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Marianne Faithfull plays sex worker in new film at Berlin festival
2007-02-13
After playing Marie Antoinette's mother, British singer Marianne Faithfull puts in a star turn as a sex worker in her new film "Irina Palm", which debuted at the Berlin Film Festival. "I get offered a lot of rubbish, but I have not come this far to blow it now on nonsense," the 60-year-old Faithfull, who recently beat breast cancer, said after a standing ovation. She plays Maggie, a prim and proper English widow who starts working in a Soho sex club to pay for treatment for her sick grandson. Against all odds, she has talent for the job. Faithfull said her character keeps her integrity but grows tougher because she is doing something she is good at and finds some respect among the squalor. This helps her to deal with the disapproval of her middle class family and friends. "She is innocent, she is not a hooker. But she becomes stronger because she is finally able to love somebody as a woman," Faithfull said of the unlikely romance that develops in the film. Her love interest is played by Serbian actor Miki Manojlovic, who regularly appears in Emir Kusturica's films. Belgian director Sam Garbarski said he originally planned to set the film, his second, in a red-light district in Brussels but when his producer found the money to make it in England, he had the script completely rewritten to fit the new setting. The result is reminiscent of Ken Loach's films and is unexpectedly funny. "I made a politically incorrect, romantic tragic comedy," Garbarski said. "Once we set it in England, it could never again be anything else than an English film," he said. Faithfull last year starred as Habsburg empress Maria Theresa in Sofia Coppola's period drama "Marie Antoinette." She last appeared at the Berlin Film Festival in a supporting part in Patrice Chereau's "Intimacy" which won the festival's prize for best film in 2001. Faithfull said she often felt like an intruder among her fellow actors. "If I was not discovered (as a singer) at 17, I would have gone to acting school and trained as an actress. I often feel like my co-stars are actors and I am just pretending to be an actress," she said. "Of course this is not true. I have done good work, but very little and with long spaces in between. I do have another job," she said of her singing career, which took off in the 1960s with the hit "As Tears Go By". Faithfull, who was Mick Jagger's girlfriend in that period, said she was not scared of age. "I have a friend in Paris who is in her eighties and still has love affairs. Isn't that wonderful?" "Irina Palm" is one of 22 films competing for the Berlinale's top prize which will be awarded on Saturday, the penultimate day of the festival.
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