Interview with Sally Hawkins by Liz Hoggard, Evening Standard

I picked up my usual daily copy of the Evening Standard on Thursday evening, and to my great surprise, there was a photo of Sally Hawkins featured on the topright of the front page!

It turned out to be an interview with Sally Hawkins by Liz Hoggard -  a 3 page spread starting from Pg 27 – to promote Sally’s forthcoming new film ‘Made in Dagenham‘.

I’m very glad that a major London newspaper has given this much space (it’s the middle spread!) for the interview as Sally really deserves as much air-time as possible, particularly for a film that narrates such a poignant tale, which – as I found out from the article – actually led to the Equal Pay Act of 1970.

Titled ‘From SE3 to USA‘, factually the interview didn’t really add much more to what we fans may have gleaned from previous interviews, but I think it was very thorough in introducing her again to the general public after her success as Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky with plenty of quotes by Sally including:

“It taps into something quite profound…You don’t realise how much you keep suppressed, because you’d be fighting every single day.“

You can read the interview online at The Evening Standard, or below:

The actress Sally Hawkins is talking about her new film, Made in Dagenham, which tells the story of the 1968 women’s strike at the Ford car works. “It was very woman-led production with a bunch of lovely, funny girls on set, just brilliant and bright. Sometimes it was difficult to calm them all down, to shout action over the hubbub and the laughter. It was like being in a big dorm.”

Although it’s not released until October, American critics are already hailing the film as the next Full Monty or Calendar Girls. According to US Elle film critic Karen Durbin: “Nigel Cole [the director] has pulled off something we seldom do well in the States, a political movie that’s touching and a lot of fun but doesn’t sugar-coat the facts.”

A strong female ensemble (Cole also directed 2003’s Calendar Girls), it features Andrea Riseborough, Jaime Winstone, Rosamund Pike, and Miranda Richardson in a terrific cameo as Barbara Castle.

But it’s Hawkins, 34, as machinist Rita O’Grady, the impromptu leader of the walk-out, who is being Oscar-tipped. A shy, dyslexic woman from Blackheath, she might seem an unlikely contender for the Hollywood A-list. But the studios have been watching her since her effervescent performance as Poppy the primary teacher in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky won her a Golden Globe last year.

And now she gets to play Rita, a housewife and mother who is plucked from the shopfloor to front a huge campaign. “Sally is perfect casting,” says Christine Langan, creative director of BBC Films and Made in Dagenham’s executive producer. “She connects you to the experience of the ordinary woman in a really compelling way due to her natural intelligence and empathy.”

When I meet Hawkins, she looks about 14, dressed in a dark embroidered skirt and fitted jacket. With her beautiful, translucent skin and deep-set hazel eyes, she’s dream casting for period drama. Only the very on-trend purple nail varnish adds colour.

She is renowned for avoiding the spotlight. Her role model is Judi Dench, who is passionate about the work but “disappears” in between roles. Previous interviewers have found her intensely nervous. But today she’s pouring all her energies into promoting the film because it’s such an important London story. “I’m so lucky, it’s a gift.”

In 1968, 187 women machine workers walked out of the Dagenham car plant when they were downgraded as “unskilled” and their demand for the same pay grading as the men in the factory was refused. Their fight captured the public imagination. Castle, who had just started as Secretary as State for Employment and Productivity, horrified her male-dominated Cabinet by agreeing to meet them.

The film came about when producer Stephen Woolley heard the R4 programme The Reunion, which brought the machinists back together after 40 years. He was struck by how innocent and unpoliticised they were. “All they wanted was a fair deal. It was common sense rather than any kind of axe to grind,” he says.

Made in Dagenham is full of warmth and humour. The fashion and music is spot on. “It just gives you the right amount of history without preaching,” says Hawkins.

True it’s a little broadbrush in places and the Americans will lap up this plucky image of the British working class. But it’s a humbling story — like many, I had no idea it was the strike that paved the way for the Equal Pay Act of 1970, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. You come out knowing we owe a huge debt to these women.

Rita is an amalgam of many of the original machinists, who Hawkins went to meet. “They’re incredible women, all still friends, and a lot of them still live in Dagenham. They weren’t looking to enter into a political world on a global scale, which they ended up doing. They were just normal average housewives catapulted into this world — saying what they needed to say, taking it so far and then going back home again.”

