Women In Love

How do you know you're about to film a nude scene? Seven men want to hold your microphone!

Actress Olivia Grant reveals how she battled her nerves - and double-sided sticky tape - while filming a new TV version of D.H. Lawrence's Women In Love.

There's nothing like the phrase 'closed set' on a filming schedule to get an actor motivated.

I usually note it far in advance and immediately start planning an aggressive exercise regime.

Disrobing on-set is a breeze - so long as you can casually unveil a body entirely purged of the effects of occasionally abandoned self-control.

Unfortunately, the excellent on-set catering and the intensity of the filming have put paid to my hopes of a physical overhaul, and I'm almost relieved that in the wardrobe department we are grappling with a different dilemma entirely: should we use double-sided toupe tape or prosthetic glue to attach strings of pearls to my breasts in the heat and humidity of South Africa?

Despite us having plumped for tape, it keeps coming away. 'We could stick the pearls together so they form a kind of shield,' my dresser muses.

'But if you move around during the scene I don't think that's going to cut it.'


As subtle an art as acting is, it tends to involve a bit of moving around, and it's with some trepidation that I leave wardrobe - a silk negligee, a couple of layers of body make-up and some tenuously affixed pearls the only things between me and total immodesty.

I am in Cape Town to shoot a BBC4 adaptation of the D.H. Lawrence classic Women In Love.

The story charts the sexual awakening of sisters Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen, and their respective lovers, Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin, set amid the newly industrialised reality of the early 20th Century.

I play Hermione Roddice, Birkin's embittered and deluded former mistress, and this nude scene is a flashback in which Hermione taunts Birkin for his inability to make love to her. Rory Kinnear plays Birkin.

We're both clad in dressing gowns and Ugg boots and pile in to a car to travel to the set.

I should be reassured by the fact that it is a closed set but in my experience this just means it suddenly takes seven men to hold up a sound boom.

Fortunately, our second assistant director seems to have the crew on a pretty short leash.

I notice only one rather spurious 'dry-ice wafter' making himself more conspicuous by his zealous smoke diffusing.

There are test shots and a long spell of experimenting with the lighting before the dressing gowns come off and the director yells: 'Action!' I am revealed in all my finery, pearls firmly in place.

And there they stay, for it's an emotional rather than a physical encounter between two lovers.

All the actors have at least one bedroom scene in this two-part drama adapted for television by William Ivory.

Something to be expected perhaps when one thinks that the 1969 Ken Russell film version (which gave Glenda Jackson a best actress Oscar) is still mostly remembered for Oliver Reed (Crich) and Alan Bates (Birkin) wrestling nude in front of a roaring fire.

My character is based on a friend of Lawrence - the eccentric and sexually omnivorous Lady Ottoline Morrell.

A society hostess and patron of the arts, she was known for cutting a swath through the Bloomsbury Set.

She didn't mess around - bedding Bertrand Russell, Augustus John and Aldous Huxley's wife.

Given that there were only two weeks between being offered the part last March and beginning filming alongside Rosamund Pike and Rachael Stirling (who play Gudrun and Ursula respectively), I still had some serious homework to do on the plane to Cape Town.

As I scanned for the chapters in the book that correspond with Ivory's adaptation, I was particularly gripped by a scene in which Hermione bashes Birkin over the head with a paperweight.

This is not only the tragic climax of her obsession with a man who no longer loves her, but the first scene to be shot.

Lawrence provides ample detail, describing Hermione as being consumed with 'delirious ecstasy' and the vicious assault on her ex-lover as an almost climactic release.

Still, it was a little difficult to imagine this as I removed my sleeping neighbour's packet of Mini-Cheddars from my elbow during the flight.

Lady Ottoline wasn't too thrilled with her literary portrayal either: she demanded the return of an opal she had given Lawrence as a gift and then refused to speak to either him or his wife for a decade.

This scene is being shot at the home of an Italian count at False Bay - a surfing hotspot dotted with multi-coloured beach huts.

It presents a challenge for our set designer given that Hermione's pile is meant to be in Nottingham and based on Garsington, Lady Ottoline's Oxfordshire retreat.

Upon arrival, I head for hair and make-up. Once suitably trussed, I put on a fabulous green silk gown I last saw in Angels, the London costumiers.

Standing on the sand outside my trailer, I wonder whether Ottoline, a notably eccentric dresser, would have approved of all this artifice.

Seeing as she was notorious for arriving at parties in theatrical costumes and swimming in high-heels at Garsington, I can't see why not.

A few surfers wander past, gazing quizzically at the strange figure I cut in my backless gown and a blue hairnet that is protecting my curls.

Routinely ridiculed by her peers, Lady Ottoline would have been no stranger to this kind of reaction.

Leonard Woolf described her cruelly as a sham beneath 'beautiful scarves' while Siegfried Sassoon routinely refused to sleep with her, deeply embarrassed by her insistence on wearing pink silk trousers.

The scene is intense and ferocious, and I manage to get through two of the prop department's paperweights in my enthusiastic bashing of Rory.

But my favourite scene turns out to be the re-creation of a Garsington garden party in Stellenbosch, one of the Cape's lush wine districts.

Stellenbosch looks like the English countryside on acid and the set dressers work minor miracles painstakingly weaving silk flowers into the African foliage.

The gardens are filled with linen deckchairs and I feel that we are as close as we can be to recreating a fragment of the past.

Admittedly I was contemplating this from one of the catering van's red plastic chairs while sipping tea from a polystyrene cup, but I had never felt so at home in Hermione's heels and tulle.

After two months it's a wrap and I reluctantly pack up my flat overlooking Table Mountain.

Back in London, I accept a piece of classical theatre and soon find myself exchanging the sexual liberation of Lawrence's Nottingham for the new constraints of corsets and crinolines in Philip Massinger's The Picture.

Less welcome is the move from South Africa's balmy autumn to England's rainy spring and more time spent in theatrical digs.

As Alec Guinness so correctly observed: 'Acting is happy agony.'

Women In Love will be shown next month on BBC4