Yankee Review

"She's my Rushmore..."
Olivia Williams laughs as she describes working with director Anderson. "Every direction from him is made up of contradictions. He says, `I want you to be serious, but laughing.' These completely unperformable tasks."

The role of Miss Cross was originally conceived to be an American; however, when Olivia Williams was cast, the part was changed to English. "When I met her I just thought we should've written it that way," Anderson says. "I mean, Max Fischer is a kid who wants to go to Oxford. It just makes sense." 

Williams describes her place in the story as "a kind of love object, I suppose. But one of the joys of the script is that Miss Cross has her own flaws and her own story. She makes some quite unforgivable mistakes, not through malice, but just through being confused, which makes it interesting."

Williams also describes Miss Cross' attraction to Blume. "There's a tremendous tragedy in Blume although it isn't displayed in the usual ways one would display personal tragedy. I think Bill Murray has a kind of tragedy in his eyes when he acts which stimulates something in Miss Cross. She wants to grieve with him and look after him. But he's very funny as well. I mean, his oddness and gaucheness in approaching her are completely kind of devastating." 

Credit: Rushmore press kit

About Olivia Williams...
When she was a struggling actress, Olivia Williams couldn't get a part on The Bill for love nor money. "I went up five times - all the way to bloody Wimbledon on the Northern Line - and they never wanted me," she recalls. "It was frustrating."  Then one day she got a phone call, at home. From Kevin Costner. The Oscar-winning romantic lead-turned-director, who could pick any actress in the world as a co-star, wanted the young unknown from north London for his new film. In fact he insisted on her. 

Williams has since made four Hollywood films in the space of two years. You've got to laugh. Actually, the 31-year-old daughter of two London barristers is too well-mannered to suggest that Sun Hill's loss has been Tinseltown's gain. But while Kate Winslet and Williams's friend, Minnie Driver, are rightly perceived as two of the most bankable British actresses in Hollywood, after a run of co-stars that reads Kevin Costner-Bill Murray-Bruce Willis, she can't be far behind. 

The Postman, Costner's overblown though unduly savaged apocalyptic epic, may have bombed at the box-office, but Williams's fresh and feisty big-screen debut, as a frontierswoman, helped her slip on to the LA circuit. She is to be seen soon as Bruce Willis's wife in the supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense. 

But next, and best of all, is Rushmore. Amid the current vogue for high-school movies - from the comic-horror of The Faculty to this month's bubble-gum nonsense, Never Been Kissed - Rushmore stands out for its eccentric, darkly comic take on US youth. 

Scripted and directed by newcomer Wes Anderson (whose style is a cross between David Lynch and John Waters), it features a bizarre love triangle of Williams, as a teacher recovering from the death of her husband, unhappy businessman Bill Murray, and newcomer Jason Schwartzman (Francis Coppola's nephew) as Max Fisher, a 15-year-old pupil whose extra-curricular activities don't stop at stalking or trying to kill his adult rivals. 

"I believe that the script - and this is going to sound very pretentious - is a work of modern literature," raves Williams. Any pretension is diminished by the way she is wolfing down her sushi; she's still able, after months of Hollywood pampering, to get a kick out of a free lunch. "It's beautifully written. And if you've been reading badly-written film scripts, it's like picking up an Arthur Miller; instead of all that Tarantino abuse. 

"I know this makes me sound a boring English actor," she continues, "and Bill Murray was endlessly rude to me about it. In interviews in the States, people would ask what attracted me to the film and I'd say, 'The text, you know', and he'd go 'Have you ever known an English actor who's said it's the money.' He was really mean to me about it." 

If Williams ever put pen to paper, she could give us wonderfully gossipy diaries to rival Richard E Grant's With Nails. She possesses the same combination of fruitily-expressed frankness and fragile, self-conscious actor's ego. When she's not dismissing herself as a "posh bird", it's as "so much not the agent of my own fate." 

Like Grant, too, she has a brilliant sense of melodrama, offstage. After graduating in English from Cambridge, Williams studied drama at the Bristol Old Vic, but - aged just 22 - immediately set herself a deadline for acting success. 

"I felt very strongly about acting, I loved it. But it seemed a patently ridiculous career choice; I just didn't think I was going to be able to support myself by acting. So I said, I'm going to give it until I'm 30. That was the cut-off point at which I thought it wouldn't be silly to re-train, go on and do a law degree or something sensible. Perhaps it was lack of confidence." 

"I knew people who had wanted to be actors from the womb, you know. I just felt deeply inadequate." For a few years she was a "jobbing actor" in regional theatre, "serving soup at the National," followed by a more rewarding stint with the RSC, and a supporting role in Emma on television; but nothing convincing enough, to her, to avert the looming deadline. 

Then, as if she wasn't already stacking the deck against a thespian future, when the big break did come - the call from Costner - Williams demurred. This story has already entered Hollywood folklore. She had done an audition on video, which Costner asked her to repeat with a different accent. The actress refused. "I wasn't rude, I just thought we needed to move on, to do something with a casting director or a script, rather than repeat the same exercise," she recalls. 

"I thought I'd do another tape and still not get the job, so I was just taking the shortcut to disappointment. And that was the end of the conversation. I thought, at least I can tell my grandchildren that Kevin Costner rang once." But her single-mindedness, or bloody-mindedness - "maybe stupidity," she suggests - paid off: Costner phoned back and invited her to audition in LA. Within three days, she was cast and on set. She was 29. 

"The Postman got in under the gate!" That film, she says, "was my education in film acting. It had everything: love scenes, sweeping camera shots, huge crowd scenes. The fact that nobody saw it, which was sad, meant that I got to learn to act on film without anyone watching." 

She and Costner have become friends, and "if there's a project I'm interested in and I need him to put in a good word, I'll call him up." But while she's more comfortable in Los Angeles than most ("The poolside existence doesn't suck, you know"), Williams has resisted the urge to emulate Minnie Driver and become a resident. 

"London is my home, that's where everything I own is," she says. "I love my flat, I love Camden Town, it's close to my family, I go there in between films and I just heave a huge sigh of relief. I've lived there all my life. I was born in the same square." Williams once imagined that "if I was lucky I might do 'back row in a corset' in a Merchant-Ivory film." 

Instead, she is adeptly combining big-budget, big-star vehicles, with independent films like Rushmore and her fourth film, a thriller called 4 Dogs Playing Poker, on which she co-starred with former Sex Pistol Steve Jones. "We listened to Abba together in his trailer. He knows all the words and the guitar riffs." 

Credit: Film Unlimited

Olivia William's Filmography

Rushmore (1998) - 
Beck (1997) - Karen Quinn 
The Postman (1997) - Abby 

Credit: Internet Movie Database 

Rushmore Criterion Collection DVD

The Sixth Sense