KATCHING MY I: Jessica Raine: Hollywood beckons for the Call the Midwife star

Sunday, 10 February 2013

Jessica Raine: Hollywood beckons for the Call the Midwife star

PUBLISHED: 00:01, 10 February 2013 | UPDATED: 10:01, 10 February 2013

Tonight the BAFTAs, next year the Oscars? With her Elizabeth Taylor looks and charismatic screen presence, we predict a stellar future for Call the Midwife’s JESSICA RAINE. And, as she tells Jane Gordon, Hollywood is already calling

Jessica Raine from Call the Midwife's wears crepe satin Dress, Reem Juan. Earrings, Susan Caplan Vintage Collection

It is hard to match the unusually pretty girl sitting in the restaurant of London’s Covent Garden Hotel with the actress who plays the leading role in the most successful new BBC1 drama series in over a decade.

But without her familiar blue and white 1950s NHS uniform, 30-year-old Jessica Raine looks more like a teenage schoolgirl rather than Call the Midwife’s nurse Jenny Lee.

We meet for breakfast before Jessica goes off to be transformed into a red-carpet star by top hairstylist Charles Worthington, who has chosen her to be his muse at tonight’s EE British Academy Film Awards (Charles Worthington is the official hairstylist to the BAFTAs).

‘Anyone can be an actor if they have talent, determination and some luck’

But right now, wearing an Urban Outfitters top, skinny jeans and sturdy boots, it is easier to imagine Jessica on a student march than tottering down the red carpet in a pair of Louboutins.

‘I have a really adaptable face, but when I am just being me people always think I am younger than I am,’ she says with a girlish grin.

Jessica might seem to have achieved overnight success in Call the Midwife (her first leading role on television), but it has taken years of hard work, rejection and determination to fulfil her ambition to become an actress.

As the younger of two daughters growing up on a farm in the Wye Valley she was, she says, ‘the shy, quiet one’ while her sister Sarah was the outgoing performer.

Jessica as Jenny Lee in Call the Midwife's

Their father Allan Lloyd (Raine is Jessica’s stage name) was involved in a local amateur theatrical group, but it was Sarah (now a college lecturer) who took centre stage.

‘My first acting experience was a non-speaking role as a robot. My costume was a cardboard box covered in tinfoil, but I was so shy I refused to go on stage,’ says Jessica, laughing at the memory.

She is incredibly private (she doesn’t want to name the actor boyfriend she’s been living with for ‘a couple of years’), and you sense that while her childhood on the family farm seems idyllic, her early life was not easy.

When she was nine her mother Sue, a nurse, suffered a serious illness (from which she has completely recovered), but an already shy Jessica became more withdrawn. ‘It’s hard to talk about, but I think that seeing a parent very ill and vulnerable does make a child think; it affects you at a deep level,’ she says.

Jessica has huge love for her mother and absolute admiration for her work as a nurse (Sue had given her the first volume of Jennifer Worth’s memoir, Call the Midwife, long before her daughter was to audition for the role in the show), but she credits her father, now retired from farming,
for inspiring in her ‘a love of words.

He would read to us as children and was a massive influence on me,’ she says.

After graduating with a degree in drama and cultural studies from the University of the West of England in Bristol, she made the decision to go on to acting training.

But every drama school she applied to turned her down, so she took a gap year teaching in Thailand.

Undeterred, the following year she tried again and was accepted by Rada. Immediately after her graduation in 2008 – by now nearly 26 – she won a prominent role playing Lesley Sharp’s goth daughter Sarah in the National Theatre production of Simon Stephens’s Harper Regan.

‘I always knew that the only thing I wanted to do was act, but it took me a long time to say it out loud to anyone, let alone myself. I am surprised by how dogged I have been in wanting to make a living as a respected actress,’ she says.

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TULLE DRESS, Merchant Archive. Gloves, Cornelia James. Earrings, Susan Caplan Vintage Collection. Diamond necklace and ring, Asprey

Roles in three more National Theatre productions followed, with Jessica usually playing what she calls ‘mardy’ (a colloquial Midlands word for moody) and sometimes overtly sexual teenagers.

She worries that because her career began in ‘highbrow’ theatre, people might think that she is one of the current posse of posh actors. ‘I am not posh. I went to a comprehensive school.

There are so many public-school educated actors around at the moment, many of them brilliant, but I want to get across the fact that anyone can be an actor if they have talent, determination and some luck,’ she says.

Extending her career beyond theatre has already involved a small role ‘wearing a hideous wimple’ in Ridley Scott’s film Robin Hood and, more recently, appearing alongside Daniel Radcliffe in The Woman in Black.

She would love a career that could combine film work (she has already had approaches from Los Angeles, and spent January there) and stage roles, and fantasises about one day winning both an Oscar and an Olivier.

