Brought up under Thatcher she embodies the tricky dictum that position is to be achieved not born to:
Brought up under Thatcher, she embodies the tricky dictum that position is to be achieved, not born to: will it and it will happen Yet Minnie is the moment and Blairite: sure, reach.. then reach out, be responsible She's got a high emotional IQMinnie Driver is now. A British-born star who owns no debt to her contemporaries, those poster girls for privilege and high colonics , or to her stuck-up, screwed up predecessors. With the possible exception of: Elizabeth Taylor, another exotic, free-living, gutsy dame (not Dame) transplanted early from dry native soil to grow under the Californian sun. Not exactly a rose, not exactly a Lady and not exactly Serious, but an impatient hybrid; the Best of both Elizabeth has two Oscars By tomorrow morning, let's hope Minnie has at least one. Minnie: the People's Princess.(Best) British Actresses Known to Have Gone Home with a Small, Yellow Stranger1939: Vivien Leigh for Gone With The Wind 1951: Vivien Leigh for A Streetcar Named Desire 1960: Elizabeth Taylor for Butterfield 8 1964: Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins 1965: Julie Christie for Darling 1966: Elizabeth Taylor for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1969: Maggie Smith for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 1970: Glenda Jackson for Women in Love 1973: Glenda Jackson for A Touch of Class 1992: Emma Thompson for Howard's End. Michael Williams, actor extraordinaire and husband to Dame Judi Dench, is nervous. Within hours of him studying the critics' verdict on his West End revival of a one-handed marathon called Brief Lives, his wife may just step up to receive an Oscar some 6,000 miles away in Hollywood for her portrayal of Queen Victoria in the film Mrs Brown He certainly won't have slept much last night.
He has already told her to prepare a speech and he's placing a bet. He thinks her dazed and confused Queen Victoria is the best thing she has ever done in the cinema. "She's never managed to carry off that luminosity before that she has in the theatre," he says "Yes, I had a weep." He pauses and smiles "She makes me weep a lot, living with her. No, seriously, she makes me laugh a lot as well." Underneath this modest exterior lurks a pocket battleship.
Williams earned his stripes over 14 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company under the guidance of Peter Hall, and he easily held his own by Dame Judi's side in the West End treats Pack of Lies and Mr and Mrs Nobody.On television the duo were something of a staple diet in the early Eighties, as Mike and Laura in Bob Larbey's A Fine Romance and he surprised sceptics with his jaded music hall comic in the ITV saga September Song "I never looked on acting as an ego trip," he says. "I could sight-read Dickens better than anybody else in class I couldn't do anything else I was a total dunce, apart from a bit of cricket and rugby I was useless. But this one thing, I could do."And so to Brief Lives, based on a book of short biographies written by a Wiltshire gentleman, John Aubrey, in the late 17th-century but never published in his lifetime.This is tour de force stuff, some 56 pages of script in slightly over two hours under Garland's direction. Williams and Dame Judi have been married for 27 years and remain blissfully happy, although there have been traumas.