Neve Campbell has transformed herself from Scream queen to dancing queen. As the hapless Sidney Prescott, a veteran of three Scream movies, she has witnessed so much bloody mutilation and slaughter, it’s a wonder she manages to speak and walk at the same time. But the fact that she’s gliding, leaping and standing on tiptoes in her latest film, The Company, proves much about Campbell. At 30, she has beaten the curse of typecasting and become a Hollywood survivor.
With The Company, she almost single-handedly inspired the script and the casting, to the point where the accomplished director Robert Altman, now 79, decided to take on the project. He had been subjected to four years of plain talking and browbeating from Campbell. The subject matter is her first love: ballet. It’s a minority interest among the movers and shakers in the Hollywood Hills, of course, who would sooner tread on toes than point them, so this has been a slug-slow process. But the fact that Campbell stars as dancer Ry, alongside Malcolm McDowell as the dictatorial artistic leader of the real-life Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, creates one of the more surprising films of the spring. Its semi-documentary style, with fiction running alongside fact, delivers a revealing portrait of the world of ballet. It features top-class artists who are, for the most part, poorly paid and live hand to mouth, often in unglamorous conditions.
Even Altman, who knows a thing or two about suffering for art in a film career that stretches back more than half a century, was shocked. “They take immaculate care of their bodies, while smoking countless cigarettes, downing endless cups of coffee and working punishing hours,” he says. “Their daily reality includes muscle injuries, bloody feet and bludgeoned ambitions — all of it amid the demanding beauty of the work itself. Had it not been for Neve Campbell, it’s a subject I would never have gone near.”
For Campbell, it really is personal. She would have gladly become a ballet star herself — she was dancing at six and at Canada’s National Ballet School at nine, on a full-time scholarship — had not the bitter combination of injury and breakdown brought her to an impasse. Instead of enjoying a career, she returned to live with her father in Toronto (her parents parted shortly after her birth), to nurse her physical and mental wounds.
“I just could not cope with the expectations and pressures,” she says now. “I was too insecure and had problems with my parents’ divorce that I could not really recognise at the time. Then there were the injuries, the nonstop demands and the realisation that, come what may, my career would have been over at 35. In some ways, it can be a joyous existence, doing what you want. In other ways, it can be hell. I wanted to get all that across in a movie.”
It does not take long in Campbell’s company to realise she is a woman of substance. She is dark-haired, hazel-eyed and pretty, but no more so than half-a-dozen other women in the lobby of the five-star hotel in Beverly Hills where we meet, where beauty is paraded on an almost hourly basis. She turns a few heads because she wears relaxed woollens rather than designer clothes (“My wardrobe is full of rags”). She also goes around in comfortable shoes, because she tore her feet apart during her teenage dancing years and suffers from arthritis in her toes. Disregard her, though, at your peril.
As we sip nothing stronger than earl grey tea, there emerges an ambitious streak at the heart of what appears to be her marshmallow softness. It has propelled Campbell to millionaire status in her second-choice career of acting. “With each film, I have always hoped that it would lead to something else,” she says. “I have always been pushing. Nobody can ever sit back and think they have it made. I remember losing out a few years ago on a film I really wanted. It was down to two of us in the end. But it went to Heather Graham instead. I accept such things happen on the turn of a coin.”
The fact that Campbell is willing to talk calmly about such disappointment is typical. Canadian-born, she is convinced her Scottish family background is at the root of her pragmatic approach to work and life. Her father, Gerry, who now teaches drama at a high school near Toronto, moved with his parents to a small town in Ontario when he was 11. He married a Canadian, but kept the faith.
“As a child, I performed in a Scottish troupe, since he ran the local amateur acting group,” says Campbell. “Dad also read at Burns Night and made sure we were suitably dressed. I still have the tartan, with scarf and brooch, that I used to wear. There was a big Scottish community around us, which I think gives me a down-to-earth approach to life, with a sense of humour.” There’s not much demand for that in Hollywood, where qualities such as irony and modesty come well down the pecking order. “There is a style of talking up achievements that I don’t really share,” she says. “But I am a hard worker, and I think I’ve made some good choices. I have also, undoubtedly, had luck on my side.”
