Samantha Morton

Lunch with a leading British actress in one of London’s finest restaurants would normally be a treat, but the thrill of meeting Samantha Morton at St John Bread and Wine in Spitalfields is tempered by the fact that: (a) she is, according to reports, a tetchy interviewee; (b) Mister Lonely, her new film and the reason for our meeting, is not particularly good; (c) I’m recovering from a vomiting bug and am concerned that pig’s spleen – St John specialises in offal – might not be a sensible way of returning to solids.

Issue (b) is a particular pain because it could otherwise provide a solution to (a). The standard approach to “difficult” interviewees is to witter inanely about a project at hand before venturing, gently, into more controversial areas, which in Morton’s case include her father’s marriage to her babysitter, her time spent in care and with a series of foster parents, and her tempestuous relationship with the tabloids.

Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, which recounts the story of a Michael Jackson impersonator who falls in love with a Marilyn Monroe double (played by Morton) and then follows her to a commune of impersonators in Scotland, offers no such opportunity for bland banter. The surreal art-house movie, which has a subplot involving a bunch of flying nuns, is beautifully filmed and forces you to think, but many of the questions it raises are drowned out – in the experience of this viewer – by irritation at its pretentiousness.

I spend my journey to East London, where Morton lives with her fiancé, Harry Holm, the director son of actor Sir Ian, and two daughters, aged eight and just six weeks old, fretting about how to broach the subject. Samantha, I thought you were the best thing in the film (true and often the case in Morton’s movies). Harmony Korine films are like Marmite: you either love them or hate them (definitely the case with Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy). In the end, as Morton takes a seat, professing exhaustion but looking 70 times better than I feel, I go for the decidedly timid: “I think I may have missed the point….”

Read atTimes Online