‘Career Girl’ in Name Only

If you don’t know who Katrin Cartlidge is, that probably means you missed several of the best foreign films of the last four years. If you had seen “Naked,” “Before the Rain,” or “Breaking the Waves,” you would surely remember her.

In Mike Leigh’s 1993 “Naked,” the British actress played Sophie, a seriously stoned Cockney girl with no particular goal in life and a predilection for unreliable men.

She was virtually unrecognizable two years later in “Before the Rain,” which marked the directorial debut of Milcho Manchevski, who cast her as a conflicted photo editor torn between her comfortable life in London and the reality she sees in photographs wired to her plush office from Bosnia.

Cartlidge dazzled the critics again last year in Lars Von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves,” playing a compassionate nurse who is unable to intervene in the tragedy unfolding around her.

It’s quite an impressive resume.

“I’m able to be selective in the films I do because I’ve resigned myself to a less-than-lavish lifestyle--I rent a two-room flat and drive a very cruddy car,” the 36-year-old actress says with a laugh over lunch at a Hollywood hotel. “But it’s not as if I’ve had to struggle to resist selling out. I’m not exactly deluged with offers to play bimbos in big-budget action films. The only part I’m likely to be offered in ‘Lethal Weapon IV’ is the part of the lethal weapon.”

Did we mention that Cartlidge is self-deprecating? She is, to a fault; in fact she’s not unlike Hannah, the endearingly unpretentious character she plays in Leigh’s new “Career Girls,” his first film since last year’s Oscar-nominated “Secrets & Lies.”

“Career Girls,” which opens Friday, is the story of two young misfits who room together during college, go their separate ways, then have a weekend reunion 10 years later. Cartlidge describes it as a story about “the way that different memories have different significances for different people.”

Cartlidge grew up in London, with a brother 15 years older, who owns Ehler’s Grove winery in the Napa Valley, and a sister 11 years older, who writes children’s books in Cornwall, England.

“Because there was such a gap in our ages, I sort of grew up as an only child,” the actress recalls. “My parents were early bohemians. My mother was a German Jew who fled Berlin when she was 16, and most of her childhood friends didn’t survive the war. Experiences of that magnitude make you ask big questions. And if you’ve got an ounce of intelligence, you’re probably going to conclude that the conventional lifestyle isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

“So I grew up surrounded by art, with an endless parade of fascinating characters coming through our house. My mother runs a gallery devoted to unique pieces of jewelry, and my father ran a transport firm. He was raised in an orphanage, which sent him into the army during [World War II]. In the service he became politicized and realized he was a pacifist, but because you can’t be a conscientious objector once you’re in uniform, he deserted and was promptly put in jail. He’s had a hard life, but much to his credit, he’s not at all bitter.”

As a child, Cartlidge says, she was considered to be of below-average intelligence because she had difficulty in school. Many years later she was found to have a slight astigmatism and mild dyslexia, “but by then the damage had been done,” she says.

“I’m sure my being judged educationally subnormal played a role in my becoming an actress,” she says. “From an early age, my only way of displaying my intelligence was to perform.”

Though Cartlidge was exposed to avant-garde theater and art from an early age, she nonetheless developed a fondness for movies, particularly American movies, which were a staple of British TV.

“I remember being deeply impressed by people like Bette Davis,” she says. “I also saw European films, and it was when I was watching the French film ‘The Red Balloon’ that it first occurred to me that maybe I could be in a film like that.”

With no formal training as an actress, Cartlidge began auditioning for plays and made her London stage debut at 18 playing Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet.”

The annoying need to make a living led Cartlidge to sign on as a regular on the British soap opera “Brookside” in 1982.

“I was 21 at the time and played what’s known in England as a ‘snotty bitch,’ ” she says. “Working on that series was surreal beyond belief, but it was a great way to learn to be in front of the camera because you could see the mistakes in your work one day and eliminate them the next.”

In 1987 Cartlidge auditioned for Leigh, who passed on her for a commercial he was casting at the time but made a note to himself to keep track of her. Six years later, with “Naked,” they finally embarked on a project together.

“Mike’s process is completely collaborative,” she says. “At the beginning you simply agree to work with him, attempting to build a character drawn from the entire melee of your own experience. You do this work in a sort of vacuum with no knowledge of what the other actors are doing, and Mike reviews the character with you periodically.

“He then decides which aspects of your character he wants to explore and creates a very loose structure. For instance, the ‘script’ for the first day of shooting ‘Career Girls’ said nothing more than ‘Hannah and Annie meet.’ Lynda Steadman and I then improvise that scene several times. So, there are several markedly different versions of every scene.

“It’s an extraordinarily exciting process--in fact, the most difficult thing about working with Mike is that it makes you incapable of turning your mind off. The more thinking and creating you do when you’re not at work, the more you have to draw on when you’re on the set, so it becomes an all-engrossing process.”

“Career Girls,” she says, was the most exhausting film of the five she has done.

“The most challenging part of Hannah was her mental energy,” she says. “She’s so hyperactive that she’s always slightly ahead of herself and she exudes a quality of intense speed and energy. That, coupled with the fact that my character is in every scene, made it a very tiring shoot.”

It had been Cartlidge’s work on “Naked” that led Danish director Lars Von Trier to take an interest in her.

“I was sitting by the pool in Cannes in 1994 when this strange, rather wonderful character with a big fat cigar said to me in a Danish accent: ‘You are Katrin Cartlidge. You must read this script and come and meet Lars.’ I thought, who the hell is Lars? It was as if I was being summoned by the Wizard of Oz.”

The man with the cigar turned out to be Von Trier’s producer Peter Aalbaek Jensen.

“I read the script and thought it was amazing, so I went to Denmark to meet Lars and fell in love with his way of working--which is the opposite of how Mike Leigh works. Whereas Mike moves from chaos into structure, Lars begins with a structured script and encourages you to use it as a launching point into chaos and the creation of something organic.”

Cartlidge recently completed the New York shoot of the second, as-yet-untitled film by Lodge Kerrigan, the director of “Clean, Shaven.” And though she clearly loves the process of filmmaking, she has no movies on her dance card at the moment and plans to spend part of this month at the home of novelist John Berger in Bordeaux, France. Working in collaboration with the author, and the Thea^tre DeComplicite , an avant-garde, multi-lingual theater company based in London, Cartlidge will help create a radio adaptation of Berger’s new novel, “To the Wedding.” After that, she will head to Lucarno, Switzerland, to serve on the jury of the Lucarno Film Festival.

“I love not working,” Cartlidge says. “I love the variety of experiences available in the world.

“For instance, during one of my financially lean periods I worked as an artist’s model at the Slade School of Art. I recommend it to everyone because it teaches you that the human body is not just an object of sexuality. It’s also an object of light, shape and form, and in that sense it’s infinitely beautiful, regardless of how much it deviates from the cultural ideal of the day.

“This is a good lesson for an actor to learn. If a film requires that I be naked for a scene now it doesn’t upset me, because I don’t care if I look bony, flabby or whatever. It certainly bothers me less than seeing someone’s brains being blown out on screen. The human body is wonderful, and I wish we’d see more of it, because it reminds us of what we are underneath all our disguises.”