Pike’s progress

ROSAMUND Pike owns up to feeling a little embarrassed to be here talking about new film Made In Dagenham. “I was on it for no time at all. I don’t know why they asked me to talk to you. I feel I should be a surrogate Sally and answer her questions as well,”

she says.

She referring to leading actress Sally Hawkins, who’s flown over for the premiere from the US where she’s appearing on stage and has been taken ill, causing her to miss most of the press junket.

Pike, one of the most interesting British actresses around these days, is a more than adequate replacement.

Looking fabulous in black leather trousers and lacy top, she adopts a light and comic outlook that you wouldn’t have thought possible until seeing her in last year’s An Education.

Her turn as a somewhat dim Sixties girl wasn’t a major role, but she certainly made her mark. Which is why producers Liz Carlsen and Stephen Woolley asked her to be in Made In Dagenham, playing the Oxford- educated wife of the boss of the Ford plant where women machinists go on strike for equal pay.

It’s a small but key role. “It wasn’t like reading a script and thinking, ‘ooh, which one would I like to play?’ All you look for, really, is somebody who influences the film and isn’t going to be cut out,” she explains.

“And her role actually changes the film, I think, from being a working class struggle to being a film about all women’s fight for equal pay. It just elevates it to another level.”

She liked William Ivory’s script so much that she went on to work on another of his screenplays – a BBC television version of DH Lawrence’s Women In Love and The Rainbow, due for screening early next year.

Pike is a former Bond girl – as she herself reminds me at one point – but no one would ever typecast her as a dumb blonde. After her brush with 007 in Die Another Day, she made her stage debut in The Blonde, Terry Johnson’s homage to Hitchcock’s icy blonde screen heroines. Perhaps that was responsible for people’s perception of her as a “serious” actress.

But while she’s serious about her craft, Pike laughs a lot during the interview and loves making audiences laugh on screen. She’s about to do it again, opposite Rowan Atkinson in a sequel to the spy spoof comedy Johnny English.

“You keep appearing in unexpected places,” I suggest.

This week she’s the voice of Daisy, the demented vicar’s daughter, in the puppet comedy Jackboots On Whitehall. Other recent credits include Surrogates, a Hollywood film with Bruce Willis, and going on stage in London with Judi Dench in Madame De Sade. No one could accuse her of playing the same role twice.

“You know, I like that because it’s more fun for me now I have that freedom,” says Pike. “An Education surprised people in many ways and suddenly I have these comedy doors opened to me now. I’m going in that direction and carrying on doing the drama.

“The Johnny English film is a very funny script.

Maybe they liked the idea of a Bond spoof being played by someone who was a Bond girl. I think Rowan specifically approached me because of An Education.

It’s the business – no one ever sees, unless they are banged over the head with it, what someone might or might not be.”

The daughter of two opera singers, Pike appeared with the National Youth Theatre before studying at Oxford, but she didn’t use the experience when making her speech in Made In Dagenham in which the boss’s wife talks about her university education being used to do housework and raise a family.

“You draw on your experience all the time for every role, but I wasn’t thinking about myself in that moment because I didn’t read history and what she says about reading history is very particular. But I found it really touching. Although it’s a speech about Oxford, it’s about self-regret and realisation. Suddenly you hark back to that girl of 21 and remember all those hopes and dreams you haven’t really honoured or followed through. In a way the film is about that, about people realising or not realising their potential.”

WITH An Education and Made In Dagenham she seems to be specialising in small, but important, supporting roles. “The more you have to do, the better, but I don’t think you have to play the biggest part to get noticed, to have an impact,” she says. “Having a dynamite scene is worth much more than being there but not making an impact.”

Pike also really liked working with Sally Hawkins, the star of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky who plays the housewife and mother who becomes the leader of the striking women machinists. “We really got on and we want to work with each other again. I suppose it was like chemistry, but you don’t really talk about that between women,” she says.

“I just believed in her and I think she believed in me, just in terms of being those people. That’s why you’re so indebted to the casting director on films like this, because your only chance of giving a decent performance is if you believe in the whole world which is created by whether you believe all these people around you. You forget who they are and get immersed in it.”

There was never any danger of losing any scenes in the final cut, for the simple reason Pike isn’t in a lot.

“When I read the script I knew all her scenes were going to stay in. But that’s another important thing, because everything is directly influencing the main action. I thought it was a really well devised little part.

And it has an impact, right? It does have an impact and I’m only in it for about ten minutes.”

She’s pleased to learn about audience reaction to the film. “I hear that it kind of gets people, so that’s really nice. Because that’s the only reason I do this job.

You want to move people in some way – it can be to make them laugh or whatever, but you want people to recognise something in what you do, to recognise themselves in the performance you give.

“That’s the only reason I do it, because that’s what used to excite me when I was an audience member.”

■ Made In Dagenham (15) and Jackboots On Whitehall (12A) are now showing in cinemas.