The Discreet Charm Of Emily Mortimer
“I’m always trying to work out where people are from, what their background is. To me it’s really interesting, trying to place people all the time. Like, how do you come to be? It’s fascinating. But it’s an English thing, to want to demystify.”
For Emily, who is indisputably posh, this interest in how people “come to be” developed during her teenage years into a love of popular British television—true entertainment for the masses. As the child of John Mortimer, a man famous in England both as a barrister and novelist, the mundanities of TV were exotic. “I got into showbiz from being a television addict,” she says, a habit that produced a number of déclassé symptoms. “Going somewhere in a caravan with Tupperware seemed like heaven. And I wanted that. I used to watch this thing called Summertime Special, from the Birmingham Exhibition Center, and it was just the most cheesy thing—dance troupes doing this sort of formation dancing, and band comedians, and I would long to be one of those dancers.”
It wasn’t to be. The nearest she got to becoming the “girl with an ankle bracelet” she dreamed of as a teen was probably Kenneth Branagh’s musical adaptation of Love’s Labours Lost. She wasn’t destined to be a showgirl. In the nicest way possible, she hasn’t the face for it. Her features suggest intelligent sympathy rather than gay abandon. The nose is blunted into an elegant little bulb; her eyes angled in an inverted V to express a state of perpetual empathy. It’s the elfin face of Galadriel’s bookish little sister.
How then did a career that once aimed so low launch itself in adaptations of Anthony Powell and Shakespeare? What went horribly right?
“When you first start off, you don’t turn down anything because it’d be daft. Then it gets to the point where you have to turn some things down because they’re not very good. But anything that’s good—it doesn’t matter what it is, a comedy or whatever—if you’re not embarrassed to be in it and you can do well in the part, you do it, because you’ve got to be working.”
It’s the natural-selection model of career development.
“You can make grand statements about your career choices, but it’s all in retrospect. At the time, it’s ‘I’d better just do this.’”