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Press | Need To Know, July 2002 Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose 'Teenagers are pretty merciless anyway. But living in a house full of corpses kind of makes you an extra big target.' So finds 24-year-old Lauren Ambrose the actress who plays the angsty 17-year-old Claire Fisher in the funeral-parlour drama Six Feet Under. 'I really feel for Claire,' laughs Ambrose. 'I mean I had a pretty averagely alienated time at high school, but she's an outsider at home and at school.' Which only makes life at LA undertakers Fisher & Sons all the more captivating for us. We're now almost half way through the first season of the show scripted by American Beauty writer Alan Ball, and as Claire, the fractious anti-Britney who wages a single-handed war against the cheesiness of American teenhood, Ambrose is a definite scene-stealer. To date we've seen her knick a corpse's foot from the mortuary and put it in her two-faced boyfriend's locker by way of a 'Screw you!' We've seen her doodling a skull on her exam paper, and answering the door to a pensioner, saying: 'I don't deal with the dead people, come back later.' After sucking her boyfriend's toes in the family's hearse, she even sang Peggy Lee's 'What a Little Moonlight Can Do' in a fantasy musical interlude. 'Alan wrote that specially for me,' she swoons. Ambrose brings a fairly quaint life experience to the part. Born in New Haven Connecticut, she is a stage-school graduate and a classically trained singer. But after appearances on US TV's early-90s bereaved children saga Party of Five and several warmly received independent movies including Swimming and Psycho Beach Party, Ambrose has finally moved to LA. When Ball asked to see her in his office after auditioning 300 hopefuls, she produced a secret from her hicktown past which swung things her way. 'In my audition I had to pretend I was high on crystal meth while hearing that my father had died crashing the family's new hearse,' says Ambrose. 'I've never done drugs, but I researched it a bit and focussed on making my jaw twitch and acting hyper. When Alan called me into his office he was sitting in a sort of shrine of American Beauty memorabilia. That made me nervous, but I had a sort of ace up my sleeve: my 93-year-old Grandma was quite a figure around New Haven. She got invited to all the funerals and wakes and I went, too. I think Alan liked that.' Six Feet Under regulars will be familiar with post-mortem phenomena, such as 'angel lust' (a male corpse erection) and 'casket climbers' (sniffling mourners who make a sudden dash to 'ride' the coffin). And what with the tantrum-prone corpse technician, Ambrose has found Fisher & Sons a challenging working environment. 'Every actor who dies in an episode has a body cast made for their corpse scenes. Our model makers are incredible and these corpses are life-like to the last hair. That can be pretty weird - confronting your own corpse. I've seen actors looking at themselves on the slab and it's definitely a coffee-and-cigarette moment.' Despite two Golden Globes and impressive ratings for a cable show, you can't see Ambrose being swept away by Hollywood's undertow of venality. 'I'm not very Hollywood,' she laughs. 'I'm getting good money now, but I thought really carefully before buying myself a rug! I got married in September and I'm very happy. My husband bought me a record player, so while we're not filming, I'm lazing in the sun listening to a lot of Super Furry Animals and Billy Bragg.' The party invites might go in the bin, but Ambrose is taking career-navigation advice from some Hollywood heavies. Actress Kathy Bates, for instance, has directed two episodes of Six Feet Under and Ambrose has been listening carefully. 'Hollywood's not exactly full of female role-models over 35. Kathy's one of them. And Sissy Spacek and Meryl Streep. They do great work and then head straight back to reality. Sissy won't even live in LA- she flies into work and goes home. No Hollywood indulgence. But after a 16-hour-day surrounded by bodies, I'm not exactly a party-girl either.' |