The Discreet Charm Of Emily Mortimer
On closer examination, this comic picaresque looks more like the workings of fate. Not in the mystical sense (a professed atheist, she’d have no truck with that), but fate defined simply as an accumulation of the past that comes to determine the future. Her father, her biggest influence, grew up wanting to be Fred Astaire. With a frame that soon mimicked Samuel Johnson’s, this was never a probable scenario, and, like his father before him, he took up law, eventually working out his creative juices in a slew of successful novels, TV scripts and plays. The best of the plays, the autobiographical A Voyage Round My Father, became a movie in which Emily’s grandfather Clifford is played by Laurence Olivier. At the end of the film, Olivier dies in the very bed where the real Clifford passed away, in the house where Emily grew up and where her mother still lives. With such an upbringing, becoming an accountant wasn’t an impossible contingency, but actress was much more likely.
In the future, she may pursue her father’s trade in writing. Since playing alongside Steve Coogan, she’s been gently piling on the pressure to persuade him to direct a script she wrote with a friend, based on a story by British writer Rachel Cusk. It’s an examination of a theme close to her heart: English people’s snobbery toward their transatlantic cousins—if the two can still claim to be family.
“In England,” she explains, “it’s wrong to be rude about different races or sexual preferences, but you can be rude about Americans. In fact, it’s weird not to be. Poor Americans! They love the British, and we do so well here by no virtue of our own, but only because, to them, we sound as if we must be more intelligent.”
Having done her part to ensure that no Brit will ever again be cast as a super-villain, she puts this English meanness down to jealousy. After all, American hegemony displaced the British Empire. But the snobbery she observes hints more generally at the dark side of the English sensibility. Beyond a certain point, the love of the unvarnished truth tips over into cynicism—which to the casual eye passes for honesty.
“I feel awkward and very fucked up about ambition and striving. They’re a bit embarrassing. It’s something innate to the British culture.”
Britons have always taken to expatriation, and Emily’s predicament helps explain why. It’s a culture in which people are meant to be defined and static—knowable—and if you want to change, it’s best to leave. And ambition, which is a desire for reinvention, is, in its early stages, indistinguishable from pretense, the worst of all sins to the English mindset. As Auden put it, to become anything, you first have to pretend to be it. No wonder he made his home in New York.
“It’s a great city to feel like you don’t belong,” she says. “Nobody really belongs and so we all belong.” •
THE DISCREET CHARM OF EMILY MORTIMER from BROOKLYN MAGAZINE on Vimeo.