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13 June 1999 - by Brian
Pendreigh
After next month, there'll be no more bit parts
for Laura Fraser.
There is an old saying in Hollywood that an actress's
success is determined by who she goes to bed with. If
there is any truth to this, it is little surprise that
Laura Fraser is being hailed as the pick of the current
crop of young British hopefuls. The 23-year-old
Glaswegian's career has taken off since she went to bed
with Leonardo DiCaprio. Mind you, it was a real quickie.
She simply had to fly to Paris, take her clothes off, get
into bed with DiCaprio, get up and fly home again.
"I was only there for a day," she says.
Her immediate reward seemed a trifle ungracious. Their
encounter was one of the scenes in the Hollywood period
adventure The Man in the Iron Mask, but Fraser appears in
the credits simply as "Bedroom Beauty".
The Man in the Iron Mask is one of nine films she has
made in the past three years, virtually all involving
nameless supporting roles, that kept her so busy she has
managed only a single week's holiday in that time. She
reckons she only got the role in the Alexandre Dumas
classic because she was Scottish. "The director
(Randall Wallace) was really nice," she says.
"He had written Braveheart, so he liked Scottish
people. I just talked to him lots about Scotland and he
was like, - 'We have to get her into it.' ."
Fraser, though, will shortly reap the reward of all her
hard but uncredited work, with two films released next
month in which she has lead roles - The Match, a Scottish
comedy combining romance and football, and Virtual
Sexuality, which once more focuses on whom she goes to
bed with. Except this time she takes the entire film
getting there.
She was on the cover of Total Film's special British
cinema edition this month, her name is starting to buzz
around the industry. Fraser made her film debut in 1995
in Small Faces, Gillies MacKinnon's film about Glasgow
teenagers. She played the girl admired by most of the
male characters and was an aloof vision of beauty and
sophistication. So meeting the real Laura Fraser comes as
a shock.
She is tiny, just a couple of inches over 5ft, with huge,
expressive eyes, a sensuous gash of a mouth and hair
carelessly piled on top of her head. While the lips
recall Julia Roberts, the language - including details of
a lengthy visit to the lavatory - brings to mind Billy
Connolly.
She recalls a home life where the children were always
encouraged to express themselves. Her father is a manager
with a building company; her mother, whom she cites as
her hero, was a nurse and is now a college lecturer. Her
parents cultivated her interest in cinema at an early
age. "Remember the Rocky films? Our family loved
them," she says. She became a regular at the
Grosvenor and Salon cinemas in Glasgow's west end, and
was never fussy about what was playing. "It used to
be a place to go to snog your boyfriend."
It was her father who provided her first break in
showbusiness when he wrote a play called Wayne, Lulubelle
and the Irn-Bru Cafe for her primary school. She got to
play Lulubelle. "Black Bart comes to town to steal
the Irn-Bru cafe," she says. "It sounds a bit
like The Match." The fate of two bars hinges on a
football game in The Match, in which she co-stars with
Max Beesley, television's Tom Jones, and which opens on
July 9. The previous week sees the release of Virtual
Sexuality, in which she plays Justine, a 17-year-old
schoolgirl desperate to lose her virginity. A computer
booth allows her to create an image of the perfect man,
but something goes wrong and her vision becomes a
reality. Fraser describes it as a British version of the
sort of teen comedy-dramas that John Hughes used to make,
like Pretty in Pink. "I just thought it was light
and fun and silly, and a bit of a challenge to play
someone so young," she says.
She had reservations about her suitability. "I think
I look dead old, with my shadows." But producers
clearly disagree. She has just played another teenager in
the comedy Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?
Fraser sees little similarity between Justine and herself
at 17. "I think she's a young 17-year-old...all that
stuff about 'If I wasn't a virgin, would you fancy me?'.
When I was 17 I was about to move into my own flat."
Fraser admits to being a wild child. After one teenage
drinking session she came home with tyre marks on her
legs and no idea how they got there. In the production
notes for Virtual Sexuality she describes herself as a
"radgeling".
"Oh God, I wish that wasn't in there," she
says. "It's so stupid. The boyfriend I was living
with at the time used to call me that, because he said I
was a fledgling radge." Radge, for the unaware,
means a wild one.
After leaving school at 16, Fraser did a two-year drama
foundation course at Langside College in Rutherglen,
Glasgow, and then enrolled at the Royal Scottish Academy
of Music and Drama. She appeared in an episode of Taggart
as "this girl who came to the door and cried"
before Small Faces gave her a featured role alongside Joe
McFadden, Iain Robertson and Kevin McKidd. But her
absences from class caused friction among what she calls
the "pompous" people who ran the the academy.
Dropping out, she moved to London, though all she had to
show for her first eight months there was a guest
appearance in Casualty. She shared a flat with Anna
Friel, with whom she appeared in The Tribe, a film about
a futuristic community that never got a cinema release -
much to Fraser's relief. She had supporting roles in
Cousin Bette and Divorcing Jack last year and a starring
role in the critically praised, but little-seen Left
Luggage with
Isabella Rossellini. Then there is Titus. If Virtual
Sexuality and The Match do not transform her from
promising newcomer to fully-fledged star, then perhaps
Titus will. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, better known
for its violence than its plot or dialogue, is rarely
performed, but the film version could just do for the
bard what Reservoir Dogs did for Quentin Tarantino. The
$20m film, shot on location in Rome and Croatia,
presented Fraser with a substantial role alongside
Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. It was to be her
biggest challenge, both physically and mentally.
"I play Lavinia, who is the daughter of Titus, who
gets raped by the two brothers and then they cut out her
tongue and chop off her hands. So I'm like that for most
of the film. They had this plate that they put in my
mouth, but I kept choking on it. In certain bits my hands
are bandaged; in certain bits I had twigs stuck down my
wrists. There were all sorts of moulds made. Sometimes I
just had long-sleeved costumes.
"It was a very difficult part and I had to sustain
it for five months. It was a kind of dark place to be in
your head. The kind of things you have to think about to
get the emotions required for scenes were
just...catastrophic, actually.:
Next on Fraser's agenda is a quick visit to Hollywood to
meet a few of the people clamouring to represent her in
America. Then she will be recharging her batteries in the
Mediterrean sunshine, a brief moment of respite before
resuming her ascent into the cinematic firmament. "
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