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Laura Fraser knows she has to
play the game, but as the buzz grows around A Knight's
Tale and its young duo of Fraser and star Heath Ledger,
she freely admits that she's not going to get crazy about
it.
Appearing opposite Leonardo
DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask, she was billed
simply as "bedroom beauty", and it seemed a
fair assessment of her seductive charms and of the extent
of the
role. She managed to reinvent herself however as a
plookey teenager in Kevin and Perry Go Large. And while
she might have seemed a natural for the princess-type in
the Hollywood medieval romp 'A Knight's Tale', she ended
up as the blacksmith.
The 26-year-old actress from Hillhead even learned to
shoe a horse, despite a phobia for the beasts. "It's
dangerous to be on the horse and all that," she
concedes. "But it's more dangerous to be
underneath... standing at a horse's bum and getting its
leg between your legs, and you had to hammer it and
everything, and it's really scary. It could get in a wee
mood or something and `Whack!'."
A Knight's Tale recreates the Middle Ages for an MTV
generation, with Australian heartthrob Heath Ledger as
the commoner with ambitions to become a star of the
jousting circuit and a soundtrack by Bowie and Queen. A
$40 million budget paid for the construction of a
medieval village in the Czech Republic and Fraser admits
to being awed by the scale of the film.
"They were huge shots, that involved so much
co-ordination and stuff, and I would just f*** it all up
by just running out of shot. And Brian (Helgeland), the
director, was like, `Laura, could you please try and stay
in shot.'" She rose to the challenge, while the
princess-type just stood around looking pretty.
There seems little danger of Laura Fraser ever being
typecast, on screen or in real life. The green-eyed
bedroom beauty was something of a wild child in her
teenage years. Liberal parents encouraged her artistic
ambitions, but there was also some serious underage
drinking. "One night I came home with tyre marks on
my legs," she told one interviewer. "I couldn't
figure out what had happened."
She dropped out of drama school after making her film
debut six years ago in Small Faces, the acclaimed drama
about Glasgow gangs in the Sixties. She moved to London,
shared a flat with Anna Friel and established a
reputation for in-your-face honesty in interviews,
volunteering details of how she lost her virginity and
criticising films in which she appeared.
Fraser is more cautious these days, following a threat of
legal action from one company that pointed out she had a
legal obligation to promote their film, not rubbish it.
She has been in a steady
relationship for about a year and a half now with Paul
Bettany, the star of Gangster No 1, who appears as the
sharp-witted Geoff Chaucer in A Knight's Tale, but she
plays a strange little game, refusing to confirm her
boyfriend's identity, though it has been reported in the
press. She worries that if she talks about him in
interviews, then they split up, she will continue to be
asked about him afterwards.
She does confirm her boyfriend is an actor, though she
insists he is not famous - which could in itself be
deemed grounds for separation. Fraser and Bettany play
two parts of the entourage Heath Ledger acquires along
with the mantle of medieval sporting superstar. Fraser
admits she was nervous about meeting Ledger, who made a
big impact as Mel Gibson's son in The Patriot.
"We had heard all this buzz about him, which kind
puts a little bit of a barrier between you and someone at
first... He had Vanity Fair coming over to do a big shoot
on him and he brought an assistant with him... We thought
`Oh God, he's got an entourage.' But then we discovered
that Sony (Columbia Pictures' parent company) were paying
for him to have an assistant and the assistant turned out
to be his best mate, who just comes along and makes an
occasional phone call.
"He was one of the lads, he really was... dead
young, and really kind of excited about life."
Ledger is four years younger than Fraser.
Fraser and Bettany seem determined not to become a
celebrity couple, eschewing the London party scene. They
do not go to premieres, she says. "We just watch
videos." It seems the girl who used to come home
with tyre marks on her legs has settled down and wants
nothing more than to become a mum. Although Fraser is
reluctant to talk about the relationship, her
conversation continually works its way back to children.
What else has she done recently? A BBC drama Station Jim,
in which she plays a young teacher in a Victorian
orphanage, which she did because it gave her the chance
to work with children. It received (25 Aug) its world
premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival. What are her
ambitions now? "To have kids."
While A Knight's Tale is an ultra-modern, revisionist
take on the Middle Ages, Station Jim seems to have been
left behind by some previous generation. An orphanage is
threatened with closure by a wicked businessman and
coincidentally Queen Victoria is threatened with
assassination by republicans, but the villains have not
reckoned with the ingenuity of the little dog known as
Station Jim. I kid you not.
Fraser has not seen it, but fears the worst. "It's
for TV, it's not like film film, it's a bit
worrying," she says. "I wanted to do it because
I was feeling really clucky and desperate to have a baby.
And I thought if I worked with kids then I'd maybe
overdose myself and I'd want to put off having a baby for
a few years, but it just made me want kids even
more."
Although she has now graduated to big Hollywood movies,
there is still an element about Fraser reminiscent of a
small child let loose in a sweetie shop - coupled with a
good Scottish appreciation of the value of money, learned
at her mother's side.
She is wearing a green tee-shirt bearing the word
"Slamey" in yellow letters. She has no idea who
or what Slamey is. She was walking round New York one day
and feeling sweaty, so she went into a second-hand shop
and bought the shirt. "When I was younger I used to
get carted round all the second-hand shops. I used to be
really embarrassed, in case I met anybody from
school."
The shirt might be deemed second-hand chic, but she
admits that when Columbia put her up in the expensive
Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, she went to the
reception desk at the end of her stay and asked for the
balance of her expense allowance in cigarettes.
"They were like really snooty about it," she
says. "I was using every last penny. I think I got
about 400."
And although she could easily stay with her parents in
Glasgow, before our interview, she cannot resist the
temptation of a night at One Devonshire Gardens. "I
thought, Columbia's got lots of money, so why not just
take advantage and stay in a nice hotel... I wouldn't pay
the money for that myself... That seems like a bit of a
waste to me."
The money she made on A Knight's Tale meant Fraser did
not need to work again for a year. She is due a break:
her Internet Movie Database entry lists 17 films and
major TV productions since Small Faces, including the
Irish thriller Divorcing Jack, Shakespeare's bloodfest
Titus and various titles, like teen comedy Virtual
Sexuality and Scottish football comedy The Match, which
will mean
nothing to anyone other than the most dedicated of
cinema-goers. "I wasn't too choosy," she says.
And, no, she will not say which she would prefer not to
have made.
"At the same time as wanting to be selective with
work, I really want a baby," she says, returning to
her theme of the afternoon. "So I really need money
because I want to be able to bring them up in
London and it's going to be really expensive." And
as I reach to switch off my tape-recorder, she asks:
"So, is Station Jim really bad?"
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