By Brendan Cole NY Daily News, Wednesday, August 27, 1997 - Copyright 1997

The career of actor Melanie Lynskey has taken a fairytale turn.

The 20-year-old New Plymouth woman will star alongside Hollywood luminary Drew Barrymore - who plays the title role in the 20th Century Fox film Cinderella.

It has been three years since Lynskey starred in Peter Jackson's award-winning film Heavenly Creatures in which she played Pauline Parker, a wallflower whose obsessive friendship with Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet) led the pair to bludgeon Parker's mother to death.

Lynskey then travelled to Los Angeles last year to audition for further film roles but was unsuccessful.

However, on her return visit in June, before she began her part in a forthcoming film called Foreign Correspondents, she tried for the part of Jacqueline de Ghent - Cinderella's ugly sister.

"The audition was great, they were very enthusiastic - usually an audition is terrifying because you only have a few minutes to put everything into it. You really feel the pressure, but this was just really fun," she said.

And it was her agent who told her the good news.

"I was just amazed. Whenever I am waiting to hear from someone, I am used to my agent saying 'they loved you but the other person was more famous, or something like that. My agent has always been honest.

"But halfway through the conversation she said: 'Oh that's right, you got the part', I was like 'are you sure?'."

Lynskey said learning how to overcome audition nerves was one of the reasons behind her success and she attributed part of her new- found confidence to advice from top New Zealand director Gaylene Preston.

"In Hollywood auditions, no matter what sort of character you play, they like you to be totally confident as if the part is yours. This time I really got the confidence to go in there and feel good about myself."

After narrowly missing out on a part in the film The Crucible, Lynskey returned to New Zealand last year to ponder her future and deal with constant questioning about what and when her next film would be. While Lynskey toiled away in audition after audition, Heavenly Creatures co-star Kate Winslet experienced a meteoric rise to fame.

"People are eager to draw comparisons between us, but we are two completely different actresses who will always be doing different things. She does wonderful work. People in the industry understand how hard it is to get work, but a lot of people expected that if you do one movie, then you just do more. I felt that a lot of people thought there was something wrong with me."

Lynskey will not reveal too much about Cinderella, except that it is a "different" version of the age-old fairytale. Today she flies to London for costume fitting and then will spend time with her co-star Drew Barrymore before rehearsals start on Monday.

And from being a Victoria University student used to living in draughty flats, she is looking forward to working on a set in the sunny south of France with some of Hollywood's greatest stars.

"My agents are so excited about the future and I'm a bit scared to walk towards it because I have not worked in four years. It has not sunk in yet."

Peter Jackson (PJ) and Fran Walsh (FW) on the discovery of Melanie Lynskey:

(...)

Q: I know you found Kate Winslet at an audition in England. How did you come across Melanie Lynskey, who played Pauline? I understand she was not a professional actress.

PJ: Well, it's one of those stories that sounds like it's not true. We wanted to cast someone in New Zealand, and we'd auditioned a lot of people, five or six hundred, who were either videotaped or photographed. I wanted to find someone who was young, around 15 or 16 years old; I didn't want a 23-year-old in a school uniform. And we wanted someone who was physically very much like the original Pauline; I have a thing about being as accurate as possible. So we quickly exhausted the professional actors in New Zealand who happened to look like Pauline, there's only about one or two. [laughs] We knew we were looking for someone with no experience, but we just had to find them. We kept saying, "Somewhere in New Zealand there's somebody who's perfect for this role." We were actually about four weeks away from beginning shooting, and we had one or two people on the short list, neither of whom we were happy with, but we were coming under enormous pressure to cast one of them, because, you know, the wardrobe department needed to make costumes, and so on, and Fran said to me, "You're not really happy with the choices, are you?" And I said, "No." And she said, "This is crazy; we've spent all this time and energy on this film and we haven't found Pauline. This is something close to a major tragedy." I was in Christchurch, so Fran decided to drive with a casting person around the lower half of the North Island of New Zealand; she was prepared to drive as far as she had to. They'd visit every small town, go to the local school, visit the principal's office and show a photo of Pauline Parker. She'd say, "We're making a movie about Pauline Parker; do you have any pupils in your school who resemble her who might be interested in this?"

FW: We were in a rusting Ford Cortina, and we had no official I.D. We'd roll up to these provincial schools, and we'd be greeted by some curious teacher. Although no one ever once questioned our authenticity, we would always get asked about the car: "If you're in films, why aren't you driving a Porsche?" [both laugh] So then I would pitch the story to the entire classroom, scanning the room the whole time, looking for sullen, brooding school girls, all the while thinking, "What would she look like with her hair dyed black?"

PJ: I guess that went on for about a week. Every night I'd get a call from Fran. Anyone that was vaguely appropriate was videotaped, and I got a couple of tapes in Christchurch, and it was a bit depressing. Finally, Fran called from a small town called New Plymouth, and said, "I think I've found someone very interesting. ' And this was Mel. We flew her down to Christchurch and gave her an audition and a screen test, and we cast her two weeks before the film started shooting. I called her mother up on a Friday night and said, "I'd really like Melanie to do the film." And she said, "When does she have to start?" And I said, "Well, she's got to come down here on Sunday." The poor girl didn't even get a chance to go back to school to clean out her locker.

Q: Do you think there was any correspondence between the two actresses and their backgrounds and those of the characters they were playing?

PJ: One of the things that we knew about Pauline was that she was incredibly witty and intelligent, and Melanie was very similar; she was the top student in her province in many subjects. And we knew if we cast an intelligent person, then they were going to hit it. Melanie's also very enigmatic. The character of Pauline doesn't have an enormous amount of dialogue. In a sense, the real Pauline Parker speaks for her, through the diaries. So what we were looking for was an actress who has that kind of aspect to her that's a real movie-star thing: where you can film somebody sitting in a room, doing nothing, and they're still fascinating to watch. We found that in Mel.