Acting ‘only a job’

Press, 5 March 1987, Page 19

Acting ‘only a job’

Beatie Edney — who plays the singer Nancy Ellis and the object of Richard Herncastle’s affections in “Lost Empires” — is determined not to overrate the acting profession. “Some people,” says the vivacious 23 year old, “talk about acting being an art form. Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t, but if it is, then there are plenty of other professions for which you could make the same claim. I mean, I’ve an accountant who is absolutely brilliant and what he does is just as much an art form as acting. Acting is only a job like any other ... except that the work isn’t usually as steady. “Actors,” she says, “are so boring. When we get together nobody ever finishes a sentence because we’re always interrupting, wanting to talk about ourselves. I’m as bad as any of them. Always this great need for attention. I suppose my height makes me

like that as well. Short people like me and Hitler are always assertive, always having to shout to be seen.

“A director paid me a compliment the other day, and said there were great actors who were small, such as James Cagney, for a start. But who wants to be another James Cagney?"

Edney is 157 cm tall and has a degree in English. Her first name is actually Beatrice, but she calls herself Beatie because “I’m young and silly and Beatrice conjured up

someone who was posh and respectable.”

Her mother is also an accomplished actress, Sylvia Syms. Edney sees “Lost Empires’ ” Nancy as a realist who doesn’t particularly want to be on the stage. “She’s cold, if you like. I justified her being like that because I think she’d had enough of men. They’d all failed her. Now she’d test someone ruthlessly before becoming involved. I think it’s something I have in common with her. Too much pride. You have to learn to swallow it. I can now, but I couldn’t before.”

She did not expect to get the part, arriving at the audition not knowing the key she was expected to sing in and making “a complete wally of myself.” She returned to her house to discover a pile of scripts on her doorstep. Beatie Edney is Nancy Ellis in “Lost Empires,” tonight at 9.00 on One.