Actress Natasha Little: From scheming vixen to wronged woman
Actress Natasha Little: How the scheming vixen became a wronged woman
Best known for her bad-girl roles in This Life and Vanity Fair, Natasha is about to play a deceived wife in the new series of Mistresses. In a revealing interview, she talks about learning to expose her vulnerable side and the health problems that nearly scuppered her chance to have a family
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It is no exaggeration to say that Natasha Little once enjoyed the cult status of being British television’s most hated blonde. Not as herself, of course, but as Rachel, the beautiful, treacherous lawyer with the soft, wheedling, little-girl voice and the aura of sweet poison in the 90s decade-defining yuppie drama serial This Life.
We’ve all had run-ins with Rachels in our lives (though in my case she’s called Jane – don’t deny it, you know who you are). And Natasha gave such a brilliant portrayal of her passive-aggressive tactics that the delicious moment when Rachel finally got her comeuppance, by way of a punch on the jaw from fellow solicitor Milly in the final series in 1997, was voted the 37th most memorable TV scene ever in a Channel 4 poll.
All of which made Natasha not just an overnight name, but an object of fascination.
One critic called her a classic Hitchcock blonde, with hidden fires under that cool exterior, while another praised the enigmatic quality that has become her stock in trade.
With such a build-up, I’m expecting some kind of bitch-goddess to walk into the photo shoot, so it’s quite disarming when Natasha turns up tousle-haired and breathless in trainers like any other busy mother of a lively four-year-old and meekly asks if she can keep her coat on for a while as she sits by the radiator ‘because I really feel the cold. Sorry, it looks very rude.’
‘After specialising in characters who wreaked havoc, it’s lovely to play someone who is cheerful and bright’
Even before make-up, she’s as pretty as she appears on screen, but she’s also as human and vulnerable as anyone else – and we’re about to see a lot more of Natasha’s vulnerable side in her latest role as deceived wife Megan in the new series of BBC1’s Mistresses.
Megan is married to Jack (Steven Brand), who comes back into the life of his old flame Katy (Sarah Parish). ‘Megan is an anaesthetist, Jack is a surgeon and they have two beautiful children, so it seems that they have this fabulous life – but the cracks begin to show,’ says Natasha. ‘It’s lovely playing someone like Megan for a change, someone who is cheerful and bright and oblivious to the undercurrents between Jack and Katy.’
Meanwhile, she’s not denying that, as she demurely puts it, ‘I did have a run of playing characters who specialised in wreaking havoc.’ Her post-This Life performance as literature’s most scheming social climber, Becky Sharp, in a BBC1 version of Vanity Fair in 1998 still eclipses Reese Witherspoon’s splashy big-screen incarnation six years later. (In that version Natasha was cast in the role of Lady Jane Sheepshanks without a squeak of diva-like protest.)
Such was the excitement generated by Natasha’s Becky that she was offered the lead in the 2001 film Enigma – only to have it withdrawn when Kate Winslet suddenly became available. But as we shall see, there are more important things in Natasha’s life than wasting time on a Rachel-style catfight over a role.
This Life, that fight: Natasha (right) gets to grips with Amita Dhiri in the final explosive scene
For someone whose latest leading men in two forthcoming big-screen films are Jared Leto in Mr Nobody and Clive Owen in The Boys Are Back in Town (of which more later), she seems surprisingly self-deprecating. ‘My so-called cool exterior is just a façade,’ she says. ‘And sometimes enigma can be confused with not really knowing what you’re doing.
' "Career" sounds like such a big word for lurching from job to job as I do. This Life definitely opened doors, but it
was a long time ago now. And it makes me feel quite old [she’s 39] that there will be people who have never heard
of This Life.’
Yet Natasha still feels strangely fond of Rachel. ‘It’s hard to play a character if you don’t like them,’ she admits. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever played someone I loathed. I based Rachel on an amalgam of several people, and she herself didn’t think she was terrible – she thought she was well-intentioned.’
‘Fidelity is very important to me. I couldn’t imagine being in a relationship where there wasn’t trust. If you can’t trust someone, your behaviour is warped by that. You can’t be yourself at all’
In Mistresses, she’s relishing playing the wronged party. ‘But these things are complicated, aren’t they?’ she says. ‘Because the four central characters are all mistresses in one way or another, the series shows the grey areas that mean you can’t always paint someone as black or white as you want them to be. It’s impossible to judge other people’s relationships – you never know the whole story, you never get the full picture. Fortunately, I’ve never been in that situation.’
Natasha herself has been happily married since 2003 to 35-year-old actor Bohdan Poraj (short for Poraj-Pstrokonski, which is her mouthful of a married name). Always known as Bo, he’s the British-born son of Polish parents and his first name Bohdan means ‘gift from God’.
She and Bo, who live in East London, had already met a couple of times in different productions at the National Theatre in the late 1990s before they were introduced properly by a mutual friend who was appearing alongside Bo in a production of Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic in 1999. As Natasha shyly puts it, ‘I went to see my friend – and fell in love with Bo’s Laertes.
