There is a story Jessica Chastain tells about a trip to Disneyland when she was 10 years old, and a stranger's act of kindness that made a lasting impact on her. As a child, she was an "ugly duckling", with red hair and freckles.
Her $100 clothing allowance had to last all year. It can be hard to credit – now she's on the cover of Vogue, walking the red carpet in Versace and Givenchy – but for the first half of her life, almost no one gave her a second glance.
She was with her family, waiting for Mickey and Minnie to pass by in the parade, when one of the dancers spotted her in the crowd. "I hated everything about the way I looked, and a stranger came up to me and said 'I love your hair'," Chastain says. "And her talking to me that way empowered me. The idea that I could go and help someone feel stronger and more powerful and maybe step forward in their lives is really exciting to me."
Chastain got her first big break in 2005 when Al Pacino cast her in the title role of Oscar Wilde's Salome. Each night, she stripped to perform the dance of the seven veils for 1400 people at the Wadsworth Theatre in Los Angeles. During the day, she reprised the role on a movie set, while a second film crew made a documentary about the process. Pacino played Herod and directed the enterprise in a kingly fury.
Casting agents noticed her performance, but the film, Wilde Salome, wasn't released until 2011, the year Chastain became "the unknown everyone's already sick of", as she puts it, when seven of her films came out in a few months. In May, she was in Cannes with her Tree of Life co-stars Sean Penn and Brad Pitt. By January she had been nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for The Help.
The glut was a coincidence of scheduling, the result of Pacino and Tree of Life director Terrence Malick's glacial creative tempo, but it worked in Chastain's favour by showing off her range as an actor, equally capable of playing a southern socialite, an Israeli spy, a bereaved mother and the frightened wife of a madman. From the Shakespearean verse of Corionalus to the police procedural of Texas Killing Fields, she could do it all.
"I look at her movies, the performances in her career, and it's as if those characters are being played by different women, such is her ability to shape shift," says Niki Caro, who directed her in new film The Zookeeper's Wife. "She's peerless. She has so much skill and so much depth."
Chastain plays the title character, Antonina Zabinski, who ran the Warsaw Zoo with her husband Jan. When the Nazis invaded Poland, the reich's chief zoologist Lutz Heck shipped prized animals to Berlin and had most of the rest killed.
The Zabinskis suggested turning the zoo into a pig farm to feed the troops, and under cover of collecting scraps, smuggled more than 300 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to safety.
The Sunday Herald
‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’ is screening at the Majestic Cineplex and Empire Arcade. It is a CEL release.
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