Anne-Louise Lambert's reputation rests on two performances, for Peter Weir and Peter Greenaway, and both depend on the same thing: a calm the camera cannot leave alone and the people around her cannot read. It is a narrow gift, and a real one.
Fi1m perspective
Miranda St. Clare walks a little ahead of the other girls, and Peter Weir's camera goes with her. Anne-Louise Lambert was nineteen or twenty when she made Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and what she does in it is barely acting in the usual sense. She does not raise her voice, she does not hurry, and she lets Russell Boyd's photography make her the centre of every shot she is in. Botticelli angel is the phrase that has followed the performance ever since, and it is fair. It is also the problem, and we will come to it.
She had come from television soaps, Number 96 (1973) and Class of '74 (1974), and she left Australia for Britain at twenty-one. There she played Lucrezia Borgia in the BBC's The Borgias (1981), and then Sarah Talmann for Peter Greenaway in The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), which is the other film people mean when they mention her. After that the work came intermittently, on stage and screen, with the part of Martha in Somersault (2004) among the later credits. Two performances is not much to build a reputation on, but plenty of actors have worked steadily for forty years and left less behind.
Greenaway's film is talk, most of it barbed, and Anthony Higgins's draughtsman does most of the talking. Lambert's Mrs Talmann says less and gives away less, and her restraint is what stops the film becoming a display of one man's cleverness. In a screenplay where a civil tone makes an insult worse, she is the most civil person in the house. We found ourselves listening harder whenever she was on screen, waiting for the sentence underneath the sentence, and the film rewards that. Both her directors compose a frame like a painting and need an actor who can hold still inside it without going dead. That is what she can do, and it is why the two Peters got more from her than anyone else has.
The reservation is the one we had about Weir's film. Everyone in it admires Miranda, the camera admires her most of all, and Lambert's calm gives that admiration nothing to push against. We wanted a flicker of irritation, some awkwardness, anything to suggest a girl rather than a picture of one. Whether that is her fault or Weir's is hard to say, since the part is written to be looked at, but the result is a performance that stays in the memory as an image rather than as a piece of acting. She has spoken of finding the association limiting, and one sees why. Once you have been cast as a mystery, it is difficult to be cast as anything else.
Watch the two films close together. Seen that way the Greenaway looks like a reply to the Weir: the same composure, this time with something plainly moving behind it. Lambert has said of Picnic at Hanging Rock, "It’s a secret, and there aren’t enough secrets in the world today." In both films, keeping the secret is the whole of what she does, and she does it better than almost anyone.
Biography
Anne-Louise Lambert, also credited as Anne Lambert, is an Australian actress. She was born on 21 August 1955 in Brisbane and later moved to Sydney.
She first gained recognition in Australian television soap operas, including Number 96 (1973) and Class of '74 (1974). Lambert is best known for her role as Miranda St Clare in Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), for which she received an Australian Film Institute Award nomination. She later appeared as Sarah Talmann in Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) and in other films and television productions such as The Borgias (1981) and Somersault (2004).
Lambert has also worked in theatre and, in later years, has practised as a psychotherapist. She has a son, Harry, born in 1989, and a younger sister, screenwriter Sarah Lambert.
