Miller probably didn't need too much preparation to play Caitlin, yet Knightley had her work cut out for her. Firstly she had to affect a Welsh accent. "My mum's half-Welsh and when I was a kid she used to read me books about witches and wizards and they always had Welsh accents."
Her biggest challenge though was her 40s-style singing. Maybury makes the most of her flush red lips in close-up.
"I went to a voice coach, I was absolutely terrified," she explains exuberantly, clapping her hands. "I thought my knees were going to buckle and for the first few takes I sounded like a pubescent boy. I didn't realise I'd have to do it live and I'd recorded it in a studio beforehand. Then on the morning when there were 100 extras and God knows how many crew members, John came to me and said I could just do it live. Actually once I got into it, it was fine. Vera's singing down in a tube station so she doesn't have to be brilliant."
Maybury insists her live performance adds a fragility that was important to her character. The most fragile of the group though was Thomas, the charismatic genius Bob Dylan named himself after, who painstakingly crafted some of the most romantic poetry ever written but who could be very difficult to be around. He went on to become famous after the events in the film and eventually died in 1953 at the age of 39 after a bout of heavy drinking in New York.
"It was only when he hit the lecture circuit in the States that he became a serious alcoholic, because he was drinking cocktails for the first time," Maybury explains. "When he was living in England he was basically a beer drinker. That was the great tragedy of Dylan Thomas actually - the success he had in America led to the cocktail party circuit, when actually he was allergic to alcohol."
Rhys, who is nothing like his gay pent-up lawyer on television's Brothers & Sisters, is actually a jovial Welshman who doesn't mind a drop himself. A fluent Welsh speaker, he had given a recital of Thomas's Under Milkwood for his entry to RADA, Britain's prestigious drama school, and had sent Maybury a tape with himself and his best friend and fellow Welshman, actor Ioan Gruffudd, doing Dylan. In fact Gruffudd did it badly for a lark, and Rhys got Maybury's attention by channelling Richard Burton, on whose version of Under Milkwood young Welshman are weaned. "There's a sense of the young Richard Burton about his performance in the film," Maybury concedes.
Rhys had to gain almost 10kg for the role. "I sort of ignored all the healthy weight gain plans and ate a lot of pies and Guinness," he smiles. Ultimately he has his own take on the man he was perhaps born to play.
"I think Dylan Thomas was tormented and he had a lot of demons. He had issues with his parents, which he never resolved, as he was so terrorised by his own relationship with Caitlin that was so intense and so destructive. They loved each other so much it was painful."
What actually went on sexually between the couples is largely unknown, though in the film Knightley does hop into the bath and clearly does the deed with Dylan off screen, as seems to be the case in life. As for Vera and Caitlin (who openly had affairs with both genders), it seems less likely.
"It's a friendship with all the complexities that come with that," Knightley says. Isn't there a sexual undercurrent? "If you want to see that. I don't personally."
"I said that to them every day on set," Rhys opines in booming Burton mode. "Remember the sexual undercurrent!"
Whatever the truth, there's certainly no doubting that both actors were excited to be filming in Britain. Rhys has since returned to Los Angeles, and has lost all those kilos for his return to television, while Knightley has another British film, The Duchess, set for release.
"It's been fantastic to have the opportunity to work abroad, but there is a certain point when you think 'I'd love to work at home'," she says. "Once you have a certain profile you can help to make films here. We have a tiny industry and it's good for people who can to do something entirely British-financed and with a British cast and crew. It's the same with The Duchess too. Of course if they'd been crap I wouldn't have done them but both are fascinating stories. I think the British emotional mentality is a very interesting one, and it's my culture so obviously it's what I'm interested in looking at."
LOWDOWN
What: The Edge of Love, about the life of poet Dylan Thomas and the women in his life. Stars Keira Knightley, Sienna Miller, Matthew Rhys, Cillian Murphy. Directed by John Maybury.
When: Opens at cinemas on October 2.
