UK's Telegraph does a Rosamund Pike interview

Following last week's Telegraph.co.uk's Made de Sade article and photo.

This week, Telegraph.co.uk's Lucy Cavendish has interviewed Rosamund Pike as she gets ready to do Madame de Sade stage play with P&P/Die Another Day co-stars Judi Dench.



Here are some interesting parts from the RP interview...


Rosamund Pike interview


Even before her very public break-up Rosamund Pike found stardom uncomfortable. Still single – and about to play the Marquis de Sade's wife – she talks about why she's now happier with, and by, herself.

Madame de Sade is a play in which her saintly character (Renée) actually turns out to have spent half her life swinging naked from chandeliers. 'Judi Dench plays my mother,' Pike says ruminatively. 'She doesn't approve of her daughter's actions.' Is acting with Dench in any way a scary thought? 'No,' she says. 'It's a wonderful thought. I have acted with her before but I didn't really have the confidence to talk to her. I was scared of everything then, you see.'

But of course, because Rosamund Pike is so obviously no intellectual slouch. She was educated at Badminton in Bristol, the same school that Iris Murdoch attended. She then won a place at Wadham College, Oxford, where she graduated with a 2.1 in English. She certainly knows her Proust from her Pirandello. Halfway through her degree, though, she decided to leave to go to drama college. 'I had been in the National Youth Theatre in Romeo and Juliet,' she says

Her boyfriend, Simon Woods, went on to become an actor, too, and after they split up was cast alongside her in the film Pride & Prejudice in 2005. I hesitate to mention Pride & Prejudice as this was also the film on which she met her former fiancé, the director Joe Wright. She was, until last summer, engaged to be married to him. The invitations had, allegedly, been sent out, the flowers ordered, the cake put into the mixer etc, etc when, suddenly, Wright broke off the engagement.

Rumours flew round, the most persistent being that Wright balked at not being consulted about the hundreds of wedding invitations Pike had sent out accompanied by a picture of the couple in a hot tub. If it's true, well, more fool him for being such a prude, but who knows? Pike isn't saying. In fact, neither of them has ever talked about it and she's not going to start now. Instead she tells me that, despite stories in gossip columns linking her to this person or that person, she is resolutely single.

She tells me of how she was travelling in America recently. 'I took a train from Chicago to Los Angeles. It was amazing. I met so many people. In fact, it's great if you go places on your own because people approach you in a way they don't when you are with someone.' She also tells of how she ended up in Atlanta and went to see a huge arch that was built for the Olympics. 'There were all these schoolgirls there,' she says. 'They all got so overexcited asking me if I was in Pride & Prejudice and I felt suddenly so strange and rather claustrophobic – as you can actually go up through this arch in a kind of a pod, so it is very enclosed – that I didn't really answer. Later on their teacher came up and said, "Why didn't you just tell them who you were?" and I felt so awful.'

Read Rosamund's full interview @ Telegraph.co.uk.

• 'Madame de Sade' is now open at the Donmar at Wyndham's Theatre, London WC2 (0844 482 5120), until May 23rd.

Previously Posted Related Posts:

• Stage Play: Judi Dench and Rosamund Pike's Madame de Sade to debut next Friday
• Rosamund Pike bonds with Judi Dench in Madame De Sade