Interwiew
The Reluctant Star
Lara Belmont was plucked off the streets of Notting Hill to appear in Tim Roth’s gritty directorial debut. Beverly D’Silva meets Britain’s most talented, and hesitant young actress.
Tim Roth is attempting to explain the very specialness of his prot�g�e, Lara Belmont. How a little girl with no acting experience could beat thousands of hopefuls to give the most sensational performance of the year in his new film, The War Zone.
It all began, says Roth, with a smudgy Polaroid from a casting agent, who spotted Belmont shopping in Notting Hill. “Funny thing is, from the picture, I didn’t see any beauty in Lara. But something, call it intuition if you like, made me call her in.”
Once Belmont was in, he took just one glimpse at her through his camera lens and rockets went off in his head. “What I saw was amazing. I felt as though I’d discovered Ingrid Bergman.”
New directors do tend to get a bit overexcited - even ones whose debuts are “so stunning, it blazes across the screen”, as one early review gushed. But Roth is right. Belmont’s much more than mere eye-candy. Her lovely, haunted face and little-girl gaucheness did what he wanted - “To remind me of my lost innocence” - and more. “She’s a natural,” he says. “Someone who immediately understood acting. She’s an equal - actually, someone better than me.”
Belmont is oblivious to all this juicy praise. Rather touchingly, she thought she had been cast out of 2,500 girls because “I was the first girl the talent scout could grab. Lucky for me”.
When we meet earlier this year, she plays nervously with her silver rings, rolling her huge Betty Boop eyes, puffing on a roll-up. When she wants to go to the loo, she asks my permission (I feel she only just stopped herself putting up her hand to do so). Talk about naive. She’s so shiny and new, she’s still got her wrapping on.
Belmont was so anxious about the reaction to her performance, she booked a round-the-world trip to escape all the publicity. “When it comes out, I shall be a long way away,” she whispers, imagining herself zonked out on a beach in the Philippines or branding cows on a farm in the outback. “And when I get back here, all the fuss should have died down . . .”
Not likely. Belmont is going to be in big demand. Luckily, she was persuaded to return in time for the film’s opening at the Edinburgh Festival last week. And in case they haven’t already, someone should tell her she’s a breath of fresh British air, a lovely antidote to the bratty Hollywood starlets who’ve been shrieking at their publicists ever since they could dial.
She must have had an inkling the camera loved her, though. She was first “discovered” five years ago, at the age of 13, by Isabella Blow, fashion director of The Sunday Times. She went on to model for The Face and Italian Vogue. A good entr�e for movies, perhaps -but nothing could prepare her for the tough task ahead. Adapted from the novel by Alexander Stuart, The War Zone is a dark story of incest and sexual abuse.
Belmont, who plays the daughter Jessie, had some gruelling scenes opposite Ray Winstone, who was playing her sexually abusive father. She was apparently very brave, and at times was so exhausted from crying that she would fall asleep on set.
“I felt the story was so good I’d have done anything to get it across,” she says. The film looks fantastic - as evocative as a Terrence Malick movie with perpetual Devon drizzle. And she deserves an Oscar for her performance, but typically she hands the credit back to Tim Roth and her fellow cast. “Especially Ray, who was amazing. Even in the scariest moments - and he can be brilliantly scary, although he may hate his character - he helped me separate reality from the acting.”
Once the film wrapped, Belmont went back home to Stroud in Gloucestershire, where she lives with her dad, to discover that a nasty rumour had gone round town about her. “I was in the pub and an old schoolmate said to me: Is it true? Have you really become a porn star?” And how did she answer that?” I said, er, yeah, it is true, I have. I thought I’d let them believe it, to create a bit of a stir!” she says, finally displaying some healthy puckishness.
Belmont became good mates with her screen mother Tilda Swinton, whose next film was The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. She contemplated visiting her on the movie set in Thailand, “and hanging out with Leonardo. But the more I thought about it, the worse an idea it seemed”.
She decided to explore Indonesia for herself, taking a few easy-going male friends, two cases of homeopathic medicines and a rosary with an onyx heart supplied by her mother. “The rosary is for if the plane crashes, so I can pray like mad.”
Beauty runs in the Belmont veins. Her mother was a fashion model in the 1960s and her paternal grandmother - “She had a big bottom. Whoops!” - was painted by Whistler. Ask if she has a boyfriend, and she almost dies. “Oh no! I haven’t . . . The longest I’ve dated someone was a week. We met at Glastonbury. It was so intense we didn’t even talk.” Before that there was a boy she met three years ago. “We went to see Babe. I dated him the day before half term and dumped him the day after.”
She admits to having a crush on the American guitarist Ben Harper, though. “And Madonna, well, she is, like, my all-time heroine. Oh dear. Is that the right word?”
Belmont made this brave acting debut, but to her dad’s irritation she hates to call the bank or book a train ticket herself. “I get shy when I talk to people I don’t know on the phone.”
A sensitive little flower, then, she can’t help tuning into other people’s feelings. She worries about her director, how he’ll cope with the attention his film has attracted, poor love. “I think it will be weird for him when it comes out. I think he’s quite scared. Anyone would be,” she frets.
She is unaware that Roth is hoping she will, as he puts it, “consider working with me again”. She doesn’t know about this acting lark. She thinks her true vocation may be photography. When she talks about her new cameras - a “tiny little Olympus to make a photo-journal of the movie” she bought when she got the job, and a “gorgeous big Nikon FM2, from my first wage packet” - it’s the first time she looks happy and animated.
“That’s one of the main reasons I needed to go away - to come back with a clear head. Maybe then I’ll try one more movie,” she says. Could her life change just from appearing in a movie, she asks. “Do people really think you’re special just because you’ve done this acting?”
Not to worry. Her mates - those with the inside rap on the porn rumour - have pledged that fame will not go to her head. “They’ve told me they’ll slap me if I change. Well, I haven’t had a slap, yet,” she smiles.
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