Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, The : Frances Conroy Interview


Frances Conroy (Miss Greythorne)

Frances Conroy was born in Monroe Georgia in 1953 of Irish and Latvian descent, she attended high school in Long Island and studied drama at the Neighbourhood Playhouse and the Juilliard School in New York City as a teenager. During the 1970s, she performed regularly with regional and touring theatrical companies and appeared in an off-Broadway production of Othello with Richard Dreyfuss and Raul Julia.

One of Conroy's first film appearances was as a Shakespearean actress in Woody Allen's 1979 classic, Manhattan. In 1980, she made her Broadway debut in The Lady From Dubuque. She focused primarily on her stage career for the next two decades, appearing in such productions as Our Town, The Little Foxes, and The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, receiving one Tony and four Drama Desk Award nominations (including a Drama Desk win for The Secret Rapture). Conroy is best known for her critically acclaimed work on HBO's original drama series Six Feet Under playing family matriarch Ruth Fisher. For her work on the series, Conroy was nominated for four Emmy Awards and won a Golden Globe and three Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Question: How would you describe your role in the film?

Frances:
This story that we are making is one of five books in a series by Susan Cooper. And the character that I play, whose name is Miss Greythorne is actually a larger entity than this particular person. In this story, The Dark Is Rising, she has a beautiful manor house in a small English village and is well known, and liked in town. In the series as a whole she is one of the Old Ones, one of these figures who are outside time, and she is referred to as The Lady. There are significant moments in the other books where thousands of Old Ones are waiting for The Lady to appear to give them the message they need to go on. She is a profound spirit in the cosmos along with the other Old Ones she exists with, and in this story she is Miss Greythorne. And Merriman Ian McShane is technically her butler. They are like an old married couple as David Cunningham says, they have their good nights and bad nights, as they try to bring this young child into manhood with this rather heavy burden he has been given to save the world

Question: So you have read the books….

Frances:
I’ve read all of them, I wanted to, they are beautiful. Just to have the basic mythology from the stories as we go through the film. I found it wonderful to fall back on and think of.

Question: Did you know of them before you were cast?

Frances:
I didn’t, but my sister had taught them when she was teaching English to seventh-eighth graders. She said they were beautiful books, and they were highly lauded when they came out.

Question: They did have a fine reputation, but got somewhat lost in the mix with the arrival of the Harry Potters and the like…

Frances:
They are wonderful, though, they are quite frightening at times. They really show both the innocence of children, and the power of children to define the right way, and their innate wisdom in avoiding the pitfalls of life or evil. I like them a lot.

Question: With the Narnia books there is an integral moral code – is that the same here?

Frances:
This young man, Will, in the book, when he’s turned eleven these things come to pass; in the film it is when he turns fourteen, a coming-of-age so-to-speak, of a young boy moving into early manhood. It’s not the end of innocence, rather than addition of real-life, very adult issues. There is also the fact that he is the last of the old ones, the last to be born, and he will bring the world into light, against the power of the dark. These are really philosophical terms — it is pretty profound. At a bar mitzvah, or any other coming-of-age time, you are dealing with the yin and the yang, the light and the dark, all your potential. The book goes deep. And it draws on Arthurian legend so it is very deep in that way as well.

Question: Are you a fan of this kind of fantasy material?

Frances:
When I was in high school my brother-in-law gave me a copy of The Lord Of The Rings, and I read all of them. That was like 5000 years ago! But I didn’t see all of those films, I felt that they were geared toward a pre-adolescent male. I’m not really touched by special effects, they leave me cold. Intellectually thinking how happy they must have been making these things in the computer. It was the scenery of New Zealand that touched me, that and some great acting. David Cunningham is doing as much as possible in the real world, and I am glad, it makes it more elemental. Anything that is real and not virtual is moving. I don’t understand the virtual world at all – we still have blood in our bodies. As long as that is the case we’ve got hope.

Dark Is Rising is released in cinemas nationwide on October 19th.