Emily Watson - IVTR

Interview, Jan, 1999 by Emily Watson

Two things were very helpful to me. You'd written in your book that when Jackie played, she slipped into very deep concentration. And I remember Piers saying that when he was very young he sat in the front row of a concert Jackie was playing and stuck his tongue out at her, but she just smiled and carried on. Bill Pleeth [Jackie's teacher at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London] told me the key to understanding where she was going when she was playing was the look in her eye. Obviously, I couldn't approach her musicianship from a technical point of view, but I tried to get the spirit of it. To me, acting is very imagination-based - it's full of pictures - and the type of music Jackie played was very romantic and very felt, you know? And for an actor that's easy to relate to.

HDP: What intrigued you about Jackie's personality?

EW: One of the things that fascinated me was that in the very early stages of her story, before any of the complications began, Jackie seemed like an ordinary, simple girl, not very good at talking about emotions - although she was always able to communicate with you, wasn't she?

HDP: Yes, and by the end it was telepathic. We knew what the other was thinking all the time. After she died, it was terribly difficult to be without that. When she was young, her only method, really, of communication with people was through the cello and that was exactly what saved her for so long. She knew how to play with people's emotions and would sometimes do that through her playing, although not consciously. It wasn't until she got MS that she got better with words.

EW: Did it ever alarm you as a child that she was suddenly capable of Haying something like the Elgar concerto, which is such a mature expression of melancholy?

HDP: No, I took it completely for granted because she had always had that gift. And she hardly ever practiced - it bored her stiff. I remember she did an interview after MS was diagnosed, and the interviewer - presumptuous little man! - said, "This can't be too bad for you, Miss du Pre, because you've achieved so much." And Jackie said, "I've achieved nothing at all because I've never had to work." That was how she related to the music - she could always just do it. It made life difficult for her because she was literally carrying this great thing around with her all the time and it set her apart from children of her own age. They didn't know how to react to her and she was ostracized. It was the best thing in the world for her when she left school because she didn't have to be with children anymore. Emotionally, she had a very old head on her young shoulders.

EW: Do you think the cello ever became a prison for her?

HDP: The cello was her liberation. Jackie's prison was that she couldn't be understood by other people, and her genius, or whatever you want to call it, was a huge burden for her, although I don't think she ever identified it as such.

EW: Were you similarly gifted in that you didn't have to work hard at the violin?