Double Murder

Steve Pratt chats to Amanda Donahoe and Kris Marshall from Murder City and reports on Lisa Faulkner and Coroline Catz becoming an all-female crime-fighting team in Murder in Suburbia.

AMANDA Donohoe, the British actress back home after 12 years in Hollywood, still bears the scars of making her new ITV detective series. Not that she injured herself filming scenes of her detective inspector character pursuing and arresting criminals. This happened off-camera, in what she calls "the table surfing incident" involving a long conference-style table.

"You take a running leap at the table, hopefully hit it on your stomach and then slide all the way along until you reach the other end," she explains. "I landed on my knee, but I completed the 30ft track along the table."

Such behaviour might be expected from the often-unconventional Donohoe, who first came to the public notice by stripping off to star opposite Oliver Reed in the desert island drama Castaway. She then found fame in the US in an equally controversial role, winning a Golden Globe as lesbian C J Lamb in LA Law.

Another crime series, Murder City, brings her back to British TV screens in the role of DI Susan Alembic, opposite My Family star Kris Marshall as her sidekick DS Chris Stone. It follows her return to this side of the Atlantic last year, when she played seductress Mrs Robinson in the stage version of The Graduate in London's West End.

Donohoe returned for "many different reasons", she says. "Twelve years in Hollywood is a long time. I'm 41. I grew up and decided to come home. It was great fun while it lasted, but because I don't have any family there, I never felt entirely at home.

"The nature of Hollywood is bright young things. I needed to come back to prove, not just to the business, but to myself that I was the actor I trained to be. Doing stage roles was important.

"There are some very interesting written women's parts on screen in America, but you can count them on one hand - and there are 50 of us competing for them. I'm a slightly bigger fish in this pond, so it's a little easier."

As well as The Graduate, she worked in regional theatre in the Ibsen classic Hedda Gabler and as a rock singer in a revival of David Hare's Teeth And Smiles. She's currently discussing doing another classic on the stage.

Her favourite TV cop show remains Hill Street Blues, which she believes is unsurpassed in its genre. But she's pleased with Murder City and would welcome the chance to do a second series, not least because she and Marshall hit it off.

"We'd never met each other before and really clicked. That's a rare thing, and I'm happy we can translate more onto the screen next time," she says.

The gory killings didn't worry her. "There's a great deal of black humour to be had from body parts," she says. "We are less graphic than some of the American fare I've seen on TV. But it's there and part of the investigation. This is what they do."

For Kris Marshall, playing it straight as a detective is refreshing but harder than playing the dozy, layabout son Nick in hit BBC1 comedy My Family. "It's easier to walk around with big hair and an inane grin on your face, but you can't keep doing that into your thirties," he explains. "Much as I love those characters, I can't carry on doing them forever. There has to be a certain amount of moving away from that. I was going to leave My Family earlier, but there were certain incentives for staying.

"I had a lot of fun with that character, and never thought for one moment it would have kicked off like it did with the public. He obviously struck a chord with some people. But it's a question of age and wanting to do other stuff, having done 50 episodes."

He'd love a movie career, and has been fortunate to fit in a couple of films in between series of My Family. They included a role in hit British rom-com Love Actually, and he's been filming a big screen version of Shakespeare's The Merchant Of Venice with Hollywood actor Al Pacino. "He was a very sweet man and into his theatre. He's arguably the best actor of his generation and a good reminder of what an actor should be," says Marshall.

His next project is on the small screen in a BBC2 film My Life In Film, as a wannabe screenwriter who lives in a council flat and finds his life beginning to follow the plots of movies like Rear Window, Top Gun and Butch Cassidy.

Donohoe's next work is a movie too. She's off to shoot The Truth About Love, a British romantic comedy with Dougray Scott, Jimi Mistri and Jennifer Love Hewitt, in Bristol.

It will enable her to continue catching up with the things she's missed while living in LA - such as the tabloid newspapers. "I really love all that crap," she says.

