Brenda Found Hersong, But We Know Her Secret

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday June 22, 2007

Garry Maddox Film writer

THE English actress Brenda Blethyn used to have a fantasy about being a nightclub singer. Now she has lived it by belting out the Tina Turner hit Nutbush City Limits with Frankie J. Holden in the new Australian film Clubland.

"You couldn't make it up, really," says the Oscar-nominated Blethyn, who plays a stand-up comic working on the western Sydney club circuit.

"This is the closest I'm ever going to get to it [her fantasy] - standing up there singing with Frankie J. Holden."

Blethyn, whose other films include Saving Grace, Lovely & Amazing and Pride & Prejudice, is particularly impressed with one of Clubland's young stars, the former model Emma Booth.

"I'm boasting that I'm in the film that introduced Emma Booth to the film-going world," she says. "But all the acting is good. There's a superb turn by Rebecca Gibney - you wouldn't even recognise her - playing a lush friend. What a doll."

The comic drama, directed by Cherie Nowlan, opens in Australian cinemas next week and is bound for the United States. A distributor snapped it up for $US4 million ($4.7 million) at the Sundance Film Festival and it will be screened with a different title, Introducing the Dwights, in a staged 50-cityrelease next month.

Blethyn is unsurprised the film is getting a wider American release than most Australian films.

"It has a universal theme," she says. "It's about families and relationships and emotions that we can all identify with and remember what they were like when they first happened. It's such an uplifting film, but it takes you on a whole rollercoaster of emotions."

Between roles Blethyn found time to write a memoir called Mixed Fancies. It chronicles a life that began nine months after the end of World War II - a product of the celebrations, she believes.

With disarming frankness she reveals that she accepted a Golden Globe for Secrets & Lies after an embarrassing incident in the toilets minutes earlier.

"I hadn't anticipated how difficult it was to get in and out of an all-in-one tuxedo," she writes. "Carefully holding it all around my knees as I took a leak, the weight of [my] giant brooch took it crashing to the floor.

"With a reflex action, I dived after it but then urgently recoiled when I realised I was peeing on my collar. Oh no. Oh NO. The Golden Globes and I've peed on my collar!"

Blethyn is due back in Australia to perform on stage with Sigrid Thornton in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, from October to December.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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