Scotland on Sunday - March 28 2004
updated 18th May 2005

THE FRASER INQUIRY
by AIDAN SMITH

It is nine years since Laura Fraser pitched up in London as a teenager, her head full of dreams and schemes. From the 15th floor of the St George’s Hotel near Oxford Circus, the metropolis is presented in sumptuous widescreen, and for a few seconds the Scots actress stops to admire the view. But then she turns away, turns her back on the city and its dangerous allure. "Basically," she says, remembering her time here, "I went nuts."

Now 28, older and so much wiser, Fraser is chewing one of those sweets that smokers use to try to dull the craving for nicotine. "I’ve only been off the fags for eight days but I’m determined to stop." If she is successful, then all her bad habits, her London habits, will be history.

Dressed in a jersey, jeans and fearsomely pointy boots, which it’s safe to assume are not Clark’s Start-Rites, she orders a bottle of Highland Spring - a large one. All those years spent partying too long and too hard have not taken their toll on her elfin beauty. Her long auburn hair is lustrous, her big brown eyes are so seductive that when confronted by the question "Who killed Bambi?", your only reasonable response is: "Who cares?"

And the wild nights, and mornings, don’t seem to have done her career any harm either. Next month, she stars in a major BBC costume drama based on the Anthony Trollope novel He Knew He Was Right. The book, about an ideal 19th-century marriage which goes disastrously wrong, has been adapted by Andrew Davies, the usual gun-for-hire on such occasions, but it is Fraser’s first period piece in which she has played the lead role.

"It was a great thing to do, but really hard work," she says. "This will sound pretty lame, but it was the most dialogue I’ve ever had to learn. I hadn’t read the book so, shamefully, I didn’t know the story. But there wasn’t much time to put that right. I only found out a week before that I’d got the part."

Glasgow-born Fraser plays Emily, the new wife of Louis Trevelyan (Oliver Dimsdale). She’s a spunky lass but he quickly becomes madly mistrustful and jealous, believing that Emily’s friendship with her godfather Colonel Osbourne (Bill Nighy) is a full-blown affair.

Even though He Knew He Was Right is set in the 1860s, both screenwriter and star believe the book has resonances for the present. "It’s Trollope’s take on the Othello story and it feels startlingly modern," says Davies. "The behaviour of the couple is what we see today in divorce courts and read about in newspapers."

"Emily struggles to maintain her dignity while her husband treats her like shit," adds Fraser. She got the part because the producers reckoned she exudes the same independent spirit as the heroine and this is evident on meeting her.

"Could I have lived in those times? No way," she says. "I mean, you’d like to think there would be some instinctual part of you that told you it was wrong that a man could demean and persecute a woman like that, but society was different back then. Remember that Harry Enfield sketch? ‘Women! Know your limits!’ It was only a good time if you liked wearing hats. And, because your corset was wound up too tight, you ended up dying of a kidney infection while still in your twenties. Thank God!..."

I’d met Fraser before. It was five years ago, when the British cinema industry was still on a post-Trainspotting high, a movie mag had just anointed her among a "Britpack" of sexy young stars, and her film roles were stacking up like planes.

She groans at the memory of that afternoon in the actors’ hangout, Soho House. "My papa, who was still alive at the time, was shocked to read how and when I lost my virginity." I try to tell her that her revelations were, if not essential to the plot, then at least in keeping with the theme of the teen flick Virtual Sexuality, one of four movies she had out in the spring of 1999. "It was my fault, I said those things. I got drunk."

She didn’t. If memory serves, we shared a bottle of wine. This is rare occurrence for me - not the drinking of wine, but doing it with actresses. They usually sip mineral water and talk about themselves without saying anything, a neat trick. But Fraser, like the heroine Emily, speaks her mind. From other interviews, it’s obvious she doesn’t really do coy, and it’s no different today.

Fraser has given up drink, drugs and (almost) cigarettes. Now the trinity that matters to her is marriage, country life and poker. But she has no regrets about her London ladette lifestyle. "If I hadn’t done those things," she says, "I wouldn’t have got to where I am, which is where I want to be."

When she hit the Big Smoke as a 19-year-old on the back of Small Faces, the mini-mobster movie which hitched aboard the Trainspotting express, she hadn’t exactly led a sheltered life. "I was a bit of a handful when I was 14 and was grounded by my dad for drinking," she told me in 1999. "It was Merrydown for the boys and vodka for the girls. I drank mine straight. One night I came home with tyre marks on my legs."

Back then, Fraser admitted, she was a "radgeling". Soundbites like these were picked up by the tabloids and followed her around for a while. Suddenly, it was cool to be Scottish. If you wanted to get a career in film, fiction or pop, a Caledonian accent was de rigueur, ya bass.

Not naive, then, but London definitely turned her head. "Turned it round and round and round like Linda Blair in The Exorcist," she laughs. "I was a teenager in Glasgow, which was a pretty cool place back then, and when I came to London I thought I’d just take it in my stride. But the difference was I had lots of money at my disposal. I was crazy-busy making films during the day and at night, because I was so young, I went nuts."