Hawkins had a more middle-class background. The daughter of the children’s book illustrators and writers Jacqui and Colin Hawkins, she grew up in Blackheath in an elegant “gingerbread house”, designed by 1950s architect Patrick Gwynne, and protected by the National Trust. Her parents’ studio was full of puppets, pirates ships and spooky monsters — to inspire their books. She went to James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich.

But she understands vulnerability. As a child, she stammered and found it hard to look people in the eye. Later it was found she was dyslexic. Discovering acting changed everything. “Something clicked. English was always an academic subject, there was a barrier I found so hard to break. But as soon as I spoke the words I understood what they meant. This whole world of literature unlocked, which I’d been scared of. And I’m in love with it now. You can go anywhere, be anything for a couple of hours. Sorry, I’m spouting clichés at you…”, she tails off.

She was accepted by Rada, and when she graduated in 1998, Mike Leigh immediately saw her potential. She admits it would never have happened without the help of her “brilliantly organised” friend, the actress Maxine Peake, who sent out their joint CVs.

They met Leigh’s casting director Nina Gold, who took Hawkins to meet Leigh at his Soho office, where he spent an hour chatting about her hobbies, inspirations and dreams. “Memories of that first meeting will stay with me for the rest of my life.”

Later Leigh cast her against type as a fabulously sexy bitch in his film All or Nothing. “It was so liberating. Normally I’m the sweet little thing.” Then followed the role of a gangster’s moll in Layer Cake but it was her portrayal of Sue in Fingersmith, based on the Sarah Waters’s novel, that had the critics raving. The sex scenes were exquisitely done — just a flash of stomach, but many people still swear both actresses were topless. Sex is to do with the mind, she argues.
Leigh built the whole role of Poppy around her “energy, humour and profundity”. “Mike is great,” she says fondly, “because he’ll see you, but he’s not interested in who you are, he’s interested in what you can do.”

She’s worked with David Hare (on his version of The House of Bernarda Alba at the National) and Jez Butterworth (The Winterling). But you also sense an endearing silliness: she played Kenny Craig’s girlfriend in Little Britain (in one famous episode David Walliams vomited on her). She’s written sketches for R4’s Concrete Cow.

She protects her private life but volunteers that she and her good friend James Corden once made a pact to get married and have babies if they were still single at 35. At home she loves gardening and plants. “Being in nature is very important to me.”

Next we’ll see her in Never Let Me Go, an adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Most interesting of all, she is playing the Irish republican activist Bernadette Devlin in the lead role of The Roaring Girl.

A higher profile means everything she wears on the red carpet will be scrutinised. “I don’t really follow fashion. I like to be comfortable. I’m not a glamour puss.” For the Golden Globes, she wore New York designer Angel Sanchez. “I’d broken my collar bone at the time,” she laughs. “I was probably drugged up to my… no, don’t put that, it was all legal. But then I discovered this beautiful, highly gothic black dress.”

Does she despair of the obsession with looks? “I’m lucky that I’m not going to be viewed as that type. I’ve had interesting intelligent films to make and people haven’t undermined me in that way… yet. For myself I’d probably wear a bin liner, but dressing up is part of the job.”

Like Rita, Hawkins is finding her voice in public. “You think: why would anyone want to listen to me? But I have a responsibility to this film — to these women. My granny was a machinist. I want as many people to see it as possible. It’s history we can touch still, so I’ve just got to get on with it.” She praises Woolley and his co-producer wife Elizabeth Karlsen. “It’s a passion project, which is rare in a producer.”

We discuss how the most poignant moment in Made in Dagenham is when the men at the factory start to lose their jobs. Rita’s husband (Daniel Mays) begs her to call off the strike, reminding her he’s a loyal husband who has never hit her. “It’s about rights not privileges,” she tells him firmly. A shiver goes down your spine.

“It taps into something quite profound,” Hawkins agrees. Women’s equality is very much still a live issue, especially in the film industry where men still call the shots “You don’t realise how much you keep suppressed, because you’d be fighting every single day.”

And none of us want to be labelled the difficult girl? “Yes, that’s what’s so terrifying. You read about these cases in the City with claims getting to tribunals over equal pay, and you think: Oh, it’s taken so long’, because there’s this secrecy about pay in all industries. The glass ceiling is most definitely opaque. We may find it embarrassing to talk about money but until we do, things will stay the same.”

Made in Dagenham is released on October 1

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