Articles/Interviews

WHEN Amanda Donohoe consented to roll naked with the rumbustious Oliver Reed, she turned herself into a star virtually overnight.

But Amanda wasn't rolling about on the casting couch - she was making love scenes for the film Castaway which will soon be hitting the big screen.

She plays the bold Scottish woman Lucy Irving, a former inland revenue clerk and now author, who answers an advertisement: "Writer seeks wife for year on tropical island."

Lucy returned to write a book based on her year on the uninhabited island of Tuin, off the northernmost tip of Australia. Her best-seller has now become a film.

The makers of Castaway spent 18 months looking for the right blonde to play the part. Previously Amanda had only played "blink and you'll miss it" parts and was surprised when she was picked.

"It's a fantastic role for any actress and I thought one of the big names would get the part," she says. Amanda didn't bother to apply, but 18 months later she heard the producers were still searching.

"So when I went for the audition and saw these dozens of beautiful blondes waiting, I thought I had no chance. So I said, 'Listen, what do you want ... a blonde or an actress?' I mean they'd specified a blonde and I wasn't even that. I was a brunette. They dyed my hair, gave me screen tests and here we are."

Amanda was offered the part after three screen tests. "Later I went out and bought four bottles of champagne and got an overdraft," she says.

The production of Castaway was stopped for six months, so during that time Amanda starred with Denis Quilley in Foreign Parts, by Ronald Neame, the veteran English director who made Tunes Of Glory and The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie.

Neame has seen many stars come and go and is convinced Amanda has a bright and busy acting career ahead of her. "She will certainly be as good as Susannah York - and maybe more than that. She has a great personality on the screen, she's bubbling. She's an 'up' character," he says.

The postponement of Castaway brought another stroke of good fortune. Amanda says: "I worked with the cream of British actors land fell in love with one of the camera technicians with whom I'm now living."

Together they are buying a house i London. "I've been with Jason for a year and it's just beautiful to be together, but in the beginning it was very scary," Amanda says. "I didn't know where it was all going, but it was exciting, heady stuff full of passionate lovemaking and romantic meetings."

"When I knew I had fallen in love with Jason I didn't take it for granted. I still don't."

At the beginning of her book, Lucy Irvine refers to her arrival on the island and says: "The minute the helicopter was out of sight, I took off all my clothes."

In the film, according to Amanda, the nakedness doesn't start quite so hastily. There is at least half an hour set in London where Lucy and Gerald (Oliver Reed) first meet.

The London scenes give an insight into why Lucy replied to the ad in the first place and why the relationship became sexual almost immediately. "She knew her life needed a violent change," says Amanda, "both in its externals and emotionally, and she was determined it would be her Gerald took with him, so she used her charms to see off the competition."

"The story of Castaway is like a 20-year marriage crammed into one year."

"Working with Oliver Reed wasn't one of the strains. But working while constantly undressed was."

"It wasn't working in front of so many technicians - despite what everyone thinks. They are a marvellous bunch. Seeing an actress undressed is just part of the job. You would have thought that would have made it much easier, but it got more difficult. We (she and Reed) were like a couple of kids at school - terribly nervous. Don't forget we were strangers to each other and suddenly we had to play these very intimate love scenes. It was awfully embarrassing for us both.''

Until she met him, Amanda was not at all sure about how she was going to get on with Oliver Reed.

"I didn't expect him to be a bully, and he wasn't. He is totally professional and believes in professional courtesy," she says.

"Oliver is a very sensitive actor. He would tell me stories about actors he knew who had to do exactly the same thing - come in cold to play a love scene."

"There's a feeling of vulnerability anyway about working in front of dozens of people. You wonder if you're getting it right or wrong."

"When you're doing that minus your clothes, you're twice as vulnerable. You wonder if there is a voyeuristic quality about what you're doing. At the beginning I thought if I made a fuss about keeping something on, it would only make it more interesting. So I decided to underplay it."

"Nervous? Oh my God, yes. But then so was Oliver. When we were filming these love scenes he would say to me: 'Look, if you're feeling uncomfortable we'll stop'. Or, 'Are you all right?'"

"I would say the same to him. It wasn't clinical, we were simply thoughtful about each other."

"You can't go through a film like Castaway with all the traumas involved and not feel a bond at the end. Oliver was terrific. He gave me space, allowed me to do my job. He kept us all on our toes."

Castaway is Reed's 67th film. He describes Amanda's talent as "awesome" and her beauty as "breathtaking".

"She is so beautiful she could knock any other actress into a cocked hat. But she was a bitch, a right bitch," he says. "I couldn't stand her, but I fell passionately in love with her."