She shot six films in six years, snogging Leonardo DiCaprio and Helen Baxendale in the name of art. She was sharing a flat with Anna Friel and her life seemed impossibly glamorous. "I had a great time but then I had a shit time," she adds. "It was a life of extremes. And also really lonely. You meet people when you make a film and suddenly they’re your new best friends. But back then it was all so transient. I made a lot of mistakes in that area because I didn’t know any better.

"It’s funny, I hadn’t seen Anna for years and years and just a few weeks ago we bumped into each other in New York. We were both after the same part, in a Barry Levinson TV series about lawyers. It was pretty emotional."

Fraser says she cannot possibly reveal the "stupidest" thing she did while she was off her face. "It’s too bad. I used to get very angry - a small, aggressive Scots drunk, what a cliche! - and I’d meet strangers in bars and within minutes I’d be telling them exactly what I thought of them. I was projecting all my fears and paranoia on to them. What a tube!"

The films continued, including A Knight’s Tale, not all of them memorable, but looking back she says her work suffered during this period of over-indulgence and self-loathing. "I should have done better at things. I wasn’t focused, I didn’t concentrate - couldn’t concentrate. I turned up late for jobs and got myself a bad reputation."

And then she cleaned up her act. "I just got sick of waking up and going, ‘Ohmigod, what did I say last night? What did I do? Who do I have to apologise to now?’ All my energy was being taken up with worrying about my arsey behaviour and I hated that."

She quit by herself, without professional help, but says a few good friends played key roles in her recovery. "I haven’t touched alcohol for two years and I’ve been off drugs for even longer." Does she miss them? "Well, I don’t miss Soho House. I tore up my membership card because I was never the sort of person who would go there occasionally for a nice, civilised drink. It was always overkill. I was a little wanker in that place too many times.

"Every once in a while I think I wouldn’t mind a drink, but then you remember that it’s perfectly possibly to get off on the atmosphere at a party or the closeness of your friends. You can hear what they’re talking about and, what’s more, you’re listening to them. Everything you do when you’re on booze or coke is in your brain, it’s part of you. What you have to do is access it differently, find another way to alter your state."

Well, Fraser’s rehabilitation programme hasn’t been that severe, but an important factor in its success was meeting her husband, Karl Geary, an Irish-born writer-actor. "He directed Coney Island Baby, which I was in, and I liked him then but didn’t trust my instincts. I thought anything we had was corrupted because we’d met on a movie-set. But when we bumped into each other later in New York I realised he was an amazing guy."

Previously, she hadn’t had much luck in love. The split with Phil Campbell, a singer in the band White Buffalo, left her heartbroken. "I was young and it hurt a lot, but I’m actually really glad I experienced that."

Then came the actor Paul Bettany, her co-star in A Knight’s Tale, who went on to marry Jennifer Connelly in Scotland around the same time Fraser and Geary got hitched in New York.

"Karl has got a bar in New York but he hasn’t drunk for five years so we can be boring bastards together," she laughs. "We’ve been living in Brooklyn for the past year and had bought some land upstate with the intention of building our own house. Karl is a terrific carpenter and I was going to be his assistant.

"But now we’ve decided we’re going to live in Ireland. I’ve fallen a bit out of love with America. New York may not be typical of the States but I find a lot of Americans really arrogant. Many of them are hating the way things are just now, the invasion of Iraq and so on, but who are the ones who’re allowing it all to happen?

"I’m done with cities. We’ve bought this farmhouse in County Cork near Bantry Bay and it’s a beautiful spot. The house is a bit run-down - it needs a new roof, new floors, new everything - but Karl will do it up. We hope to be in by June and one of the first things we’ll do is have a big party to celebrate our wedding. We got married in New York’s City Hall but the ceremony was a real quickie. My mum said afterwards that she didn’t even have time to cry."

It was after shooting a movie in Shetland that Fraser decided she wanted to live by the sea. On the set of Devil’s Gate two years ago, the director Stuart St John criticised her for moaning about the horizontal rain.

"It wasn’t the best movie ever made, but there you go: no experience is all bad, you can find the positive in anything if you’re willing to look. It’s the same with my addictions. I don’t want to come across all Californian and say they’ve made me a better person, but I really have learned from my mistakes."

Fraser is sorted, happy and in love, but also eager to make up for lost time as an actress. She hopes that a film produced for America’s Home Box-Office called Iron-Jawed Angels, a drama about the suffragette movement in the States and co-starring Anjelica Huston and Hilary Swank, will be picked up by British TV. And she’s set to make a return to the big screen alongside Pam Grier in Meet the Clan, a comedy about a mother who gives up her son for adoption and meets him again 20 years later.

"I want to have children of my own and I know I’m going to love Ireland, the changing of the seasons in tiny, incredible ways. I guess we’ll be going to bed when it’s dark because there won’t be much else to do - what a novel experience that’s going to be for me. But none of this means ‘career over’.

"It wasn’t so long ago that I was telling myself that I’d had my chance and fucked it up. But I don’t do that any more because there’s just no point. I’ve got another opportunity and I’m enjoying trying to re-establish myself by turning up, doing the job and being on good form.

"Listen," she adds, and there really is nowhere else to look but straight into those Malteser eyes of hers, "I was young and I had fun. A bit too much fun, maybe, but that’s all."