Film Fact: releasing two high-profile movies in the same year is an impressive feat for any actor. Appearing in two features in the same calendar month is even more audacious. But knocking out two heavy-hitting mainstream movies in the same week — that’s simply showing off. Meet Rebecca Hall, the 24-year-old screen ingénue and daughter of the theatre legend Sir Peter Hall and opera singer Maria Ewing.This week she stars as both the sardonic yet soft-hearted love interest in the 1980s romantic comedy Starter for Ten, and as the 19th-century wife in thrall to the charms of Christian Bale in the conjuring epic The Prestige.

The former film is produced by Tom Hanks. The latter is riddled with screen talent — besides Bale you get Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson and Hugh Jackman. Hall, though, is not about to faint with excitement any time soon.

“I am massively impressed by all of it,” she deadpans, referring to both the movies and the accompanying glitz-blitz of press and premieres. “But I guess I just have a different way of reacting to it because I was brought up in a family where there were lots of stars around. I’ve always had a down-to-earth and unfazed attitude to it all.”

In person Hall is rake-thin, coyly lanky and infectiously giddy. Yet on screen she somehow transforms this Olive Oyl demeanour into a steely elegance that gives her quipping character in Starter for Ten a poise that possibly wasn’t evident on the page, and similarly makes her period heroine more than a match for Bale’s histrionics in The Prestige. The melodramatic peak of that film includes her devastating plea for affection from Bale as her unfeeling husband. “Be honest with me!” she hisses at him, as the penny suddenly drops. “Do you love me?”

It was, says Hall, her very first scene on the film. She hadn’t met Bale before the action. “It’s like, the director Christopher Nolan says, ‘OK, we’re going to run at this one.’ And I’m like, ‘Hi, Christian, nice to see you, I’m Rebecca.’ And he’s like, ‘Hello, how are you?’ “It was pretty scary, but I think it might’ve been quite good for us.”

Given her impeccable theatrical pedigree — her father founded the Royal Shakespeare Company, after all – acting was practically noblesse oblige. She made her screen debut, aged 9, as a young girl bothered by a flasher in her father’s TV production of The Camomile Lawn (1992). She played the child of a murder victim in the TV drama Don’t Leave Me This Way (1993), but switched from screen to intensive theatre work during her time at Cambridge University. She abandoned her degree before her final year, much to the chagrin of her Cambridge-graduate father. “I spent two years doing a lot of drama and not a lot of academia,” she says. “By the last year I decided there was no point in trying to bluff it.”

Hall found the task of securing theatrical work as an untrained college dropout virtually impossible, and one certainly complicated by her family name. “People really can be harder on you because of who you are,” she says. “But there’s no point denying it, because you’ll be judged even more if you do.”

After three months of rejections, Hall reluctantly took a role as the uptight daughter Vivie in her father’s own West End production of Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession. “It was one of the most genuinely terrifying moments in my life,” she says, describing her fears of the inevitable charges of nepotism. “I knew that if I f***ed this up then that would be it. I would never work again. I knew too that when I walked out on stage there would be a bunch of critics getting ready to say: ‘She’s bloody awful’. So yes, it was terrifying.”

Thankfully, Hall was judged to be far from awful, and in fact scooped a prestigious Ian Charleson Award (given to young actors for superlative classical turns). And, despite her sudden movie successes, she continues to tread the boards in the likes of Don Juan and As You Like It.

She says that she struggles with the tension between the allure of Hollywood and the often substandard roles available to actresses there. “It’s hard to find challenging film roles for my age,” she says. “They’re usually the girlfriend who sticks around looking pretty. Whereas in theatre you’ve got lots of Shakespeare and Chekhov.”

She adds, of course, that if the right role materialised she’d fly to LA in a second, which is what happened when she read The Prestige. But for now, like the theatrical royalty she is, she has no intention of whoring herself around the Tinseltown community in the hope of snagging work. “Going over there and saying, ‘Hi everyone, I’m here!’ — it can be a little degrading, no?”

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