Actress Rosamund Pike invites Lynn Barber of The Guardian. round for afternoon tea and a chat - about on-stage nudity, turning 30 and the heartache of being jilted by her ex-fiancé, director Joe Wright.
Rosamund Pike has baked me a cake! She is so nice. I don't actually like cake, but this is an exceptionally light, scrumptious rhubarb and orange confection, so I have no trouble at all eating it. She also offers tea in delicate antique china cups and invites me to look round her extremely pretty Kensington mews flat. There is a lovely wisteria outside, forming great swags of flowers around the window - it feels like being in a treetop bower. She moved into the flat last November and is only renting it, but already, she says, she thinks it's the best thing that ever happened to her. She was planning to buy somewhere but every deal fell through, "so then I just decided: actually my parents never bought anywhere so I'll probably end up like them, just being nomadic, moving when I can't afford it any more".
She is even prettier in the flesh than on film, wearing harem pants and a soft floral blouse that sometimes flops sideways to give glimpses of her breasts. The whole effect - the flat, the cake, the tea, the wisteria, this lovely porcelain girl - is utterly feminine and exquisite, and of course makes me feel like a great ugly toad. She reminds me a bit of Joanna Lumley (obviously without the gurkhas) and fills me with the same unease - can anyone really be this perfect?
But I met Pike once before, at a party of Nick Hornby's, and found her really good fun. Better still, I was knocked out by her performance in "my" film (actually Nick Hornby's film, but based on my memoir), An Education, in which she plays a girl called Helen who is on the one hand very beautiful but on the other very thick. Who knew that Rosamund Pike was such a great comedian? Nick Hornby was so impressed he said he wanted to write a whole comedy film for her. "Well, it would be great if he did. I love making people laugh. But only my close friends usually see it.
Naturally I was hoping to spend the whole morning talking about An Education, but Pike was keener to plug her next film, Fugitive Pieces, based on a best-selling Canadian novel by Anne Michaels which won the Orange Prize in 1996. It stars Stephen Dillane and is set in Canada, Greece and Poland, with some characters speaking in Yiddish or Greek. Pike plays Dillane's girlfriend and brings a much-needed breezy cheerfulness to an otherwise rather gloomy film. She is also in Freefall, the big BBC2 recession drama, playing a City broker who is having an affair with her boss - lots of bonking on desks - and is then dumped by him. Her scenes, though few, are absolutely electric, perhaps because they are improvised. And when I met her she was still acting with Judi Dench in Madame de Sade at the Donmar, and loving it. She always feels more at home in the theatre, she says, and has alternated films with theatre work, right from the start of her career when she came back from playing a Bond girl in Die Another Day to a West End run in Hitchcock Blonde. "It does teach you a helluva lot, being on stage," she says. Unfortunately, Madame de Sade got stinking reviews (though for the play, not the acting), but she claims not to have read them. "I don't read anything. You can rest assured I won't read this article. Because even if you read things that are nice, it's a bit disconcerting, really."
Madame de Sade
(Theatre)
FreeFall (TV)
An Education
(2009)
The Tower (TV)
