Life After Yum-Yum - actress Shirley Henderson - Brief Article - Interview

Shirley Henderson made an indelible impression as Topsy-Turvy's maudlin Victorian soprano whose dressing-room tippling sends her off into reveries from which one wonders if she'll ever return. But once in costume as Yum-Yum, one of "three little maids from school" in The Mikado, she transforms herself into an enchanting player.

Encouraged by director Mike Leigh to unearth everything she could about her character, Leonora Braham, Henderson discovered she was a widow whose husband had died, a possible suicide, when she was pregnant with their child in Canada. "There was a lot of sadness there," Henderson reflects. "That can make someone turn to drink, and once alcohol takes grip, it becomes part of you. I don't know if that's what really happened with Leonora, but it's what I felt." Happily, she reports, the singer remarried, had more children and lived into her seventies.

Henderson wondered how Leonora was able to perform every night. "How can she go and play this fourteen-year-old girl onstage? But she can, and she can do it at the drop of a hat. It's because you can lose yourself up there and forget all your problems."

The Scottish actress experienced a less reassuring transformation recently when she herself was onstage portraying a woman who has been persuaded--by her hypnotherapist girlfriend--that she was sexually abused by her father. Henderson's performance in Mike Cullen's play Anna Weiss, an intense examination of false-memory syndrome, was devastating.

This summer, American movie audiences can see Henderson in happier-go-lucky mode. In the slice-of-life drama Wonderland, she's a London hairdresser with a penchant for casual sex and a careless attitude to raising her son. The character is a little selfish and a little bitchy, but essentially good-hearted--in any case, it's a relief to see Henderson with a smile on her face.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group