"Everything in America is so far away. The best of England is so wonderfully parochial. I miss actively being part of the community, which as an alien resident, you can't be.

"It's been fantastic for the past few years. You meet people who are your heroes, but eventually have to wake up and come back to some sort of reality."

* Murder City begins on ITV1 next Thursday at 9pm

IN real life, former Holby City star Lisa Faulkner reckons she could never be a policeman. But it's a different matter on screen, in ITV's new buddy, buddy cop show Murder In Suburbia. She and Caroline Catz solve a fresh case every week in a series where their business is "catching murderers, arguing about the merits of suede and trying to meet the men of their dreams".

Faulkner, who plays Detective Sergeant Emma Scribbins, admits there's no way she could do the job for real. "But when my character has a revelation and suddenly pieces everything together, I started slapping my thigh and got so excited," she says. "I love a good whodunit. But in real life, I never, never guess who did."

The character is a long way from the real Faulkner. She's kooky and messy, her life is in turmoil, and she doesn't even look like a police detective. "But Scribbs has an instinct for policing and feels her way to the truth," explains the actress. "It's funny because Caroline gets to play the straight one who's on top of everything when really she's terribly disorganised, while I'm playing scatty Scribbs but I'm really organised. I have to-do lists everywhere, books full of them."

She's proud of the fact that these are women in a man's world, two police detectives who are good at their jobs and take no prisoners.

"What I love, as a big fan of murder mystery myself, is that each week you can sit down, tune in and find out who did what. Every week the story will be wrapped up neatly. I get fed up of missing the second half of two-parters."

The odd gory body did give her a shock during filming. Like the night-time scene being shot in woods. It was pitch black and there was a tent set up where the pair were looking for evidence in a burnt out car.

"Caroline and I were just joking around when we were called to rehearse the scene. We walked into the tent and were confronted with this hideous effigy of a charred body. We both knew it was fake, of course, but it made me feel really sick," she recalls.

Faulkner has set up a production company with actress friends Angela Griffin and Nicola Stephenson called Baby Voice. They're eagerly waiting for the opportunity to work together once they find the right project. She's also keen to return to the stage after appearing in The Vagina Monologues last year. "It reminded me why I wanted to be an actress in the first place," she says. "It was exciting and exhilarating and frightening all at the same time, but so interesting because you get to build up this character night after night."

Catz, who play s Detective Inspector Kate Ashhurst, reports that she and Faulkner hit it off from their first meeting, when they discovered they were both looking to move house. It emerged they had the same moving date three weeks into filming. "So we mutually went through all the stress together," she says.

"It was lucky really because otherwise we would have bored each other silly. In the end, my move was postponed for a week, which was to my advantage because Lisa had done all the groundwork for me and given me lots of advice."

That proved invaluable when she returned home in the middle of the December cold snap to find her heating had broken down. It was a Saturday night and SOS calls to Yellow Pages numbers couldn't find anyone willing to come out.

"I was considering booking a hotel for the night when Lisa rang. She gave me the number of a friend of her brother-in-law and he was brilliant, and said he'd be round straight after Pop Idol," she says.

"I don't know what I'd have done without Lisa. She even recommended someone to help out when we had mice in the house. I really don't like them, they made me very squeamish. I kept imagining them under my feet the whole time."

To research her Murder In Suburbia role, Catz met with a real life DI in the flying squad to find out more about women in senior positions in the police force.

"It was fascinating to learn about the psychology that comes into play - the different tactics they use when interviewing various suspects and the different techniques they apply," she says.

"The research was useful in unexpected ways. I would be wondering how to play a scene and recall something I'd heard from the police. But we did always remember the horror of what they are dealing with every day. What struck me is that it's always the dignity of the victim that is predominant, the murder team have a real respect and interest in that person."

* Murder In Suburbia begins on ITV1 on Saturday at 9.15pm

Published: 11/03/2004