Hampton Style - October 10, 2008

Saffron Burrows, the statuesque actress from Troy and television's Boston Legal has entered a proactive stage of her career; last year she traveled to New York from her home in Los Angeles in order to convince director Amy Redford that she should have the lead role in The Guitar, the film making its East Coast debut at this week's festival. It's not a technique Saffron is familiar with, describing herself as shy by nature.

In this film, however, both she and the character she plays, get a chance for transformation, for an emotional breakthrough. "I'm at my most exposed in The Guitar," says Burrows. "Literally and metaphorically, I'm naked." Clothes off, guard down and emotionally vulnerable, this transition is at the core of the story in which she plays a woman diagnosed with throat cancer and given only a short time to live. "It's rare for a modern screenplay to be about this-the complete stripping down. It's about that moment when everything shifts and then nothing is as it had been before. It's about when the world becomes unrecognizable." Mousy, uptight and puritanical at the start, her character, Melody, uses the bad news to engage in unbridled sexual encounters and unchecked shopping sprees.

It's an unexpected role for the actress once considered something of a cold, impassive beauty. To her credit, she carries it off with an unguarded familiarity. The woman who played Andromache in Troy is full of contradictions and revelations. She serves as the Vice President of the National Civil Rights Movement and is a regular attendee at Stop The War Coalition protests. Burrows seems to enjoy bucking the Hollywood mold with her enigmatic choices. While other celebrities clutch onto a religion of crash diets and tabloid fodder, Burrows' conversation spans the ills of Europe's anti-fascist movement and the coal miners' strike of 1952.

Her parents were both union activists, and at an early age she was sent out onto the streets of her hometown, Hackney with a socialist cause. She shared her home with striking miners and was deeply involved with anti-racist causes in South Africa.

At 16 the stoic beauty was discovered as a model and quickly became a fixture on the catwalks of Chanel and Yves St Laurent. While unafraid to speak out against government, modeling proved a terrifying prospect for the brainy activist. She carried Beckett and Yeats to shoots for comfort, and eventually, instilled with ardent feminist convictions, she moved on to acting with higher hopes.

Her career also encompasses wide extremes. Such films as In The Name Of The Father, the four films she did with Mike Figgis and Dennis Potter's Karaoke rest on the gravitas end of the spectrum, with innovative projects with visionary co-stars. On the other extreme is a mutant shark movie whose posters carried digitally enhanced images of her breasts. Pinned down as a "model-actress" by tastemakers early on, she threw back at them a slew of independent films that revealed prismatic roles and a depth beyond cleavage and cheekbones.

Her personal life, too, stretches the gamut with a fascinating mix of paramours, from married men to directors, from women to co-stars. Daniel Day-Lewis fell for her, as did Figgis, for whom she became a muse. For some time she was engaged to zany Alan Cumming, her Circle of Friends co-star, who ungallantly announced at the end of the relationship that "Saffron bats for both teams." Rumors of her bisexuality and relationship with actress Fiona Shaw were rampant, but the actress cares little for public attention of that sort. She avoids discussing her private life at all costs, claiming "Life isn't about dalliances-it's about individuals."

Of her two latest films, The Bank Job and The Guitar, Saffron plays Martine and Melody, "both protagonists who lost everything and thus had no tetherings left. They were women in an emergency realizing they had come to the end of something," says Burrows. She, however, is very much at the beginning of something, that "proactive stage" of her career. "When you're very young, a lot just happens to you," she says. Pleased that she was the one to initiate her current role, she continues: "In The Guitar I had the benefit of a brilliant director who let me be brave. There was no distance; the story washed over me."

She also counts her upcoming series My Own Worst Enemy, which debuts October 13 on NBC, as breakthrough for her. In it she plays therapist and lover to the Jekyll and Hyde-type protagonist played by Christian Slater. "When we get together to read, there's this feeling of the story pulling us along. Christian allows himself to be freer and I get to be freer with him. It lets itself go to those places-the darker and the funnier places TV scripts don't usually go to."

"Ultimately, acting is an oversaturated profession," she concludes. "You should only do it if you really like it. Soak up everything, figure out what you like and hone your tastes. Then become them."