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Dramatic rise of a theatrical superstar
By Fiona Maddocks, Evening Standard 24.11.06
Star billing: Marianne Elliott
Thèrëse Raquin at the National, with Ben Daniels and Charlotte Emmerson
Rave reviews: Much Ado About Nothing, with Tamsin Greig
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When a leading British actor mentions a director in the same breath as Nicholas Hytner, Sam Mendes, Max Stafford Clark or Mike Leigh, you have to pay attention.
Marianne Elliott, 39, nominated for an Evening Standard Theatre Award for Pillars of the Community, is described by Lesley Manville, one of its stars, as "an absolute genius. Marianne's so inspiring. I can't stop singing the woman's praises ... and I've worked with the some of the best directors around."
Elliott's atmospheric account of Ibsen's play, a coruscating study of bourgeois hypocrisy, won superlative reviews at the National last year, in part because of the way this problematic and chaotic early work had been brought to life with such rigour and clarity.
As one member of the Evening Standard jury put it: "Think of the beginning: it's all women quietly turning their clocks, quietly sewing. The play ends with one woman on stage, the whole scenery falling down around her. You suddenly have this amazing encapsulation of what's happened to women in his century. They've become free. They've burst out."
The same is true of Elliott herself, whose exploding career seems unstoppable. Nonetheless she remains delightfully astonished to have been shortlisted. This characteristic modesty is only part of it.
"I've never won anything in my life," she grins. "Or come close. Above all, it's fantastic to get recognition for something which has taken such incredible hard work for all concerned, and for such low wages."
Elliott, a very correct, self-controlled woman, never expected to go into the theatre. Although she is exceptionally nice, she lacks the flamboyant, showoffy nature of many actors, and a childhood spent surrounded by thespians made her determined to avoid the limelight herself.
Her resistance, which lasted well into adulthood, came from early over-exposure as the daughter of a prominent theatre duo: the director Michael Elliott, who co-founded the Manchester Royal Exchange, and the popular actor Rosalind Knight, known for her roles in Carry On films. Grandparents, uncles, cousins and even Elliott's sister were all linked to the stage in one way or another.
"I was taken to plays the whole time," Elliott recalls. "Often I didn't understand what they were about and I disliked the fussy, old-fashioned productions that tended to be typical at the time, where the work was not carefully produced and no one seemed to care about the audiences. I just didn't get it ..."
Her father, a powerful influence though the precise balance of positive and negative is not easy to read, died when she was 17. Gradually she felt liberated, able to explore her own attitude to theatre, free from his overbearing shadow. It took time.
She read drama at Hull but hated acting. After a period as a casting director, she set up her own company, Small Talk, eventually having her first major break at the Manchester Royal Exchange, the very place her father had co-founded.
"That was my main stage debut, ironically. At first they were hesitant about hiring me. There'd been a big falling out with my father and although it all happened 10 years earlier, and he'd died by then, they regarded me with some suspicion. But it worked, and I became artistic director."
A production of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes at the Donmar Warehouse in 2001 brought her to wider attention, as have productions, as an associate director, at the Royal Court, including Notes on Falling Leaves, Stoning Mary and The Sugar Syndrome. This year she directed a sizzling Much Ado - set in Cuba - for the RSC and her chilling, Expressionist account of Zola's Thérèse Raquin has just opened at the National. Work of every kind - "Yes, I'm eclectic. I'm interested in everything" - is pouring in.
Elliott is chic and gentle-mannered, and painstaking in her choice of words. She has kept a low public profile while shinning up the greasy pole of directorial success. Assessments of her approach tend to include such words as "meticu-
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