This Much Is True

In 1991 I had fun with Demi Moore on The Butcher’s Wife; I was thrilled when she shared with me the nugget that Bruce Willis farts in bed. Then I had the pleasure of working with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson in Dead Again, playing a mad medium. The film had a rocky start as the crew seemed to lack respect for Ken’s directing and were noisy and uncooperative. It was his first foray into Hollywood and he was determined not to be messed about so, tightening his already thin lips, he sacked the lot of them. He meant business and wanted all to see that he was fully in charge. His shock tactic worked and the film was a success. Although my part was tiny, I was always treated with complete warmth and there was a real family atmosphere on set. Ken takes the work immensely seriously but loves camp jokes; referring to the male leads of his films as ‘She’ which is something Americans can find confusing.

We were far from the only Brits in Hollywood of course. In Henry Selick and Tim Burton’s Disney production of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach (1996) wonderful Joanna Lumley and I played the orphan James’s sadistic and tyrannical aunts, sisters Spiker and Sponge. Joanna was the beautiful, thin, nasty one with a vicious tongue, and I was the fat, vain one, who delights in admiring herself in the mirror. The film was a combination of stop-motion animation and live action scenes. Henry wasn’t used to working with live actors, only with puppets and in animation. He was forever asking us to perform impossible tasks, like running backwards uphill. One particular stunt I remember was when he asked me to fall downstairs onto my back, and let a tarantula walk across my face. I said to Henry: ‘Darling, I’ll give you one shot at this.’ I insisted on a stunt double to do the fall downstairs, and I spoke to the spider wrangler beforehand: ‘Is he sedated?’ I asked. ‘Oh, yes,’ said the wrangler. ‘But the poison sac is intact, or he won’t move.’ I lay on my back, the tarantula was carefully placed on my forehead, and the cameras rolled. His little, cold feet walked slowly across my face. I gave Henry his one shot. He got it and it’s in the film.

Another stunt Joanna and I did together was being winched sixty feet up, strapped back to back with ropes, standing on a tiny round manhole cover, being spun centrifugally in the air and drenched with water. Our stunt captain was called Rocky. He was a sweet guy; he knew we were scared and said, ‘The minute you want to come down, just shout «Rocky» and I’ll have you brought down carefully.’ I think we lasted fifteen seconds, then we both screamed ‘ROCKEEE!’ at the tops of our voices. And down we came. Never again.

Less fun was working with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1999 supernatural thriller End of Days.^[17] What a pig of a man! Although he was relatively professional with me — because he didn’t fancy me — he was awfully gropey with women he was interested in. He thought a lot of himself, but I wasn’t surprised: he was a bodybuilder from Austria who had gone on to become a huge star.

In my whole acting career, this is the only fight I can remember — I was playing Mabel, Satan’s sister, and I had to tussle with Arnold, a prospect I did not relish, but on the day he was professional — he taught me how to punch and scratch. My main and most lingering memory of being in that film, however, is of Schwarzenegger’s bottom. My character was killed by having my throat sliced by a glass table at the end. The scene ended — and Schwarzenegger farted right in my face when I was down on the floor, trying not to move. It was such a noxious cloud I shouted, ‘Fuck you, Arnie!’ I think he did it because I’d farted on set and he felt a tit for tat was due.

It was good to be back in England for my next film and Ladies in Lavender was a more fragrant experience, not least because I was now working with Charles Dance, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith rather than the Terminator. ‘Lavender Bags’, Maggie’s nickname for the film, caught on and soon that was what everyone was calling it. It was Charlie’s first directing job and he was outstanding, managing to get a tenderness out of Maggie that I had never seen from her before. Like Scorsese he was subtle and polite. One day he called me over for a discreet comment on my acting; but when I turned round and caught the rest of the cast looking at us, I couldn’t resist calling out: ‘Charles Dance has the biggest erection I’ve ever felt!’ Whilst it’s certainly true that I know more about cocks than cooking, I would like to stress that I have no knowledge of the Dance genitals, but he undoubtedly has big feet.