BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Sister Ruth has some very bad habits, says Aisling Franciosi 

The sisterhood on the set of The Black Narcissus clearly took no vow of silence when it came to discussing their costumes.

‘The habit? I hated it by the end of the shoot,’ said actress Aisling Franciosi, who appears with Gemma Arterton and Diana Rigg (in one of her last roles), in the mini-series based on Rumer Godden’s classic 1939 novel about nuns and repressed sexuality.

Sisters from an Anglican missionary order travel to a remote part of the Himalayas to establish a school and a medical outpost in a mountain-top palace known as The House of Women, because it was once home to a warlord’s harem.

Franciosi, who plays psychologically fragile Sister Ruth, said the running joke during filming in Nepal ‘was that we’d burn all the costumes by the end of the shoot’, though she stressed that the hated habits did in fact survive. ‘It was our little fantasy.’

The wimple and veil affected their hearing — ‘we were all saying: ‘Sorry, what? What?!’ at each other, much like today because of the masks’ — and stuck out so far ‘that you really had to turn your head if you wanted to properly look at someone or talk to them’.

But then maybe that was the point, she noted. 

‘This idea of the ‘custody of the eyes’ — you shouldn’t be averting your attention,’ the 27-year-old told me.

But looking where they oughtn’t is exactly what gets the nuns — and in particular Sister Ruth, who has lustful, unrequited feelings for Alessandro Nivola’s uncouth land manager Mr Dean — into trouble.

She becomes insanely jealous when she imagine that Arterton’s Sister Clodagh, the Sister Superior in charge of the mission, also has feelings for Dean, but it’s delusional. 

Sister Clodagh has her own reawakened memories of sexual desires from a long ago romance that went badly wrong — and which got her dispatched to the convent.

Sister Ruth ‘just wants to be seen’, Franciosi said. So when Mr. Dean gives her the tiniest crumbs of acknowledgement she sees them for something much more than they are. ‘She’s a tragic figure rather than just a crazy person,’ she insisted.

Franciosi will be familiar to many thanks to her seductive performance as Katie Benedetto, the teen babysitter unwittingly embroiled with Jamie Dornan’s killer in The Fall. 

She went on to deliver a knock-out performance as Clare, an Irish convict in Tasmania seeking to avenge her family in Jennifer Kent’s searing film The Nightingale. And she has been much in demand since.

When we spoke she was just completing her work in an untitled film for Netflix starring Sandra Bullock and Viola Davis, adapted from the Sally Wainwright drama Unforgiven.

Before her audition for Sister Ruth, she hadn’t seen the 1947 cinema version of Godden’s book by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell starring Deborah Kerr and featuring an iconic, unhinged portrait of Sister Ruth by Kathleen Byron. 

(Interestingly, Pressburger’s grandson, Kevin Macdonald, is one of the producers of the new three-part version that will be unveiled on BBC1 from December 27.)

She was nervous about watching the original, but when she did she found it ‘beautiful’. 

‘It’s a really good story, but we have a new take on it, for a new audience,’ she told me. She acknowledged that there will inevitably be comparisons, ‘but if it brings people to our series, then great’.

She’s impatient with those who whine about remakes. ‘There’s something about the permanence of film that leads people to being wary of them being remade,’ she said. ‘Whereas no one says: ‘Oh, you’ve done that Romeo and Juliet once; you can’t do it again.’

When the Pressburger-Powell film came out, Sister Ruth was condemned for being a malignant force, ‘crazed with sexual desire’, as Macdonald recounts in his biography of his grandfather.

Franciosi said that ‘for the longest time, and still now in certain areas, female sexuality has been seen as a threatening and dangerous thing. The explanation then was that her (Ruth’s) sexuality was driving her crazy. 

‘I think that suppressing sexuality is extremely harmful. It’s not just her desire for Mr Dean. It’s the isolation, even within the group; and her not receiving credit for things she believes she has achieved.’

The actress said it was very easy, when there are ‘problems between females’ to fall back on ‘some kind of ‘go-to’ explanation that they stem from jealousy’.

But she said she saw Ruth’s downfall through a more humane lens. And in fact the mini-series as a whole is much more sympathetic to the female characters than the movie.

Director Charlotte Bruus Christensen and writer Amanda Coe’s collaboration, plus Arterton’s strong involvement, give the 1930s-set story a few modern brushstrokes, while keeping it true to the time — and the social conventions of the region, as barbaric as they might seem.

Another welcome change is that the locals are no longer played by white actors in dark make-up. 

(Jean Simmons took the part of the nubile native girl Kanchi in the original.)

Franciosi describes herself as ‘Irish, but with Italian blood’. 

Her parents — Irish mum and Italian dad — lived in Italy before her birth. 

‘My mum has a lot of sisters in Dublin and she flew home and I was born slap-bang in the centre of Dublin.’

Initially, her interest in acting was sparked when she saw Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones. 

‘That made me want to be an archaeologist, because he got to go round and have these amazing adventures,’ she said. ‘Then my mum explained that wasn’t what real archaeologists did.’

She still liked what Ford did, though, and set her sights on acting instead; studying in Dublin and quickly finding work in London.

To start with she was cast as teenagers all the time, but The Nightingale changed that. And so, I predict, will Sister Ruth.

New life for the Phantom as the Opera will go on…

Killian Donnelly (pictured) will be ‘inside your mind again’ when The Phantom Of The Opera returns to Her Majesty’s Theatre in June, subject to Government restrictions.

The star actor played the title role in what impresario Cameron Mackintosh called ‘a completely new version’ of the opulent original, which was ‘tried out’ at the Curve in Leicester back in February. Previews are planned for June 5.

‘How you create theatre, even though it might look the same, is very different from what it was 34 years ago,’ Mackintosh told me yesterday. 

‘We’ve learned to do things in different ways.’

He said there were some ‘very spectacular sequences’ created by the late Maria Bjornson for the original Andrew Lloyd Webber Phantom that were never used, such as ‘a horse that she dreamt of’, which will now feature in the show. And there will be a brand new chandelier.

‘We’re still in the hands of the Government’s ever-changing rules and regulations,’ Mackintosh cautioned, ‘but the Phantom will be fully non-distanced. We’re doing all this, predicated on the fact that we are going to be playing to full capacity — otherwise we couldn’t possibly afford to do it.’

He added: ‘If we wait for clearance, we will wait for ever; and therefore we have to take the initiative.’

Donnelly will perform Music Of The Night on It Takes Two on BBC2 tonight.

LW Theatres have carried out extensive building work inside Her Majesty’s during the shutdown. There was underlying damage to the building’s proscenium, which had been concealed beneath Phantom’s fake stage. In addition, the production’s systems and automation were no longer fit for purpose.

Those who invested in Phantom back in 1986 have also been given closing notices. 

‘That was the end of that era,’ Mackintosh told me, when I questioned him about it. 

‘It’s starting afresh.’ Upon final payment it’s estimated that original investors will have received a whopping 1,260 per cent return on their money.

Tonight, Mackintosh’s other big show, the Les Miserables Concert, will hold a dress rehearsal at the Sondheim Theatre, with an invited audience, to test Covid protocols. 

The first official performance will be tomorrow.

‘It’s an extraordinary effort everybody has made to do this.’ Mackintosh said.