| Caren Mulligan |
A special intensity: how Carey Mulligan quietly grabbed Hollywood's attention
Fans include the playwright David Hare and a studio boss but Mulligan is more interested in finding characters with real depth than leveraging her growing fame
Saturday 4 April 2015 07.00 BST
I
s Carey Mulligan about to become the face of 21st-century British feminism? It’s not too fanciful a notion: after something of a break from lead roles in the cinema, Mulligan is about to return with an attention-grabbing double header.
First, she is playing Bathsheba Everdene in a new adaptation of Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, due for release in May; and in the autumn she will be seen in Suffragette, as part of an impressive ensemble cast telling the story of the votes-for-women campaign that rocked British society before and during the first world war.
The feminist credentials of Suffragette are not difficult to ascertain – Mulligan doesn’t play one of the Pankhursts, but rather a lowly footsoldier called Maud – but it is in Madding Crowd that Mulligan shows her cards. When Julie Christie played the same role in 1967, her interpretation of Hardy’s heroine – typically described as “headstrong” – was an impulsive free spirit, seemingly baffled as to the effect she had on the men around her.
| Carey Mulligan |
Mulligan, in contrast, plays Bathsheba as a more poised, restrained figure, her resistance to marriage and determination to run her own farm born out of a refusal to kowtow to patriarchy. She delivers certain lines with relish – when she tells her would-be suitor Gabriel Oak: “I hate to be thought men’s property” and, when faced with another, William Boldwood, she murmurs pointedly: “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”