Actresses challenged by real-life roles

By Stephen Galloway

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - In April 2005, Angelina Jolie was in Namibia, pregnant for the first time and awaiting the birth of her child.

It was a period of enormous emotional upheaval, not only because of the imminent baby, but also because Jolie had invited Mariane Pearl to stay with her. And now here she was, huddled with Pearl, director Michael Winterbottom and producer Brad Pitt, all developing a movie version of Pearl's memoir, "A Mighty Heart," about her husband's abduction and death at the hands of terrorists.

Looking back, Jolie remembers how difficult the experience was for Pearl.

"It was hard having to make her talk about so much of it and watching her walk off to her tent, looking at her and realizing: This is a woman's memory of the worst time in her life," Jolie recalls. "Watching her and watching (her late husband Daniel's) boy run around -- it was very heavy, and we all grew up with it."

Growing up is an inevitable part of the acting process and comes with any true immersion into another person's life, whether fictional or not. But it happens to an even greater extent when the role is real.

This year, a number of actresses have taken on the challenge of playing real-life people -- from Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose" to Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age." Emmanuelle Seigner in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," played a lesser-known character, but that did not diminished the challenge.

FEAR OF BETRAYAL

Speak to these actresses and the first thing they mention is the moral responsibility involved.

"Of course there's a great responsibility," Jolie says. "The heaviest pressure was really their son, knowing this little boy would one day see a representation of what his parents were like together."

"You feel like you don't want to betray anyone," affirms Seigner, who plays the common-law wife of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of French Elle magazine whose story is told in "Diving Bell." Because of that, she says, "it is absolutely different" from playing a regular role.

Unlike Jolie, who spent considerable time with Pearl, Seigner chose not to meet her real-life counterpart, Celine Desmoulins, the jilted partner who stays at her ex's side as he lies in a hospital bed, paralyzed.

"I didn't want to meet the person I was playing, because I was afraid that I was going to imitate somebody," she explains. "I wanted to do it my own way, like if it happened to me."

At the same time, Seigner feared that if she got to know Desmoulins, she would skew her acting away from the real, whitewashing her character. "I didn't want her to be bitter, but I didn't want her to be saintly, either. I took the freedom of playing her like that because I thought it would be more interesting."

Seigner had the advantage of having known Bauby himself, thanks to the number of times he had put her on the cover of Elle. "I didn't know him well," she says, "but when (director Julian Schnabel) contacted me about doing the part, that made it very moving."

It was even more so when she did meet Desmoulins at Cannes.