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With beauty, brains and talent, Thandie Newton appears to lead a charmed life. But the BAFTA-winning actress has battled racism, a breakdown, a string of disastrous affairs and now 'something much, much worse'. And yet, as she tells Marianne Macdonald, the one role she refuses to play off-screen is that of victim
Thandie Newton does seem to have everything. The meltingly beautiful English and Zimbabwean actress has been happily married to the writer-director Oliver Parker for almost ten years; they have two girls - Ripley, six, and Nico, two; Newton boasts a stellar career - she won a BAFTA last year for her searing performance in Crash; she has co-starred with Brad Pitt (Interview with the Vampire), Nick Nolte (Jefferson in Paris) and Tom Cruise (his second impossible mission); and to complete the picture of perfection she is currently collapsed waifishly on a sofa in a long silken dress, looking like a mislaid Renaissance princess. But as soon as the photographer shouts, 'That's it!' she jumps to her feet, climbs calmly out of the outfit and greets me with a smile.
Thandie Newton is a rare combination of looks and talent wrapped round an analytical mind
When we sit down to talk she denies her life is special. 'From the outside it might look that way,' she admits. 'You know, the picture of it. But life is hard. Because we expect it not to be. It's what the Buddhists call samsara, that cycle of desire and expectation that leads to disappointment.'
The 34-year-old is a rather remarkable combination - looks and talent wrapped round an analytical mind and a quietly steely will.
If she wasn't so disarming, you could imagine she'd easily put people's backs up. She is clever (she got a 2:1 from Cambridge despite making six films during her degree) and today looks understatedly beautiful in pared-down, elegant clothes - a white Marni vest, brown Katayone Adeli trousers, blue Converse trainers and the thinnest of greige cashmere jumpers. In the same breath she will talk about giving birth without pain relief ('My body was just majestic!') and shopping for clothes - tomorrow, she confides, she is trying on the Giles Deacon dress she will wear to this year's BAFTAs. 'Oh my God, babe, you need to know about Giles!' she exclaims with amazement when I look blank at the designer's name. 'He won best fashion designer of the year! His work is sublime. I went to his studio last week, and it's like Alice in Wonderland!'
Currently on the big screens as Will Smith's wife in The Pursuit of Happyness (for which Smith has been nominated for a best-actor Oscar), Newton is in fact revelling in a spell at home after making several films back-to-back. Two have yet to come out - Norbit, an Eddie Murphy comedy, and Run, Fat Boy, Run, starring Simon Pegg as a deserting husband. 'Norbit's a huge comedy,' she says.
'It's all about funny. It starts in an orphanage, where Eddie's character and mine are children and in love. I get adopted because I'm cute and he gets bullied into being the boyfriend of a girl called Rasputia. It cuts to 15 years later when I've come to take over the orphanage. Eddie realises who he really is and what he really wants and that he's a downtrodden man.
I chased the film. I read the script and I loved it. It was very dark. Eddie had written it with his brother and the inspiration came from this internet site where you could watch large women beating up their small husbands.' She nods. 'Real footage! But that's Eddie for you.'
Run, Fat Boy, Run, by contrast, was directed by David Schwimmer from Friends. 'It's a comedy about a guy who leaves his pregnant wife at the altar because he feels unworthy, though of course everyone else is, like, "You bastard!" We made it in London,' says Newton. 'I never work in London and it was great, because now my kid's at school it's a whole different thing: through her I realise I want to be here, too. I don't want to be going everywhere.'
She is doubly thrilled because a trip to Los Angeles to promote Norbit the day after we talk has just been cancelled. 'So tomorrow I'll have a lovely day,' she says gleefully. 'First my friend Jenny, who is the editor of Rubbish magazine, is coming over to breakfast for her birthday - we'll have scrambled eggs and caviar. Then I'll pick Ripley up from school and won't have to say to her that I'm going to America. And in the evening I guess I'll go to Jenny's dinner!'
