By: Moonah Ellison
Photography: Jemima Marriott
I happen to be talking to Kathryn Hunter during Daylight Savings time when the clocks go forward. I think that knocked everything off with the clocks and there was a snafu in connecting. Even after all these years since Covid began and we all became Zoom Warriors, there’s still the occasional connection conundrum. But I digress. I’m just excited to be talking to Hunter, the Olivier Award-winning actress & director, who was in London, where she was born. Her parents were Greek and moved from Greece to New York where Hunter was born along with her twin sister, and then they moved again, to London, where they were born and raised.
We begin our conversation on cultural affairs, me living in New York via London via being from India. “I have a long standing love affair with India,” Hunter gushes. “One of my very early jobs was with the British Council and we toured a production of The Merchant of Venice. We went to what was then, Bombay, and Mumbai, Madras, Calcutta… We spent a month in India. We also did a month in Pakistan and then Nepal and Iraq. Since then I’ve been back, sometimes for research projects. Once I was researching a gentleman called Ambedkar [Dr. BR Ambedkar] who espoused the rights of the Dalits. I wrote a play about him. And then more recently, I’ve been back about four times to do my teacher training in Vinyasa Yoga.”
Kathryn Hunter, legendary Shakespearean actress and… yoga teacher? Her journey has been filled with experiences, the depth and breadth is nothing short of amazing.
In 2021 she won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as the Three Witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Hunter made history in 1997 when she became the first female to play King Lear in Britain. Other notable theater roles include Red Peter in Kafka’s Monkey; Puck, in Julie Taymor’s A ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream; Richard the III and King Lear at The Globe; and Hideki Noda’s The Bee. Being a long-term associate of Théâtre de Complicité, Hunter won the Olivier Award for Best Actress for The Visit, as well as performing in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Foe, The Chairs, Out of the House Walked a Man, Anything for a Quiet Life, Help! I’m Alive, and The Winter’s Tale.
Hunter is no stranger to film and TV, having garnered appearances as Lennie in Black Doves on Netflix, Swiney in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, Eedy Karn in the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, Harry Potter’s neighbor, Arabella Figg, in the franchise’s fifth movie installment, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and Teresa Cicero in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.
“I’m very lucky. I feel very fortunate. We had lists drawn up by our grandmother for arranged marriage so you would get married, and all that. But then my mother was quite an anarchic and went, ‘Oh those children. I suppose they could do what they want to.’ So we sort of escaped, but I think when I told my grandma on my father’s side that I wanted to be an actor, I think she kind of had a fit because for her, it was synonymous with becoming a prostitute or something. But my parents were very supportive. They loved the theater. They both loved the theater.”
Hunter is a product of the Catholic school system, where she first got the bug for acting while getting cast as “the bad, old lady who is trying to tempt Snow White and I said, ‘Apples for sale, apples for sale!’” She then went to Queens College in Harley Street where there was an actress who ran a coffee shop who would drag her up to the top of the school and make her watch her audition pieces, which were invariably about, sex workers and strange things. “It made me sort of say, ‘Am I any good?’ And I just kind of got interested.”
But it was at Bristol University where the passion of acting turned into true love, where she took a real notice of all that goes into a theater production and the involvement of all these people: sound, costume, lighting. “And I thought ‘God, here we all are about to join together to make a story!’ And it was just magical. I was in Jean Anouilh’s play Ring Around the Moon and I had a line and the audience burst out laughing. I have to say that first love, I thought, that’s it. This is what I want to do.”
Hunter then went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and had a principal called Hugh Cruttwell who made the students do ancient Greek plays, [Norwegian playwright Henrik] Ibsen, modern plays, just learn by doing. “And then he would kind of come and speak his mantra of the truth. You’ve got it, you haven’t got it. You might get it. You’ll never get it.” She was then trained in all sorts of physical theater, and was very disciplined, even though they were performing in little community centers and schools. “That was a great lesson in discipline, and respect for the audience, whether you’re in a community center or wherever. And then, the big huge change was meeting Complicité [British theatre company founded in 1983] who were sort of the Beatles of the time.”