But Jessica is aware that Call the Midwife has been the greatest break in her career. Passionate about the NHS – not just because of her mother’s work as a nurse, but also because she is aware that in the mid to late 50s, when the series is set, ‘it was a beautiful thing, a lifeline’ for people in deprived areas such as East London where Jennifer Worth worked.

Hair supremo Charles Worthington works his red-carpet magic

Modest about playing the central role, Jessica insists that it is an ensemble drama with no egos and great affection among the actresses involved (Miranda Hart, who plays Chummy, has become a great friend, and Bryony Hannah , who plays Cynthia, is an old friend from Jessica’s Rada days).

The second series, currently on BBC1 on Sunday evenings, reveals a more ambitious side to Jessica’s character. ‘After Jimmy, her on-off boyfriend, has come and gone again, she just shuts
down her personal life and throws herself into her work. Seconded to the London Hospital in Whitechapel, she focuses on her ambitions to become a matron.

But I can reveal that at the end of the series a new chap comes on the scene,’ she says with a smile.

When I comment that a new romance is the perfect lead into a third series, she looks pensive and I sense that she is a little ambivalent about whether she wants to continue in the role.

‘I am really up for playing someone a million miles from Jenny, much as I love her.

I would like to explore comedy, I want to do more theatre and I definitely want a future in film,’ she says.

Privately, she is as closed-off as her Call the Midwife character, finding media interest in her ‘creepy’. Her boyfriend is an actor who works ‘in theatre, television and film.

We are both working in London at the moment so that’s great, but I like not having a routine because it keeps our relationship fresh and exciting.

I am not massively interested in getting married, to be honest – we live together and that’s fine. And as for babies, I think I have had my fair share over the past couple of years and for now my babies are Pickle and Margot, my two Battersea rescue cats,’ she says.

SILK Dress, Marchesa, from Harrods. Diamond necklace and earrings, Lucie Campbell

On the way to the studio ahead of her first red-carpet appearance, Jessica is a little nervous. While she is not the slightest bit vain and ‘has never ever dieted’, she worries whether what she calls her ‘vintage body’ (she says her ‘small waist, proper boobs and bottom’ fit perfectly into the original 50s nurses uniforms she wears in Call the Midwife) will work in the clothes the stylist has picked out.

But she need not have worried, because when Jessica emerges from the dressing room, her ‘vintage body’ looks sensational in a 50s-style evening dress.

With her snow-white skin enhanced by Charles’s contemporary take on the larger-than-life hair of icons of the 40s and 50s, she looks like a young Elizabeth Taylor. Jessica is no longer the pretty girl I met this morning or a 50s midwife, but a ravishingly beautiful movie star.

Industry insiders have long predicted that Jessica is destined for major success – particularly since Call the Midwife is such a hit on the same US channel (PBS) that screens Downton Abbey.

If Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary) has managed to achieve A-list status in the States (she is co-starring with Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore in the forthcoming big-budget thriller Non-Stop), it’s impossible to imagine what the future could hold for Jessica.

When I tell her that she is ten times more beautiful than Michelle (who she knows and admires), she laughs out loud and comments that ‘those are your words not mine. I told you I had an adaptable face – I can look very plain, too.’

But there are already signs that Jessica is the one to watch in America: she has recently done an interview and photo shoot for US Vogue, she can turn on a flawless American accent and she has the gravitas of being the kind of classically trained ‘English actress’ that Hollywood loves.

Whether or not Jessica – or indeed the BBC – decides that she will continue to play Jenny in a third series of Call the Midwife (Jennifer Worth wrote three volumes of memoirs), there is no doubt that the drama has given birth to a star.

Jessica Raine is the red-carpet muse for Charles Worthington at tonight’s EE British Academy Film Awards, which will be shown on BBC1

STYLE THE MIDWIFE…

I don’t wear cosmetics much in my everyday life, so being made-up for the BAFTAs red carpet is exciting. I’d never have worn bright red lipstick, but I will now.
Charles Worthington is adorable and managed to transform my hair with his Salon at Home Instant Amplifying Volume Treatment [a special BAFTA edition is available exclusively at Boots, left £14.99, boots.com]. I have always hated the idea of extensions, so having big hair that’s all mine is fantastic. Charles’s idea was to give me a movie-star hairstyle from the 40s and 50s, but softer and less rigid so it moves when I do.

DIOR - 1955

Because I have a vintage body, I love the idea of wearing a Chanel or Dior gown from the 50s, so the dresses the stylist has picked for me are perfect — a 2013 take on the retro look I love.
I have only just started to get into designer labels, but I have a Sessun coat that I love. Noemi Klein jewellery is another passion.
I am nervous about walking the walk down the red carpet. I hardly ever wear high heels, but the Charlotte Olympia shoes I’m wearing with my outfit are comfortable, so I am reasonably confident that I won’t fall over at tonight’s BAFTAs!