FROM PRINCESS TO EMPRESS
ON HER ‘GREAT HONOUR’ AT STARRING ROLE IN ‘NAPOLEON’
As she swept onto the red, white and blue carpet last week in a scarlet Vivienne Westwood gown, Britain’s Vanessa Kirby cemented her place in the Hollywood firmament.
The actress, best known in the UK for her Bafta award-winning performance as Princess Margaret in the first two series of The Crown,, looked very much at home taking her place alongside A-list star Joaquin Phoenix at the premiere of Napoleon.
Directed by Sir Ridley Scott, the historic biopic follows the rise – and fall – of the Corsica-born general and political leader. But at its heart is a tender, complex love story between the Emperor and his wife Joséphine, who, unable to have children with Napoleon, is ousted from the marriage but continues to be a friend and confidante until her death.
Vanessa, 35, who has also starred in Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series as well as the arthouse film Pieces of a Woman,, for which she was Oscarnominated, has said she enjoys “stories about women who are really open, messy and contradictory”.
But playing Joséphine, which she says was a “real honour”, was different.
The Empress-to-be wasn’t born into Parisian society, but raised on the Caribbean island of Martinique. She moved to France as a teenager and, aged 16, married the aristocrat Alexandre de Beauharnais. They were both imprisoned in 1794, during the Revolution but, while her husband was beheaded, Joséphine was freed, becoming part of a new wave of female liberation and a leader of fashion.
“I felt like I had to bring less of myself and actually pull back my own personality a lot,” Vanessa says. “Joséphine was so enigmatic and unusual. She had to repress her feelings in order to survive, so that is how I approached playing her.”
A highlight of the shoot for Vanessa was playing opposite Joaquin. “I love him and it was so magic to play the special kind of intimacy and intensity between these two historical figures,” she says. “I had a really good time. Even though it was a dysfunctional relationship in many ways, they had this chemistry that was very potent.”
A UNIQUE LOVE STORY
Napoleon and Joséphine also had a “playfulness” that, Vanessa says, transferred over to life on set and helped lighten the mood when depicting “an intense and brutal time”.
“It was hard, but we found we had to laugh sometimes between takes to get through that. We had to bring some lightness to it because of the intensity of thi