‘Fidelity is very important to me,’ she adds.‘I couldn’t imagine being in a relationship where there wasn’t trust. If you can’t trust someone, your behaviour is warped by that. You can’t be yourself at all. You have to keep in contact with each other, and as actors Bo and I are so fortunate that we can choose not to take a job in order to take turns with the childcare. For us it’s been a big thing since our son Gabriel was born four years ago. He’s going to have the biggest coat-peg sign at school – he’s named after his granddads as well, so his full name is Gabriel Matthew Frederick Herbert Poraj-Pstrokonski.’
It’s clear that Natasha’s life has been completely transformed by his birth, not least because for years she thought she wouldn’t be able to have children. ‘Before he was born, I didn’t feel I needed a child to make my life complete, but now he’s here I can’t imagine life without him.
'I was told it might be quite difficult to conceive, so it really was a great blessing when my pregnancy suddenly happened. I had been diagnosed years ago with polycystic ovarian syndrome, which can affect your fertility – but luckily in my case it didn’t. When I conceived, we weren’t even trying for a child, though obviously we were having sex,’ she says, laughing as she adds, ‘sorry to be blunt about it, but what I mean is I wasn’t taking my temperature or anything at the time.’
So central is Gabriel to her life that she admits, ‘I hate to be separated from him. When he was little, it took a long time for me to get back to work; in fact, I took two years off. I know it sounds a bit feeble,’ she adds hastily, ‘but I didn’t want to leave him, and that certainly plays a part in the jobs you go up for as an actor.
'I look at some of the friends who I’ve met through my local mums’ network and they are faced with the decision of whether to go back to the office or not in six months and whether to work full time or negotiate a part-time arrangement. I really feel for women in that situation – it’s a big choice.
‘Having my own family has made me realise there’s more to life than chasing the next job. I love my work and I feel fortunate to be doing a job I love, but it isn’t the centre of my life’
'As an actor I’m in such a privileged position, because my work is job by job. If something doesn’t fit in with family life, there’s more flexibility. Bo is amazingly supportive, and if a job comes up in another part of the world for me, he readily says, “Well, Gabriel and I will come with you.” Similarly, if he works away from home, I’m quite happy to go and hang out with Gabriel on Bo’s set.’
She and Bo are both only children, which has made their son all the more precious to both sets of grandparents. ‘My parents were terribly pleased when he was born and they absolutely adore him,’ says Natasha, who spent much of her childhood travelling round the Middle East while her father worked for the World Health Organisation and
her mother was an English language teacher. Her parents divorced when she was 15 and her mother now lives very near her in East London.
‘But my dad makes an effort to come and see Gabriel quite a lot,’ she adds. ‘Having my own family has made me realise there’s more to life than chasing the next job. I love my work and I feel fortunate to be doing a job I love, but it isn’t the centre of my life.’
However, she and Bo, it seems, are the centre of Gabriel’s life. ‘We need to find a small country that he can be dictator of when he grows up because that’s what he’s used to – anything less would be a disappointment to him,’ she laughs. ‘He said to me the other day, “I’d like to be a builder when I grow up,” because he likes diggers. But dictator is the job I’ve got him down for at the moment.’
Natasha hasn’t ruled out more children. ‘But I don’t feel incomplete with just one – I feel very blessed. And
becoming a mother has made me more aware of working with children and using the abilities you’ve got in a different way,’ she says.
As an only child, she would spend hours amusing herself by creating her own world with stories. And having just been awarded an arts council grant to write and direct a short film called Tin Man this May, with professional actors, she hopes to go on to work with children and young people on other storytelling projects.
‘In this business there’s always someone bigger and better. You have to be realistic. There’s no point torturing yourself about jobs you do or don’t get’
So with these other strings to her bow, no wonder she doesn’t obsess about ageing as many actresses do. ‘You can’t do anything about ageing. I think about Botox and surgery, but don’t believe I would ever do anything about it. I often have fantasies about it, though, standing in front of the mirror and stretching my forehead a lot,’ she admits. ‘But I think it’s easier not to look at yourself too much – or else have a very large fringe!’
It also helps that she decided to turn her back on Hollywood after spending a few days there after the success of Vanity Fair. ‘I got myself an agent, a manager and a lawyer, but I wasn’t really committed to spending any time there – and I came back because I was getting lots of work here.’
As for Enigma, she’s too level-headed to indulge in regrets. ‘There were no hard feelings because I was paid the full fee and went on to do a good play at the Almeida Theatre in North London. In this business there’s always someone bigger and better. You have to be realistic. There’s no point torturing yourself about jobs you do or don’t get, because so many factors come into play that are out of your control.’
However, Natasha is continuing to get a crack at the big screen. She took Gabriel with her to Brussels and Canada to make the ambitious time-travel fantasy Mr Nobody, with Rhys Ifans playing her husband and Jared Leto her son. And in The Boys Are Back in Town, she plays the ex-wife of Clive Owen’s sports journalist in a story of bereavement and single fatherhood that is being shot this spring by Shine director Scott Hicks.
As for This Life, Natasha still thinks fondly of her breakthrough role and likes to imagine that control-freak Rachel would have ended up, fittingly enough, as a judge. And she’s proud of how she handled that final scene.
‘There were definitely more than a couple of takes when I had to take that punch from Amita Dhiri [who played Milly]. Not bad for someone who wasn’t allowed to take the fight exam at drama school. I was rotten at fighting, so I wasn’t considered safe to take it!’
- Mistresses begins on BBC1 on 17 February
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