Newton seems comfortable segueing between her humdrum mum routine in Queen's Park and her red carpet appearances with Hollywood's A-list. She talks, as if they're the most ordinary subjects in the world, about Tom Cruise's charisma and how earnest and deep David Schwimmer is and how she turned down the Lucy Liu part in Charlie's Angels because she wanted to keep a balance in her marriage and had agreed to take a role in her husband's far smaller film It Was an Accident.
Thandie Newton does seem to have everything. The meltingly beautiful English and Zimbabwean actress has been happily married to the writer-director Oliver Parker for almost ten years; they have two girls - Ripley, six, and Nico, two; Newton boasts a stellar career - she won a BAFTA last year for her searing performance in Crash; she has co-starred with Brad Pitt (Interview with the Vampire), Nick Nolte (Jefferson in Paris) and Tom Cruise (his second impossible mission); and to complete the picture of perfection she is currently collapsed waifishly on a sofa in a long silken dress, looking like a mislaid Renaissance princess. But as soon as the photographer shouts, 'That's it!' she jumps to her feet, climbs calmly out of the outfit and greets me with a smile.
Thandie Newton is a rare combination of looks and talent wrapped round an analytical mind
When we sit down to talk she denies her life is special. 'From the outside it might look that way,' she admits. 'You know, the picture of it. But life is hard. Because we expect it not to be. It's what the Buddhists call samsara, that cycle of desire and expectation that leads to disappointment.'
The 34-year-old is a rather remarkable combination - looks and talent wrapped round an analytical mind and a quietly steely will.
If she wasn't so disarming, you could imagine she'd easily put people's backs up. She is clever (she got a 2:1 from Cambridge despite making six films during her degree) and today looks understatedly beautiful in pared-down, elegant clothes - a white Marni vest, brown Katayone Adeli trousers, blue Converse trainers and the thinnest of greige cashmere jumpers. In the same breath she will talk about giving birth without pain relief ('My body was just majestic!') and shopping for clothes - tomorrow, she confides, she is trying on the Giles Deacon dress she will wear to this year's BAFTAs. 'Oh my God, babe, you need to know about Giles!' she exclaims with amazement when I look blank at the designer's name. 'He won best fashion designer of the year! His work is sublime. I went to his studio last week, and it's like Alice in Wonderland!'
Currently on the big screens as Will Smith's wife in The Pursuit of Happyness (for which Smith has been nominated for a best-actor Oscar), Newton is in fact revelling in a spell at home after making several films back-to-back. Two have yet to come out - Norbit, an Eddie Murphy comedy, and Run, Fat Boy, Run, starring Simon Pegg as a deserting husband. 'Norbit's a huge comedy,' she says.
'It's all about funny. It starts in an orphanage, where Eddie's character and mine are children and in love. I get adopted because I'm cute and he gets bullied into being the boyfriend of a girl called Rasputia. It cuts to 15 years later when I've come to take over the orphanage. Eddie realises who he really is and what he really wants and that he's a downtrodden man.
I chased the film. I read the script and I loved it. It was very dark. Eddie had written it with his brother and the inspiration came from this internet site where you could watch large women beating up their small husbands.' She nods. 'Real footage! But that's Eddie for you.'
Run, Fat Boy, Run, by contrast, was directed by David Schwimmer from Friends. 'It's a comedy about a guy who leaves his pregnant wife at the altar because he feels unworthy, though of course everyone else is, like, "You bastard!" We made it in London,' says Newton. 'I never work in London and it was great, because now my kid's at school it's a whole different thing: through her I realise I want to be here, too. I don't want to be going everywhere.'
She is doubly thrilled because a trip to Los Angeles to promote Norbit the day after we talk has just been cancelled. 'So tomorrow I'll have a lovely day,' she says gleefully. 'First my friend Jenny, who is the editor of Rubbish magazine, is coming over to breakfast for her birthday - we'll have scrambled eggs and caviar. Then I'll pick Ripley up from school and won't have to say to her that I'm going to America. And in the evening I guess I'll go to Jenny's dinner!'
