Instead she selected Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944), Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Desk Set (1957), Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast (2000), and Kelly Macdonald in Gosford Park (2001). The actors have one thing in common: Their stories play out not just on their faces or in their words but in the ways they move their bodies onscreen.
Clarkson is eating a candy cane, breaking off little pieces and wriggling them out of the cellophane casing, while she considers what to watch first. She is dressed in a black V neck and olive cargo pants. She is five feet five and tiny — when she lifts up her sweater to show off a fake tan she acquired for her role in The Dying Gaul, her belly is as flat as a teenager’s. But her face — luminous, expressive, warm — is that of a woman who has lived, and lived well.
“I first saw Gaslight when I was 15,” she says, as Bergman appears on a huge TV in front of her. In the film Bergman plays a young wife whose husband is systematically trying to drive her insane. As she begins to suspect that her spouse is a murderer, her eyes dart back and forth. She seems frozen in place.
“From early on I had a thing about Ingrid Bergman,” Clarkson says. “She walks that beautiful line with emotion. She’s always on the verge, and you’re not really sure which way she’s going to go. There’s this fragility and strength absolutely working together at the same time. I watched this, and I was so frightened for her. I remember thinking, ‘I’m never getting married!’” Clarkson laughs, and it sounds like a Gatling gun in a velvet sack. “See the effect it had? Ingrid Bergman is the reason I’m not married!”
IN DESK SET, Hepburn isn’t married, either. She plays a research librarian who fears that a visiting efficiency expert (Tracy) is angling to replace her with a computer. Clarkson has chosen a scene in which Tracy takes Hepburn to lunch, not in a restaurant but on the roof of their office building. The winter air is freezing, and as they fumble with wax paper-wrapped sandwiches, Tracy peppers Hepburn with arcane questions he expects will prove her inferior to a machine.
“Is this an interview?” Hepburn asks, checking her chignon with an idle hand. “I would have had my hair done or something.” Clarkson smiles. She loves the way Hepburn rubs her gloved hands together, pulling her coat closer as she responds to each of Tracy’s queries.
“There’s something about this one scene. It seems incredibly unrehearsed and unpushed. She seems absolutely at ease. He is at once admiring and wry;” she says. “They just seem really comfortable, really in their bodies and in their space. She’s fighting the cold, chewing her sandwich. She’s just so smart, but it’s an effortless intelligence. That’s very difficult to convey.” She pauses. “Also, I just love the wax paper.”
Next Clarkson picks one of the few movies she likes so much, she has watched it three times: Robert Altman’s murder mystery Gosford Park. The film is packed with celebrated actors, all of them “at the top of their form.” But she has chosen a scene that features Macdonald, the young Scottish actress who plays Maggie Smith’s servant. Macdonald’s unassuming character connects everyone in the film — it is she, for example, who deduces who done it.
“From the moment she enters this film — in the beginning, when she’s standing in the rain, absolutely drenched, continuing to help Maggie Smith, not even wiping away the buckets of water — she takes a character who really has no physicality and makes the role expressive and heartbreaking,” Clarkson says. The scene she remembers best is when Macdonald confronts Clive Owen with her suspicion that he is the killer. As it plays, Clarkson clasps her hands behind her neck, rests her elbows on the table, and concentrates. Owen kisses Macdonald, who places her hand on his chest, keeping it softly clenched, as if holding something back. “I’ve been wanting to do that,” Owen tells her, “since I first laid eyes on you.”
