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Desperately seeking baby
Laura Fraser is back
in Glasgow dreaming of a family. Which means we’ll
see more of her on the BBC, writes Anna Burnside
Laura Fraser arrives in
the Merchant City cafe, apologises for being 10 minutes
late, blames her sister for her 5am bedtime, orders a
latte without specifying the caffeine or fat content of
any of its constituent parts, and announces that she is
“gagging to get pregnant”.
She claims to have spent the previous evening dancing at
the Buff Club before going back to a friend’s new
flat for further debauchery. I suspect she was at the
Roslin Institute being cloned. The slight young woman
rooting in her bag for painkillers can’t be the
coquette from BBC3’s Casanova, who is due on our
screens again next week in Conviction, the centrepiece
drama in the BBC’s spring schedule. She can’t
be the star of Britflicks from Divorcing Jack to The
Match, with Hollywood credits including A Knight’s
Tale in between. Can she? I just can’t imagine
Fraser — ponytail, comfy green hooded top and
refusal to demand a rice milk decaff — transplanted
from her hometown to Los Angeles. The blowdried,
high-heeled diva version must be hiding in a cupboard
with Louis Vuitton luggage, recovering from her last
transatlantic adventure.
It was just two months ago, and involved an intensive
fortnight of auditions and meetings. “I thought,
well, I want to have a baby so I’ll go (to LA) one
last time,” she says, hugging her cup.
“I’ll give it another try and then I can say,
okay, I did my best, I’m off now. But I only gave
myself two weeks. I don’t like driving everywhere
— I can’t cope with looking for an address and
driving on the wrong side of the road. So my husband has
to drive me. Or I have to get cabs and it costs, like
$80.”
Low-maintenance Fraser clearly finds this quite
outrageous. “And my agent says it’s impossible
to get a job in two weeks. She wants me to get an
apartment and stay for two months. But I’m just not
willing to do it.”
While there were callbacks, discussions and lots of
encouraging signs, at the end of the fortnight there was
nothing concrete. “I don’t,” she giggles,
“really care any more.”
In Conviction, Fraser (wearing, to her joy, high-street
clothes and a ponytail) is part of a team of
dysfunctional cops investigating the murder of a
12-year-old girl. “I’m more comfortable with
something contemporary, I like the way it’s written,
with flashbacks and rewinds.”
She also liked the director, Marc Munden, who allowed her
to film her only sex scene without showing so much as a
nipple. “That meant wearing a flesh-coloured”
— she looks down at her Factor 50-pale skin —
“or in my case, white strapless bra. I felt more
sorry for the guy. He had to wear this kind of horrible
bandage thing.”
Fraser is currently moving back to Glasgow, buying a flat
near her parents and plans to start a family. The agent
has been told to find her more Scottish jobs. Once she
realised that was what she wanted, it all made perfect
sense.
“It took me moving to London then New York then west
Cork to realise I wanted to be here. I want to have
babies, I want to settle in Glasgow. I want my kid to go
to Hillhead. Now all I have to do is get my husband to
impregnate me.”
Despite looking barely old enough to have a steady
boyfriend, 28-year-old Fraser is married to the
Irish-American actor-writer Karl Geary. He is the reason
that her passport is falling to bits: they met in 2001
and she went to live with him in New York. They then
decamped to the west Cork coast, which is beautiful and
friendly but two hours away from the airport. “We
are always flying away somewhere. We are always on the
road to the airport.” She frowns. “And
I’ve had enough of the countryside.”
Could this be the emergence of the new, focused Fraser?
The versions that have gone before, though warm, charming
and sometimes full of promise, never quite gelled. Her
stop-start career began with Gillies MacKinnon’s
Small Faces and predictions of great things. Young enough
to believe her own hype, Fraser moved to London and said
yes to pretty much everything: a sex scene with Leonardo
DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask; Helen
Baxendale’s lesbian lover in television drama The
Investigator; an Essex girl in the film Kevin & Perry
Go Large. Not exactly scripts with Great Career Move
stamped on the cover.
Fraser’s life was equally chaotic: she was a party
girl, sharing a flat with Anna Friel, taking cocaine
until she was so out of it that she could no longer
function as an actress. Until one day she stopped, had
counselling and started reading the scripts before
signing the contracts.
Titus, a Hollywood version of Shakespeare’s Titus
Andronicus, was meant to be her breakthrough movie.
Starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange, it was talked
of as an Oscar contender. Then the money ran out, the
shoot was a disaster and, despite her compelling
performance, the film limped into obscurity.
She did, however, make an impression on Brian Helgeland,
who offered her the part of Kate in A Knight’s Tale,
a medieval romp that looked like the kind of daft job
that had typified Fraser’s career to date. It became
her biggest hit.
Since then, Fraser has concentrated on being Mrs Geary,
being stepmother to Geary’s son Billy, now 5, and
working in British films and television. This strategy is
not without its frustrations, but she seems to be coping.
“I have,” she says, “eight or nine films
that I’m gagging to do, that I’ve been offered.
Then the dates keep moving, and keep moving.” She
gives a weary smile that is quite different from her
usual photogenic jaw-stretcher. “You just have to
stop thinking about it and if it does happen to go
you’re like, yippee.”
Fraser has finished filming the political allegory Land
of the Blind with Ralph Fiennes; it’s due for
release next year. The others remain in funding limbo.
Which means one thing: telly. “At least you know
they have got the cash. And all the film people are very
supportive, they say go ahead and take it, make some
money.”
The need to pay the mortgage has made Fraser something of
a small-screen fixture, first in the Trollope adaptation
He Knew He Was Right, then in BBC3’s Conviction and
Casanova. He Knew He Was Right (or, as Fraser has it, He
Knew We Were Shite), was a far from great experience,
exacerbated by an organ-constricting corset. “They
wanted me to go so small with the waist that it gave me a
kidney infection,” she recalls.
The Bafta-nominated six-part thriller Conviction was a
more enjoyable experience. Having played well on BBC3, it
is coming to the mainstream, with a screening on BBC2
from next Saturday.
Yet Fraser’s happiest memory of Conviction is of
co-star Zoe Henry’s tiny baby. At the moment she is
far more interested in the logistics of taking a baby on
location than in characterisation and plot. She is pawing
the ground, waiting for Geary to return from the Tribeca
Film Festival so they can look at flats and, presumably,
get on with starting a family.
For now it’s time for broody Fraser to head to the
cinema for some hangover therapy. Or perhaps she is
really going back to Roslin for some work on the west end
mama version. I look to see what direction she is walking
in, but she has disappeared in the crowd.
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