GETTING THE PART (Continued)

....For a moment I just sat there and looked him. What did he mean? Madame Pince hadn’t even been mentioned. What was this all about? Surely this couldn’t be the end of the interview. ‘What about Madame Pince?’ I asked, trying to smile and look relaxed. ‘Oh, well’ said Chris. ‘We have your last interview on tape and so I guess that’s all we need for now’. Then why had they asked me to come all the way up here? Before I could exercise some control, I heard myself say, ‘But I’ve prepared a whole improvised scene for Madame Pince!’ I spat out her name with some force and tried again to smile. The whole room had gone deathly quiet. There was an even longer pause. Chris was not at all put out it seemed. ‘Ok’, he said with some enthusiasm, ‘Why don’t you do it for us?’ I didn’t need asking twice. I leapt to my feet and pointing to some imaginary figure over Chris’ Columbus head, shouted. ‘You there, stop! You, the girl with hair like a pan-scrubber, where do you think you’re going? No one, I repeat no one is allowed in the Reference section. Come here! - What do you mean, you’ve been given permission, - by whom? Gilderoy Lockhart? (Sharp intake of breath – I had decided that Madame Pince had a crush on Gilderoy Lockhart --). Let me see that signature’ I looked at an imaginary piece of paper, read it and clutched my breast as I swayed in imitation of fainting. I sat back down on the sofa and whispered, ‘Very well, you may go and look for your book, but I shall be keeping this!' (I snatched the piece of paper and tucked it into my imaginary corset, establishing on my face, I hoped, a dreamy look of infatuation). The whole experience can have lasted less than a minute but it seemed like a lifetime to me. There had been some polite laughter and general murmurs throughout my efforts but now I waited for some comment. ‘Thanks Jenny’ said Chris, ‘That was swell.’ I got up, smiled and headed as quickly as possible for the door. As I had my hand on the doorknob, Chris called out to me, ‘By the way, who d’you think should play Gilderoy Lockhart? ‘There can only be one choice’, I said, still in the character of Madame Pince, ‘and that’s Hugh Grant’. This had obviously been said before, ‘Yeh, but what if Hugh isn’t available?’ asked Chris, ‘I really don’t know. I shall have to give that some serious thought!’. I smiled and hurriedly left the room.

I really felt so embarrassed about the whole interview that I decided to forget it and concentrate on other projects. The tour of ‘Vita & Virginia’ (a 2 hour drama about Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West) was going ahead and many arrangements had to be made. Once more, I forgot all about Harry Potter. A few weeks later I had another call from my agent. ‘They haven’t decided about Harry Potter yet’, she said, ‘but you are definitely “in the mix”. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked. My agent sighed, ‘I’m honestly not sure, but the casting director seems to feel that they will certainly offer you something’. I put down the phone and thought for a moment. If they didn’t give me Madame Pince, but offered me the Aged Witch, I should definitely turn it down!
I imagine that nearly 2 months passed. Every so often my agent would call and say, ‘They still haven’t decided’. By now filming had begun on this second Potter story and obviously other problems took precedence. I was very involved in playing Virginia Woolf and had no time to worry about a small part in a children’s film! Autumn arrived. It had been late Spring when I had been for the first interview for Madame Pince. I remember that it was on a Wednesday at the beginning of October when the phone rang. My agent was on the line. ‘Finally’, she said, ‘they want you for that part in Harry Potter’. ‘No, really?’ I shouted, ‘That’s fantastic!’ I was very excited. ‘When is it filming? Do they have the dialogue now for Madame Pince?’ There was a pause. ‘Madame Pince?’ said my agent. ‘Who’s she? They want you for the Aged Witch!’ I was stunned. ‘Well? You are going to take it aren’t you?’ said my agent with exasperation. Without a moment’s hesitation I replied, ‘Of course I am!’ I said - That’s actors for you.