Lysette

When she was 17 and starring in her first important film, Krull, Lysette Anthony looked the perfect English hothouse rose. With her long burnished-gold hair, wide Orphan Annie eyes and schoolgirl dresses, she was the picture of a fairy princess--which is what she played in that doomed movie. "I hate that film as only one who passionately loved something can hate it," says Lysette today. "It has haunted me for years. People still think of me that way. Casting directors still say, 'Where is your long blonde hair, Lysette?'" These days, Lysette wears her dark hair cropped close to her head. Her blue eyes, still round, are now teasing and savvy and her figure is as trim and lithe as a dancer's. She talks in short bursts of speed, her words barely keeping up with her thoughts. "I didn't realize it, thank God, or I would have curled up and died," says Lysette, "but after Krull, people wouldn't cast me, because they said I was too pretty, too chocolate-boxy." Her brow knits in disdain. "You know the English; they like to keep you in a niche. You have to shock them if you want to make a change." Lysette, who thrives on shocking people, has made a lot of changes, and her seven-year battle to be taken seriously as an actress is beginning to pay off, with three films this year. The first to be released is the current Without a Clue, a Sherlock Holmes spoof starring Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley. ("I play a baddie for the first time.") CBS has just aired Jack the Ripper, again starring Michael Caine. It's a feisty Lysette this time. "I play an Irish girl--raw, drunken, a little slut. Fighting, but with a kind of innocence that I can understand." Then in December comes Dangerous Love for CBS, based on the book Cupid Rides Pillion, by Barbara Cartland, with a cast that includes Michael York, Oliver Reed and Claire Bloom. "It's a formula thing, like all Cartland books. I play a virginal young girl, orphaned and very rich. I have such problems describing her, because this whole virginal thing is last on my list of priorities." None of these projects would have happened had the outspoken Lysette not forced the issue. She had to fight to be auditioned for Without a Clue. "I heard at first that the producers wouldn't see me for the film. I nearly killed the casting director. I thought, Fuck the lot of you, you're going to see me. And they did. I read for the part with a lot of other girls who all came on as sweet, sweet, sweet. I thought to myself, There's only one girl in this film and she's got to be sexy. English actresses are afraid of that. That's why they don't do well. I used to be that way myself. I'd go to auditions in proper dresses like a nice clean English girl. Now I say 'Fuck it' and go looking like me." It was not only her looks but a combination of assets that won her the challenging lead in a small Dutch film, Looking for Eileen, which required her to play a dual role--as a scruffy Belfast girl and a (text concluded on page 221)Lysette(continued from page 168) look-alike Dutchwoman who is killed in an accident and whose husband finds in Eileen a substitute for his dead wife. Neither role came easily to Lysette. "I had to learn the Belfast accent and I had to learn Dutch," Lysette recalls. "I worked very hard and it paid off. I went to Amsterdam at 22, shit-scared, knowing if I couldn't do it, I should go and have babies and let others get on with acting. I came out of that experience knowing that I could survive." She easily survived a nude scene for Eileen and now laughs at the recollection. "The only thing was, I was terribly fit from running and I was playing this little Belfast girl who couldn't look muscular. I had to stop running, so that when I took off my clothes, my body looked right." Amsterdam, which Lysette found liberating, killed her preference for England. "I could not just come back and say, 'Yes, I'd love to play a Dickensian character,' or 'Thank you very much, I do agree that Juliet should carry a Teddy bear and suck her thumb.' I couldn't do it. After Eileen, I wanted to make things happen. For a week back in London, I sat in front of the telly and wept." Then she got a grip on herself and went to work with a vengeance. She took on a project in Israel, did some modeling, made commercials, did a very well-received television comedy series, Three Up, Two Down, for the BBC, became the Cosmo girl for health and beauty and last year did a play at the Bristol Old Vic, one of the most prestigious regional theaters in England. "It was a horrendous experience," says Lysette. "Really the worst time, with actors not getting on together, everybody hating one another. The play itself, by Michael Frayn, was wonderful, but it didn't work. I thought, What am I going to do?" She decided to go to the gym every day and become "an obsessed person, then I'd sit in the bath at night with a large glass of whiskey and read poetry. I also thought about what I wanted to do. I'd been desperate to get back to Paris since I was 16. So I went, took a weeklong Berlitz course and got a French agent." That's where Lysette now spends a lot of her time--in Paris--which comes as no surprise to her mother. "She always saw me as some wild creature who kept saying, 'I'm sick of this; I'm going to Paris.'" The current man in her life, whom Lysette met in Amsterdam while filming Eileen, is an art consultant whose business base is in Holland. "It has been difficult, because I've been filming all year, but we're engaged to be engaged. I've never had such a strong friend. When we go on holiday--we've had two wonderful ones, in Key West and Provence--I start out tense, with a cigarette, highly nervous. By the end, I'm like a six-year-old."