Interview: Miranda Otto
By James Mottram

In The Two Towers she plays Eowyn Sheildmaiden of Rohan -- a foxy fighting machine. But James Mottram Australian actress Miranda Otto a vision of serenity.

For an actress on the verge of major stardom, Miranda Otto appears remarkably placid. Sitting in the shade on the terrace of the Excelsior Hotel during the Venice Film Festival, her biggest concern seems to be avoiding the harsh glare of the midday sun. "Forgive my sunglasses but I find the light off the table quiet bright," she says apologetically.

With fair skin and strawberry-blonde shoulder-length hair, her reluctance to expose herself to the elements is understandable. After all, she is about to become the focus of a far fiercer glare -- that of the media spotlight. Set to become as big as fellow Aussie stars Cate Blanchett and Rachel Griffiths, the 34-year-old Otto can be seen next month in part two of Peter Jackson's epic Lord of the Rings adaptation, The Two Towers.

Joining the all-star cast that includes, Blanchett, Elijah Wood and Sir Ian McKellen, she plays Eowyn, Sheildmaiden of Rohan. "I guess she's sometimes described as a female warrior," say Otto. "She 's certainly an excellent swordswoman and horsewoman, and want to go to war and fight. She has been brought up as if a man, without any women around her."

Today, dressed in a revealing summer dress, it's hard to imagine the very feminine Otto covered in mud and fighting Orcs. Yet as one of the few female character of importance in Tolkien's fantasy saga, her role grows with increasing significance as it spans both The Two Towers and the final chapter, The Return of the King, released next year.

She has already seen the careers of co-stars such as Orlando Bloom and Viggo Mortensen gather momentum, and you might think she would be bracing herself to expect the same treatment. Think again. "Generally, with films, what tends to happen is that a few people get a lot of momentum out of it and a lot of people don't" she says. "Who is to say whether I will be one of those people? You just can't tell."

After the experience of filming in New Zealand, where all three part were shot back-to-back in 14 months, Otto is full of admiration for director Peter Jackson. "I defy anyone to do that again: three film at one on celluloid. It really is impossible but he did it. He's incredible, really stoic and just determined. He has the ability to see the big picture and yet deal with the moment that he's in. There's so much going on and there are so many decision about so many different things, but he is able to focus on what he is doing."

Born in Brisbane, Otto -- who was named after the character in Shakespeare's play The Tempest -- grew up surrounded by showbiz. Her mother, Lindsay, was an actress until she gave birth to her daughter, turning her hand instead to fashion design. Her father is the stage and screen actor Barry Otto, best known as the father of Doug Hastings in Strictly Ballroom.

"My parents were the reason I was exposed to the business," Otto confirms. "My dad wasn't one of those parents that said, 'Don't get into it.' He loves it. He was very keen on the idea. Graduating from the prestigious NIDA, Otto would eventually get to star with her father in the 1998 homegrown feature Dead Letter Office.

By this point, Otto was about to join her first star line-up, this time for Terrence Malick's elegiac war film The Thin Red Line, in which she played the luminous wife of soldier Ben Chaplin, seen in a series of sunlit, silent flashbacks. Sine then, she has worked with the likes of Harrison Ford (in hit What Lies Beneath) and Tim Robbins in the as-yet-unreleased comedy Human Nature, written by the creator of Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman.

Aware that she has a habit of choosing off-the-wall scripts, Otto is not making any apologies for her left-field tastes. "It's just what I'm attracted to and the things I end up tending to get are the more quirky ones," she says. "I tend to do better at them. I'm not very good at the more obvious stuff. I like things that are complex and strange. I like humour that is sideways. I'm not interested in what everybody's done before. I don't really like the girlfriend/wife roles. They're so dull. I'm not very good at just being lovely. It doesn't interest me."

By way of illustration, she recently finished the London-set thriller Doctor Sleep, opposite ER's Goran Visnjic, and also can be seen as a grief-stricken mother attempting to save her cancer-riddled son in the melodrama Julie Walk Home. Partly filmed in Poland, it required Otto film a naked love scene with co-star Lothaire Bluteau on only the second day of filming. "I was freaked that we were doing it so soon because we didn't even know each other," she recalls, curling up with embarrassment. "It was meant to be a closed-set, but there were people hanging outside the window. When we started, the director started shouting 'Pull his pants down!' and I'm thinking 'My God! I've only been here two days and already I'm making some porno film in Poland!'"

As for her real-life couplings, she dated Moulin Rouge star Richard Roxburg for a time after the pair worked together on the antipodean comedy-drama Doing Time For Patsy Cline. For the moment, though, Otto has yet to find the right man.

Having spent the last two years making eight back-to-back films and TV dramas, she is planning a well-earned break. "It's been constant. I thought, 'It's got to stop now.'"

Trouble is, Miranda, it's only just begun.

source: http://maidenfair.net/miranda/uksunday.html