Linda Bassett is particularly good at playing women expected to cope. We value the strain beneath her matter-of-fact manner: she makes their competence believable without pretending that looking after everyone else comes easily.
Fi1m perspective
In the family arguments in East Is East (1999), Linda Bassett’s Ella Khan has affection to spare, but not an endless supply of patience. Holding these people together takes work, and Bassett makes that work visible without turning Ella into a saint. We were moved by the strain in her performance, because her love for the family never conceals how much they ask of her. Alongside Om Puri, she gives Damien O’Donnell’s comedy a believable family even when the humour becomes too broad.
It was her breakthrough, in a part she had already played on stage, rather than her first substantial screen appearance. She had drawn notice as Gertrude Stein in Waiting for the Moon (1987). The work that followed included Nelly Boxall in The Hours (2002) and Cora in Calendar Girls (2003); in 2015, she began her long-running role as Nurse Phyllis Crane in Call the Midwife. Those ensemble films and sustained television work suit an actor whose understated style lets a character belong among other people.
There is more to her work, though, than the casting shorthand of a resilient, matter-of-fact woman. Her long association with playwright Caryl Churchill makes sense beside that performance in East Is East. The clarity and restraint she brings to Churchill’s compressed writing also serve Ella, whose patience Bassett never asks us to mistake for agreement. The limitation lies in how readily that skill can become a casting habit. Being perceived as a working-class actor has meant fewer classical roles than she had hoped.
Nor can her precision put right everything around her. East Is East is lively and funny, but its uneven handling of domestic violence matters, especially when Bassett and Puri seem able to follow the arguments further than the comedy allows. Ella’s visible strain makes the changes of tone harder to shrug off, which is a virtue in the acting and a problem for the film. Start there for Bassett, provided the evening does not require a reassuring family comedy.
Biography
Linda Bassett is an English actress born on 4 February 1950 in Pluckley, Kent. She was raised in Pimlico, London, and developed an interest in acting through visits to the Old Vic Theatre. After leaving school she worked there as an usherette before studying English at the University of Leeds, which she left after one year. She then joined a community drama group and regards this period as her theatrical training, having received no formal education in acting.
Bassett made her London stage debut in 1982 and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991. She first gained wider recognition for her role as Ella Khan in the 1999 film East Is East, for which she received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Other notable screen credits include The Hours (2002), Calendar Girls (2003), Kinky Boots (2005), The Reader (2008) and the recurring role of Nurse Phyllis Crane in the television series Call the Midwife (2015–present).
