The life of the child actor is one begun under heavy pressure. The threat of corruption is intense, the risk of exploitation high. Any subsequent slide into depression, addiction and debauchery will be well-documented.
That didn’t happen with Jenny Agutter. Now 62, the knicker-waver from The Railway Children sailed through the experience without incident, then grew into an actor so normal it is sometimes a struggle to remember she is a star at all. Unlike her younger peers, frightened into blandly toeing the line, Agutter is open and unstuffy, frank in a way that leaves little scope for misinterpretation; composed but absolutely uncondescending.
We are due to meet at a bar on the South Bank in London on a hot Friday afternoon. She is half an hour late, but it is impossible to be cross on account of her deep embarrassment (I feel guilty even mentioning it) and vaguely mum-ish struggles with her phone. She asks how drunk I am (I’m on water), seems to teeter on the edge of suggesting cocktails, then opts for coffee, protesting low tolerance for daytime drinking. My hopes for an “In the gutter with Agutter” headline are dashed.
Underage fame was fine, she says. “One moment you’d be everyone’s favourite and another moment no one would know who you were,” she says. “I realised that it was very transitory and very ephemeral. A lot of children in films get treated like the whole weight of the work lies on their shoulders. It doesn’t.”
Today, she’s promoting Tin. In this instance, in fact, the work does rest solely on her shoulders. She is the only person you will have heard of in this micro-budget Victorian Cornish mining drama – basically a stage production transferred to the big screen through the magic of digitally inserted backgrounds.
“It was extraordinarily difficult to make,” she says. “Just because of the peculiarity that you were never in your environment. There were very few scenes that were played out where they were.”
The total spend on Tin totted up to £100,000; her dressing room was a donated caravan. The previous movie on her CV is Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Marvel’s $170m (£114m) blockbuster. The disparity tickles her.
“One of the things about acting that I love is that if you end up doing really low-budget stuff where you have no money, you appreciate how funny it is to have that much of a budget. For me, it just delights me going from one extreme to the other. It’s like being allowed to have fish and chips one night and caviar the next. Fish and chips is really good but so is caviar.”
Agutter’s happy palate has resulted in a career as varied as they come. Her role in Nicolas Roeg’s cult drama Walkabout (1971) upped her credibility levels at a crucial early stage; its nude scene turned her into an enduring pin-up. “There’s an odd thing in one’s own life about being remembered by a certain group of people in a certain period of time and knowing one’s not belonging to that any longer and yet feeling exactly the same,” she says. “I don’t feel any different but I know I’m not that young woman that they might have been fantasising about.”
The endless glamorous photo shoots were uncomfortable, she says. But today it would have been worse. “It was not a world when people had the internet and people were stopping and starting films and taking screengrabs and putting them on something like skin flicks, or whatever it is. It is more difficult because everything is so public now.”
I alert her to WikiFeet, a site that collates pictures of famous feet – hers are awarded an impressive four-star rating. Her face widens with shock. “I’ve not come across that. That’s so surprising because I have ballet dancer’s feet which are really bad. I must look at that.” Not all public attention is welcome, she reiterates. Once, someone rushed towards her in recognition – “Oh! You’re Mary Whitehouse!” Agutter shudders. “I immediately went to the lavatory and had a look at myself. How old do I look?”
Many of her most famous films – Logan’s Run, An American Werewolf in London – are now being dusted off and rebooted for a new audience, about which she is typically circumspect.
“Things move on and one’s no longer a part of it so you no longer think of it that way. It becomes a different package; it’s never going to take away from it. If you’ve done something and you’re happy about it, then someone else doing it is just going to present it to a different audience. Sometimes things creak when you go back and look at it and you think: ‘Thank God it got remade.’”
An unsnooty approach to the small screen has meant Agutter worked consistently through her 50s and beyond, in dramas such as Spooks and Call the Midwife. The experience has left her optimistic about the prospects for older women in film and TV – in part, she thinks, through organic commercial pressure. “There are many more women in the production of film, television and theatre. There are many more women visible in political, artistic and other roles later on in life and I think that the media industry has come to realise that their audience is not only 14-25-year-olds. Women play a big part.”
Next up is another small part in another huge movie: Werner Herzog’s Gertrude Bell biopic starring Nicole Kidman. The director was idiosyncratic but amazing, she reports. Kidman, meanwhile, is a “really great Australian, down-to-earth lass”.
We drink up and walk to the tube together. She chats away happily about road rage (“Driving in London you can’t help but be aggressive”) and offers dating advice (“No more doctors”). As we part ways, I’m dismayed to be leaving Jenny Agutter at a train station without a pair of red undies to send her off. I imagine she was relieved.
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