Newton seems comfortable segueing between her humdrum mum routine in Queen's Park and her red carpet appearances with Hollywood's A-list. She talks, as if they're the most ordinary subjects in the world, about Tom Cruise's charisma and how earnest and deep David Schwimmer is and how she turned down the Lucy Liu part in Charlie's Angels because she wanted to keep a balance in her marriage and had agreed to take a role in her husband's far smaller film It Was an Accident.
But she doesn't hide the fact that she felt 'lost' and a victim in her teens and twenties, when she was embroiled in a difficult love affair with a much older man.
The director John Duigan (Sirens, Lawn Dogs) had recruited her when she was 16 and he was 40 to play a part in his film Flirting, when she was boarding at the Arts Education School in Tring, Hertfordshire. He took her to Australia, where she made the film alongside Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts. He then began a relationship with her which lasted six years. She followed him to Hollywood. 'As an adult looking back, I feel so alarmed by what I got into,' she says with feeling today.
During their time together she did a degree in anthropology at Downing College, Cambridge, during which time she went on a publicity junket to Cannes two weeks before she sat her finals. In interviews then she spoke in a detached way of the recklessness of the students and how she had to think of her bank balance. But she says now that she was ashamed most of the time. 'Because I was hardly ever there. That whole period of my life was a bit of a mess. It was like I was doing time, because I had all these other places to be, and responsibilities. Whereas at university you should just be young and free.'
When she finally left Duigan at 22 she had a kind of breakdown. 'I don't think I would say a nervous breakdown, because that would mean hospitalisation, but I was very… I had a lot of shame, shame for leaving someone I once believed was everything. It felt like staying with him was my duty, but I did leave,' she says rather painfully.
Where were her parents in all this? 'Oh,' she says quietly and softly, 'I excluded my parents from everything. They couldn't have interfered if they'd wanted to. I was in London, they were in Cornwall, and I would put on a happy, healthy appearance. They were terrified when I finally talked to them - as a result we've been incredibly close ever since.'
Two unhappy love affairs followed. 'I was really broken up by some painful, shame-making experiences,' she admits with characteristic honesty. With lovers? 'I wouldn't even call them lovers. Or love-life. Hate-life! I think the film business is a really dangerous place for young people.' But what she found most difficult was the aftermath, realising, as she became happier, what she had lost during those years.
'But I have been through worse recently,' she says unexpectedly. How does she mean? She sighs. 'Um. I can't… I don't want to talk about it. I'm still… I'm still…' She frowns. 'I'm still learning. But it has changed me in many, many ways.' She won't say any more about this difficult thing, and I don't like to press her, or ask if it's to do with her family or health, though she does say it doesn't involve her marriage or her work. 'No, no, it's not. But I don't want to talk about it,' she says in a faster voice. 'But what's interesting is that I used to think, "All that stuff in my past is so huge," but it has paled to absolutely nothing now. And in a way that liberated me. Because when difficult things happen the worst thing that comes out of it is that you feel like a victim. You're placed in a position when you're a victim, and it's the weakest and most undermining place. I felt like a victim for such a long time.'
Newton and Matt Dillon in a scene from Crash
She was pulled out of that 'dark place' by Oliver Parker, one of three glamorous brothers, and the laid-back green-eyed son of the retired court of appeal judge Sir Jonathan Parker. 'There was a palpable sense of dismay among the girls when the couple got engaged,' an old friend of Oliver has said.
They met on the set of his 1997 television film In Your Dreams. He was deep into an eight-year relationship. When he and his girlfriend broke up, Newton told him she had fallen in love with him. 'He was shocked,' she has said, 'which in turn I found shocking, because he'd obviously failed to notice any of the signs. He was very honest and he said, "I can't say the same at the moment."' But he soon could, and they married a year later. 'Life was starting again,' is how she puts it. 'I had my second chance.'