Luck was involved when Altman gave her the go-ahead: “He was all set to make a film with Paul Newman, then someone from the studio insisted the female lead went to J.Lo,” she says. “He’s not a man to be pushed around, so he rejected the idea and told me, ‘I am going to do your film instead.’ Someone’s stupidity was my salvation.” So began the final throw of the dice for Campbell and The Company. Her original idea, drafted when she was 23, had no takers. She had teamed up with Killer Films, which had delivered another unlikely hit, Boys Don’t Cry, and then with the writer Barbara Turner, who had written Pollock, which won a best supporting actress Oscar for Marcia Gay Harden. “I was in good company,” she observes.
The link with Altman raised $14m in private financial backing, mostly from Britain and Germany. The Joffrey company was willing to open its doors and let in the fictional characters, who included James Franco, playing Campbell’s chef boyfriend. “They had nothing to fear,” she says. “We were going to show the work in a truthful light, which is not always flattering. But they are a secure group of people, who welcomed the challenge.” There was also a huge challenge for Campbell, who had not trained properly in years. She had also dislocated her knee when snowboarding and was still in recovery. “I just blotted out all pain and threw myself into it,” she says. “After trying for so long to get this set up, there was no turning back.”
The story is broadly based on both the joy and desperation of the dance. The insecurities, the sacrifices, the injuries and the sheer sweat and toil of professional ballet are all here, layered with a love story for Campbell’s character and the almost demonic demands of her boss, McDowell. “It is sweaty and messy and desperate, just like it should be,” she says. “Getting to the top in any business is never easy.”
Campbell has had no easy ride. After her teenage breakdown, she had to stop and take stock. “Not a simple thing to do when you are riddled with teen insecurities,” she says. She transferred to a local high school and relaxed a little before having another stab at entertainment. She appeared as a Degas girl in the Toronto production of The Phantom of the Opera. There was some modelling, a handful of com-mercials and a few roles in made-for-television Canadian movies. She had a steady — if unspectacular — career, with marriage, at 21, to a struggling actor, Jeff Colt. Then, as if spurred on by thoughts of what might have been had she stayed with ballet, she moved to Los Angeles.
“I was advised to arrive, look for an agent and sit it out,” she recalls. “But what happens? Los Angeles is hit by a big earthquake in January 1994, and I am expected a couple of weeks later. No producer would even let me through the door, because their offices were falling down. I thought, ‘What have I done?’” Within weeks, she was cast in the television series Party of Five, playing the cool Julia Salinger. It was regular money and she would never have to offer herself for waitressing work between jobs. “It got me started and I haven’t really stopped,” she reports. “There was, though, a price to pay.” That was the end of her marriage. “We had been together for six-and-a-half years and married for two-and-a-half,” she says. “He was struggling for work after arriving in LA. I was working all the time after the first few weeks. So we both lost something along the way. It was another of life’s lessons.”
Campbell seems to have been a sound pupil. She is now with another unknown actor, Billy Burke, 37, but is not set to rush into marriage. She has also been able to mix and match her film career thanks to the phenomenal success of Scream (the three movies have grossed nearly $1 billion), in light comedies such as Three to Tango, as well as Drowning Mona with Jamie Lee Curtis, and Panic, opposite veterans Donald Sutherland and William H Macy. All this was built on a telling film debut at 21, as a high-school girl engaged in witchcraft in the ensemble cast of The Craft. “I had just done The Craft when I was offered Scream,” she says. “It went on to change my life.” There was another life-changing moment when she accepted the role of a drug-addicted bisexual in the 1998 film Wild Things. Her sex scene with Denise Richards was recently voted one of the top 10 sexiest movie memories in a British television poll. “Truth is, we drank loads of red wine beforehand to prepare ourselves. I thought, ‘If I can get away with this, I can get away with anything.’”
She considers her 30th to be a welcome watershed. “I am proud to be 30 in a place obsessed with age,” she says. “I was talking to a rock star the other day and he was distraught to be 32. It is pathetic. This can be a very uninspiring place, in the way everyone is obsessed with weight and face-lifts and scripts. I sometimes wonder how long I can last here.” For the sake of some much-needed sanity in Hollywood, a long time, one hopes.
The Company is released on May 7
