Playing to win: Thandie Newton
To judge Thandie Newton by the slavering she regularly attracts from film critics and interviewers, you might expect her to have sucked in the adulation and to have become grand and off-limits. That is the normal pattern, after all, and there is no doubt that Thandie is both exquisitely beautiful and an intelligent and accomplished actress.
She will make a suitably luscious Bond babe when she stars opposite Daniel Craig in Casino Royale and that will surely give her the A-list Hollywood profile she has yet to secure. But only if she wants it, one suspects. If there is a theme to her 33 years it is that she has played the acting game — and the celebrity game — largely on her own terms.
Born to an English father, then a lab technician, and a Zimbabwean mother, a nurse, she grew up in Penzance and won a dance scholarship to The Arts Educational school in Tring as a teenager.
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She got her first movie part at 16 in Flirting, cast by the Australian director John Guigan, 25 years her senior and her first serious boyfriend. Their relationship lasted for six years and she has described it as “exploitative”, but it didn’t stop her from getting a 2.1 in anthropology at Cambridge. “It’s amazing how a degree from Cambridge cuts through the crap,” she has since remarked with reference to Hollywood types inclined to focus on her face and body.
She has been shrewd in her selection of roles, which have ranged from credible arthouse to the requisite blockbuster — she played opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible II — to a role in ER. She turned down a leading part in Charlie’s Angels (and £6 million) because she felt that the time had come to have a child with her husband, the scriptwriter Oliver Parker. They now have two children and live a relatively normal life in suburban London. Acting is “introspective and self-obsessive”, she has said. “I don’t think that’s healthy.”
The result is that she is viewed as a versatile actress who has as much gravitas as phwoar, and who is sought after without having become daily tabloid fodder. She is not above taking off her clothes or doing a lucrative part that will bankroll her husband — she quietly works the system to her advantage, understanding that it can be a brutal business but that she need not compromise unless it suits her. Pragmatic, then, erudite, classy and determined. In LA she is the organised businesswoman, she explains: “I’m very good at all that stuff.”