Newton has said that she analyses everything 'until I get a headache', and she no doubt has had her tricky moments; but she comes across as happy and relaxed and is quick to point out that in comparison to her parents she has had an easy ride. Her English father, Nick, met her Zimbabwean mother, Nyasha, at the Lusaka Hospital in Zambia where he was a lab technician (he later became an artist). Nyasha was a midwife. 'She had a black eye and that's when my dad fell in love with her,' Newton recounts.
The director John Duigan (Sirens, Lawn Dogs) had recruited her when she was 16 and he was 40 to play a part in his film Flirting, when she was boarding at the Arts Education School in Tring, Hertfordshire. He took her to Australia, where she made the film alongside Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts. He then began a relationship with her which lasted six years. She followed him to Hollywood. 'As an adult looking back, I feel so alarmed by what I got into,' she says with feeling today.
During their time together she did a degree in anthropology at Downing College, Cambridge, during which time she went on a publicity junket to Cannes two weeks before she sat her finals. In interviews then she spoke in a detached way of the recklessness of the students and how she had to think of her bank balance. But she says now that she was ashamed most of the time. 'Because I was hardly ever there. That whole period of my life was a bit of a mess. It was like I was doing time, because I had all these other places to be, and responsibilities. Whereas at university you should just be young and free.'
When she finally left Duigan at 22 she had a kind of breakdown. 'I don't think I would say a nervous breakdown, because that would mean hospitalisation, but I was very… I had a lot of shame, shame for leaving someone I once believed was everything. It felt like staying with him was my duty, but I did leave,' she says rather painfully.
Where were her parents in all this? 'Oh,' she says quietly and softly, 'I excluded my parents from everything. They couldn't have interfered if they'd wanted to. I was in London, they were in Cornwall, and I would put on a happy, healthy appearance. They were terrified when I finally talked to them - as a result we've been incredibly close ever since.'
Two unhappy love affairs followed. 'I was really broken up by some painful, shame-making experiences,' she admits with characteristic honesty. With lovers? 'I wouldn't even call them lovers. Or love-life. Hate-life! I think the film business is a really dangerous place for young people.' But what she found most difficult was the aftermath, realising, as she became happier, what she had lost during those years.
'But I have been through worse recently,' she says unexpectedly. How does she mean? She sighs. 'Um. I can't… I don't want to talk about it. I'm still… I'm still…' She frowns. 'I'm still learning. But it has changed me in many, many ways.' She won't say any more about this difficult thing, and I don't like to press her, or ask if it's to do with her family or health, though she does say it doesn't involve her marriage or her work. 'No, no, it's not. But I don't want to talk about it,' she says in a faster voice. 'But what's interesting is that I used to think, "All that stuff in my past is so huge," but it has paled to absolutely nothing now. And in a way that liberated me. Because when difficult things happen the worst thing that comes out of it is that you feel like a victim. You're placed in a position when you're a victim, and it's the weakest and most undermining place. I felt like a victim for such a long time.'
Newton and Matt Dillon in a scene from Crash
She was pulled out of that 'dark place' by Oliver Parker, one of three glamorous brothers, and the laid-back green-eyed son of the retired court of appeal judge Sir Jonathan Parker. 'There was a palpable sense of dismay among the girls when the couple got engaged,' an old friend of Oliver has said.
They met on the set of his 1997 television film In Your Dreams. He was deep into an eight-year relationship. When he and his girlfriend broke up, Newton told him she had fallen in love with him. 'He was shocked,' she has said, 'which in turn I found shocking, because he'd obviously failed to notice any of the signs. He was very honest and he said, "I can't say the same at the moment."' But he soon could, and they married a year later. 'Life was starting again,' is how she puts it. 'I had my second chance.'
Newton has said that she analyses everything 'until I get a headache', and she no doubt has had her tricky moments; but she comes across as happy and relaxed and is quick to point out that in comparison to her parents she has had an easy ride. Her English father, Nick, met her Zimbabwean mother, Nyasha, at the Lusaka Hospital in Zambia where he was a lab technician (he later became an artist). Nyasha was a midwife. 'She had a black eye and that's when my dad fell in love with her,' Newton recounts.
