I must admit to a long passion for Barbara Hershey.
Percy Grainger - pianist, composer, eccentric, masochist - was one of the
most complex characters ever to come out of Australian culture. Passion
explores his life story.
Barbara Hershey was really only expecting to do some work on her Aussie
accent - which, in the finished film, is actually very impressive - when
she asked Richard Roxburgh, her co-star in Passion, to send her some study
tapes.
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"Passion is like a sonata about Percy Grainger. It is romantic and it's
dark and it's historical"
Peter Duncan
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Hershey is the only performer in history to win the Best Actress Award two
years running at the Cannes Film Festival, and for both roles a lot of
dialect work was required. The first was in 1987, in Andrei Konchalovsky's
Shy People, where she had to learn the speech rhythms of the Louisiana
bayou country. Then, the following year, Hershey was back in A World Apart,
speaking with a 100% convincing South African accent in Shawn Slovo's
autobiographical script about her mother, anti-Apartheid activist Ruth First.
But Passion was going to be different: Hershey would be working with a
mainly Australian cast, portraying a real-life Australian woman. And,
however good her accent was, if it sounded different from that of Roxburgh
- who plays her son, the tortured musical genius Percy Grainger, in the
film - then the movie wasn't going to work.
Hershey had intensive sessions with dialect coach Victoria Mielewska. But
she also asked Roxburgh to send her some tapes of the way he would be
speaking. And that was when she discovered the real darkness and complexity
of the story she was getting into.
Like most people, Hershey knew a little about Grainger, whose friends
included some of the major figures in turn-of-the-century music, among them
Strauss, Delius and Grieg; who had a career as an international concert
pianist in the twenties and thirties; and whose collections of folk music
have given us the definitive arrangements of 'The Londonderry Air' (aka
'Danny Boy') and 'English Country Gardens'.
Hershey knew, too, that Grainger was suspected of having an incestuous
affair with his mother, Rose - the part she herself, aged considerably for
the film, would be playing. But she had little idea of the world Grainger
inhabited. Nor, initially, did anyone else who worked on the film, with the
possible exception of veteran producer Matt Carroll, who has been trying to
bring Grainger's life story to the screen for almost 20 years.
"Richard and I had to agree on accents," says Hershey, recalling that first
batch of tapes sent to her by Roxburgh, who is fast emerging as one of
Australia's top film actors. "I wanted to hear what he was doing, so he put
down a tape-reading of some of Percy's letters. It was really wild when it
happened, because I could hear the shock and excitement in his voice as he
read the words. He'd not read them previously: he just arbitrarily pulled
some letters out of a big box and started to read into the tape.
http://www.preview-online.com/may_june/feature_articles/passion/passion_pg1.html
