Emilie Francois

Ronald’s away in Melbourne watching the Oz open so I’ve been having an absolute orgy watching all my shows. The other night it was Sense & Sensibility. The casting is inspired - even Hugh Grant is not half as foppish and grating as one expects - but the actress who portrays Margaret Dashwood is a stand out. It’s an absolute inspired bit of casting on Ang Lee’s part.

In the movie she is extraordinary as the youngest of three sisters and a widowed mother, all who are in their own way mourning the death of a beloved father. Each realising that they’re to be cast adrift as women with no fortune and future now that their father having died, has left his estate to his son from a previous marriage and his scheming wife (played by Harriet Walter with a nasal top note to her accent that beautifully captures her disdain for her step in-laws). Margaret is a total tomboy, refusing to emerge from her tree house in the grounds of the estate that is about to be yanked from underneath them and when she does, she hides under furniture with her beloved atlas, refusing to emerge to meet the horror in-laws, or she’s hounding Edward (HG) to fencing duels and thwacking him about his person when he least expects it.

She is totally perplexed by her older sisters and their disastrous love lives and doesn’t hesitate to voice her confusion and contempt either to them or to her mother. She’s balanced utterly at that point before she will inevitably slip into the dark, fecund swamp of adolescence but now, as her old life is pulled from beneath her, she maintains a childhood wonder of worlds that offers endless possibilities; even when to outsiders it looks positively Dickensian. She can barely hold still when her hair is being brushed, she runs with abandon, her skirts hitched over her knees, she skids into rooms where others genteelly bob about, and is forever looking through her beloved telescope to worlds metaphorically and physically beyond her ken, straining to throw herself at it all. I wanted to weep watching that sense of purpose and innocence.

Of course I’m seeing my younger self in Margaret’s antics and energy. Her lack of guile and her outspokenness is a jolt of exquisite agony. When I first saw the movie I was totally caught up with Alan Rickman’s brooding Colonel Brandon and couldn’t abide the traitorous John Willoughby (a brilliant Greg Wise who in IRL goes on to marry Emma Thompson). I spent much of the movie inwardly shrieking at Kate Winslet’s character to get a grip and pay attention to the tortured Brandon but with this viewing the other night, my heart was totally captured by the youngest sister. I wanted to bottle her personality while rueing the era in which she had been born and would inevitably have to succumb to thanks to the idiot English and their rigid class and gender structures. I had to keep reminding myself it was fiction. (But it’s actually not).

And so dear reader, I’ve been scouring the internet for further movies our ingenue has been in but, news flash, her actress-ing is barely a soupçon of her story. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised. Margaret Dashwood’s name is actually Emilie Siobhan Geoghegan François. She is no longer an actress (and with a name like that, you’re definitely not having a career as a jobbing thespian), she’s a journalist, writer, and film maker. Even Wikipedia barely mentions her child actress days. She has degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and Georgetown universities respectively and became a Muslim in the early aughts.

With my cursory research, it’s clear she has a commitment to learning and throwing herself at the world that makes one feel a little diminished. It’s very impressive stuff indeed. Her life so far has made me take a sidelong glance at mine and it pains me to admit that I come up a little lacking. It’s a strange feeling and I hope it passes quickly…

Here is someone who has definitely done more than just peer through a telescope. Hats off.