The family lived in Zambia until she was five. They then moved to Cornwall to live above the Penzance antique shop that her father inherited. Her mother worked as a district nurse, and both her parents had to struggle against prejudice. 'I'm really in awe of them and what they had to overcome,' says Newton. 'I mean, it wasn't really extreme racism, but it was people not wanting to know.'
I ask if she followed the Big Brother racism/bullying row with Jade Goody. 'Oh,' she murmurs. 'Throw the spotlight on anybody and they're going to… Anybody if they had a video camera pointed at their faces… It's horrifying. I think it's tragic, actually, for Jade.' She has experienced racism herself, she says, but her views on it are not the same as other people's. 'Racism is the product of a deeper malaise, which is allowed to continue developing. But the way race is defined - the difference in skin colour - doesn't make any sense,' she observes. 'It is biologically unsound. You can't define a group of people by their skin. The first question I was asked when I went up for my anthropology interview at university was, "How do you define race?" I said, "Well, skin colour." The professor said, "Do you know there's more genetic difference between a Zambian and a Kenyan than between a Swiss person and a Kenyan?" It's about, like, weather!'
I ask if she is about to start filming again. She shakes her head. She is writing a screenplay - a comedy - and wants to stay at home. 'Ol is working incredibly hard on his writing right now and I want to be around to support him,' she goes on. 'We do that. It's been ten years, and it's been so easy.
You'd have thought by this point in a marriage you'd be like, "What now?" But it's like going further and further into this tapestry you create.'
InterviewNewton, left to right, with Nicole Kidman in 'Flirting' (1991); with Matt Dillon in 'Crash' (2004); winning a BAFTA in 2006; with her husband and parents in January; and with her daughter Ripley last yearMoviestore Collection. Matrix. Goff-Inf. AlphaInterview'I was really broken up by some shame-making experiences' Pretty
I ask if she followed the Big Brother racism/bullying row with Jade Goody. 'Oh,' she murmurs. 'Throw the spotlight on anybody and they're going to… Anybody if they had a video camera pointed at their faces… It's horrifying. I think it's tragic, actually, for Jade.' She has experienced racism herself, she says, but her views on it are not the same as other people's. 'Racism is the product of a deeper malaise, which is allowed to continue developing. But the way race is defined - the difference in skin colour - doesn't make any sense,' she observes. 'It is biologically unsound. You can't define a group of people by their skin. The first question I was asked when I went up for my anthropology interview at university was, "How do you define race?" I said, "Well, skin colour." The professor said, "Do you know there's more genetic difference between a Zambian and a Kenyan than between a Swiss person and a Kenyan?" It's about, like, weather!'
I ask if she is about to start filming again. She shakes her head. She is writing a screenplay - a comedy - and wants to stay at home. 'Ol is working incredibly hard on his writing right now and I want to be around to support him,' she goes on. 'We do that. It's been ten years, and it's been so easy.
You'd have thought by this point in a marriage you'd be like, "What now?" But it's like going further and further into this tapestry you create.'
InterviewNewton, left to right, with Nicole Kidman in 'Flirting' (1991); with Matt Dillon in 'Crash' (2004); winning a BAFTA in 2006; with her husband and parents in January; and with her daughter Ripley last yearMoviestore Collection. Matrix. Goff-Inf. AlphaInterview'I was really broken up by some shame-making experiences' Pretty
6 comments:
thandie is said to be at the baftas tonight here in london
scanned the front of stella as i had not seen anyone else do it
Quinn
Great job! Must be a UK magazine as I haven't seen it here yet. Thank you as always...
Stella is a magazine with the Sunday Telegraph newspaper here, Thandie is often in the Telegraph!
Is the Telegraph the Tori (sp?) paper?
very much so also called the torygraph, when poking fun at it, only good thing in it is coverage of tour de france, cycling race.
my favourite paper is the guardian or if am staying anywhere the morning star the communist newspaper which you never get i wonder why must be mi5/6 watching me lol
quinn
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