Model-Turned-Actress Discovers Her `Wings' With Henry James

Henry James has replaced Jane Austen and E.M. Forster as chief literary source for movies this season. Latest example: Iain Softley's film of James' 1902 novel, "The Wings of the Dove," which opens Friday at the Guild 45th.

As adapted by Hossein Amini (who wrote "Jude," last year's film of Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure"), the book's setting has been pushed up to 1910. But it still follows the story of a dying American heiress, Millie Theale (Alison Elliott), who befriends a London society woman, Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter), and falls in love with Kate's rejected lover, the journalist Merton Densher (Linus Roache), who follows them to Venice.

"I read part of the book," said Elliott during a Seattle visit. "I'd not read any of James before. I'd been given `Portrait of a Lady' as a gift three years ago, but I never cracked it. When I saw this script I felt like I'd be a bad actor if I didn't read the book."

This was easier planned than accomplished. She and the other actors found James interesting but circuitous.

"I was a little stupefied when I finally read James," she said. "But I actually fell in love with his writing - after the initial shock of a three-page-long sentence; I may be exaggerating there. I appreciated the psychological insights, the fact that no one is all bad, no one is all good."

She was also able to fill in details that weren't in the script.

"You never see Millie's whole back story, but it was important for me to have a sense of history about her," she said. "She's the only surviving member of her family, and there's something that makes Millie feel somehow stronger to be alive. She's a very romantic figure: an orphaned heiress who's insanely wealthy. I think she's in love with romance."

Softley wasn't thrilled with the idea that the actors were comparing the script with the source. He even told Elliott not to read the book.

"He thought we might get dangerous ideas," she said. "One thing we did use was Millie's red hair. The initial idea was Millie would be a blonde, and I had thought of her as dark. But when the book introduces her as having flaming red hair, I thought that was so right for her."

Eventually she had to separate herself from James and see the story in the filmmakers' terms.

"I had to put the book down so I wouldn't resent the script for not having everything that was in the book," she said. "And the script did give some wonderful earmarks to follow. It's quite true to the spirit of James."

Because Softley had directed only the Beatles movie "Backbeat" and the computer thriller "Hackers" before, Elliott wasn't sure about his approach to James.

"I did wonder if they were going to make it slick and hip by updating it to 1910, and I was concerned that it might lose its integrity if it were made more accessible to a modern audience," she said. "But mostly I just liked this script. I was gambling on the merits of that."

She ended up applauding Amini's decision to move up the date.

"It was a really exciting time in history, a period of forward thinking. The London underground had just been completed, and it had become socially comfortable for people to go down in the subway, to dress up for a subway ride. Everything seemed possible.

"I think they also liked the lines of the costumes, which were less Edwardian and more attractive."

In order to become familiar with Millie's illness, Elliott read medical journals from the period. Part of her research was not planned: in Venice, she was hospitalized for dehydration and kidney stones.

"It felt like a burst appendix," she said. "I didn't know what had happened. Playing someone who is mortally ill and not having any idea what was wrong, going to the hospital in costume at 5 in the morning - in some ways it helped to understand Millie differently."

There were other difficulties in shooting on location on water.

"We were doing a period film at the height of the tourist season, in summer, and you go everywhere by boat - little boats," she said. "The restrooms are inconvenient and impossible to find, shots are ruined by motorboat sounds or plastic Evian bottles floating down the canals.

"The first take might be good for an actor but not good because of something like that showing up in a shot. We worked a lot of strange hours. You'd go to work at night for night scenes, and maybe do a scene at first light at 5:30 in the morning. We just had to knuckle under."

Elliott started out as a teen model, doing fashion shoots in Tokyo, Paris and New York. During the past five years she's established herself as an actress, playing Morgan Earp's wife in Lawrence Kasdan's "Wyatt Earp," the femme fatale in Steven Soderbergh's "The Underneath" and the ex-convict who tries to establish a new life in the Sundance Film Festival prize-winner, "The Spitfire Grill."

"Modeling gave me confidence and independence at an early age," she said, though she was always thinking about acting. Her television credits include the sitcom "Living Dolls" and the BBC/Masterpiece Theatre production of Edith Wharton's "The Buccaneers."

Her first movie, "Pretty Hattie's Baby," has not been released because of ownership problems, though she thinks it will turn up, if only on cable or video. She played the daughter of Alfre Woodard and Charles Dutton, raised in a black family in Reno in the 1960s, "waiting for her skin to darken, trying to figure out who she is. It was made by the Korean Grocers' Association and shown only once, during the L.A. riots."

She spent four months in New Mexico on "Wyatt Earp," though the women's roles in that film were minor. Soderbergh's film came and went without much impact. Her breakthrough came with "The Spitfire Grill."

"It was this little film, this little character that I cared so much about, and I knew from experience that it could have been lost," she said.

"After Sundance it was so appreciated that it was like this enormous hurdle that I'd been able to get over. Maybe that gave me more hope that I could be acceptable to play Millie."