Thirty or so years ago, Hunter recollects, especially in the UK, “this sense that you can actually, further articulate a physical language in the space was totally new. So when we did The Visit, for which I got an Olivier, but really, the whole company should have gotten it because it was groundbreaking theater. It was like people didn’t know what it was! Is this dance theater? You could tell that people were excited. Before that, the company had done devised pieces. But this is the first time we did, during March, “The Visit”. So now a real play, as it were. And they said, wow, a bonafide serious piece. Very powerful, very political. We can actually kind of push the boundaries, be every bit as true and biting. And articulate politically. But also have a physical expression.”
As Hunter looks back she speaks fondly of her mother who was “a feminist without knowing she was a feminist.She went into business in an area in shipping where there were like three women… women in our community had been pushed aside because they’d been married [arranged marriages in Greek culture years ago] at 16, and then inevitably had an affair, and then were kind of ostracized, and left with nothing and. You didn’t have a chance to have an education. So she [Hunter’s mother] went to court on their behalf. She espoused women’s causes, and boy, was she fearsome. I wish I could be as fierce as her sometimes, but in terms of [acting], I gravitated towards male roles.”
From the beginning, Hunter played children, played old people. She gravitated toward male roles because they looked to be more interesting. In Shakespeare’s canon, except for Juliet, there are interesting women, but Hunter fell in love with the text of King Lear at school and became obsessed with the play. Polish director Helena Kaut-Howson thought of her mother as a Lear figure and asked Hunter if she wanted to play it [1997]. She was 37 at the time. “And of course, it caused an outrage. But, we went to Japan, and they went, ‘Oh… interesting. We do it the other way around here. We have our men play men, and women play women.. And that was the end of that. They were fascinated, and appalled by the story of a family, where the father is kicked out, sort of thing. Like, I couldn’t believe it. And then Mark Rylance asked me to play Richard the Third.
“Somebody said, ‘Oh, why didn’t you play as Queen Lear?’ And for me, that would be nonsense. The play’s predicated on patriarchy. It’s all about that. So to play a Queen Lear would have been nonsense, really.”
Hunter also loves seeing men play women. “I think there are insights to be had. There was a Japanese colleague, a very fine artist, Hideki Noda. He did a play called The Bee. Anyway, I played a Japanese businessman, and in it there was a scene where I raped [him]. He played the woman. And there was [still] a rape scene. We did it in a stylized way. But had it been a man? I know it provoked a kind of disquiet, but in a good way. Because I was a woman, and it was really weird. He was a man playing a woman, you know? And we did a rape scene! It provoked a really interesting discourse.
And I’d like to expand into some of the fun space that you’ve probably lived in your journey. You’ve worked with so many interesting people. I’d love for you to share one anecdote of some interesting story of when you met somebody who was maybe somebody that you’d always wanted to meet, or an experience that you had with a fellow actor that kind of blew you away because it was outside of the norm.
How does Hunter find collaboration these days? She’s been working with a company called Intermission Youth, a company that was founded about 20 years ago by an ex-offender. “Mark Rylance went into Prison Brixton [male prison in London]. Did a workshop on Hamlet, I think. They do spectacular work where they do Shakespeare remixed. So it’s partly in a colloquial vernacular. They work with young people, 15 to 25, using Shakespeare’s plays, but reimagined. And so they’ll go do their vernacular and then pop into Shakespeare. And it’s also a training ground. So I’m working with them at the moment in terms of training and mentoring.”
According to Hunter, Intermission Youth provides a kind of mentorship with lots of other people who would do subsequent workshops with them. “That’s one collaboration that I love. To see from the beginning, how withdrawn, and fearful, and how some of these young people can be. To then see how they’re unleashed, and empowered by this possibility to express themselves. And the leadership is kind of disciplined, yet always comforting. It’s always accepting. There might be difficult things going on in their lives, and often there are, so to assure them that they’re in a safe place. I love that, yes.”
We love it too.
CREDITS:
Photographer: Jemima Marriott
Makeup: Mary-Jane Gotidoc
Stylist: Ruari Stainfield-Bruce