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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday April 2 2000 23.31 BST
One of the first things that ambitous Australian drama students would do well to learn is how to perfect a flawless English accent. Cate Blanchett, Hilary Griffiths and Toni Collette have all done it. Now Frances O'Connor has also made it big over here.
The Australian actress is about to pull off a double whammy in the costume drama stakes. She stars in the big screen revisionist adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park , while on television she plays the passionate title character in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary for BBC2.
Both adaptations take a sexy, modern approach to their texts. Mansfield Park is a brave triumph at pains to expose the unsavoury mores of Victorian society. The rebellious Fanny Price will be unfamiliar to Austen fans used to the novel's compliant heroine. Writer-director Patricia Rozema incorporated into the script dialogue and observations from Austen's letters to create a woman who suffers neither fools nor unworthy suitors. Lesbianism, adultery and drug dependency make appearances, occasionally bringing a sensibility more familiar to Brookside Close than the nineteenth century drawing room.
O'Connor provides a sharp tongue for the intellectual, self-assertive heroine. Canadian Rozema deliberately chose a non-English actress after 'casting about the entire globe'. 'She's so free, so natural,' the director explains. 'I think it comes from a culture that's actually on the youngish side. It's not an overripe culture. It's almost wide-eyed in a way.'
In Madame Bovary O'Connor's passions aren't unrequited. She is a repressed sybarite; a married woman who gets ruinously involved with Greg Wise's Rodolphe. For an actress who grew up watching BBC period adaptations, it's another step forward. She was raised in Perth but born here - in Oxford - where her father, a nuclear physicist, was completing his PhD. She first came to attention playing a lesbian student in the breakout indie film Love and Other Catastrophes . Then, in 1997, came back-to-back roles in Kiss and Kill and Thank God He Met Lizzie , which won her a double nomination at the Australian Film Awards.
Sometimes described ambiguously as 'professional' on set, she has apparently cultivated an attitude towards celebrity usually reserved for bigger names: running late for interviews and photo shoots and dodging awkward questions from interviewers. Of her talent there is no doubt though. If Oscar voters had not been been suffering corset fatigue this year O'Connor might have been anticipating the opening of a certain envelope in Los Angeles last week.
O'Connor has said: 'I love watching Hollywood movies - I just don't know if I'd be happy doing a Jurassic Park .' But perhaps her agent or bank manager has had a quiet word. In addition to making All About Adam , a romantic comedy, she is currently in Hollywood filming Bedazzled, a remake of the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore comedy, also starring Liz Hurley.
If she really wants to be a diva, Ms Hurley should be able to teach her a thing or two.
• Mansfield Park opened on Friday. Madame Bovary starts on 10 April on BBC2
