Great Expectations: Justine Waddell on Estella (1999?)

Justine Waddell was simply bowled over by the chance to play Estella, the beautiful young woman trained by Miss Havisham to break Pip’s heart in Great Expectations. “It doesn’t get better than Estella,” she enthuses. “Like Cathy in Wuthering Heights and Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, she’s one of those characters that everybody knows.” What most appealed to the actress was the fact that Estella is “so dark and cold. That’s fun. The way it is written is light and funny, but there’s so much behind it. Also, the triangle between Estella and Pip and Miss Havisham is fascinating.”

Waddell doesn’t mind that the character does not elicit much sympathy. “In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, you are meant to feel sympathy for the character, whereas in Great Expectations, Pip is the sympathetic character and you see Estella through his eyes.”

Like the rest of the cast, Justine Waddell was mightily impressed when she ready Tony Marchant’s script. The actress recalls that “I thought, ‘wow, this is incredible – dark and funny and brutal and unsentimental. It doesn’t sound like a period script at all. It has a contemporary resonance’. I felt you could film the script anywhere – on a modern-day council estate in Liverpool – and it would still work. The rhythms are so modern, and certain figures are archetypal. The characters come immediately alive. You read the script and say, ‘I know someone like that’.”

She was particularly taken with Marchant’s explication of why Estella was so cruel. “He gave Estella more reasons for the way she is than there are in the book. She was an orphan and was never given healthy affection – you can see exactly why she is what she is. At one point, Pip says to Miss Havisham, ‘look what you’ve done to Estella, you’ve destroyed her’. If anything, I wasn’t icy and damaged enough. When you think of what she had been through her behaviour is quite understandable.”

Estella is so damaged, Waddell reckons, that “she marries a man because he is stony and cold. That is what she knows and she feels comfortable with. What she knows is abuse. That’s such a theme in Great Expectations – how childhood patters spread over your adult life. Childhood actions can have subliminal consequences and keep repeating themselves.”

Waddell also finds the bond between Estella and Pip intriguing. “Pip goes on such an enormous journey as an adult, and Estella goes on a painful journey, too. At the end, they come together as two adults who have lost all their expectations and are suddenly children again. There is this amazing sense of them having such a long shared history. Because of that, they’ll always be linked; they’re the only ones who have ever seen what the other person has seen. For Estella, Pip is safe. She can and does abuse him, and that’s what he knows. He keeps coming back for more because love in Great Expectations is about abuse – not about ‘happy ever after’.”

This psychoanalytical approach is just one reason why Great Expectations rings such bells in the modern era. “People get tired of the contemporary resonance being pointed out, but with Dickens you can’t get away from it,” Waddell says. “Dickens is pre-Freud and is writing without modern psychological awareness, but that makes it all the more powerful. The images resonate without being filled with all the psychology baggage that we bring. They have a purity.”

According to the actress, Dickens chimes with everyone. “When you start to talk to someone about Dickens, it’s like an automatic family. You have an immediate community. When I came in yesterday, my car driver told me that David Copperfield meant so much to him because he related to him as a child.”

Away from the thematic side, Waddell admits to being smitten by the costumes. “I accepted I was in clothes heaven,” she laughs. “When you’re four, you draw clothes like that – it’s a childhood dream. As a girl watching Gone With the Wind, you long to grow up as an actress playing Estella. I hate shopping because nothing ever fits. But as Estella, it was a permanent kick to waltz into wardrobe. She’s the only character I’ll ever play who takes two and a half hours in make-up. With Estella, you can be as vain as you like.”

Waddell took a year and a half out of Cambridge University to act, but went back last summer to complete her degree. She is now very pleased she did. “If you go straight from school, there’s a danger of throwing it away. Going back, I knew what was special because I’d been away. I said to myself, ‘these are the books I want to read and the lectures I want to hear’. It was also lovely to be back with young people. Everyone is still so innocent – they haven’t hit depression or discovered how difficult adult life can be. They still believe they can conquer the world. It’s wonderful to be given that optimism again.”

Having appeared in The Woman in White, Tess and Mansfield Park, Waddell has obviously got the taste for period drama. “I wouldn’t turn work down just because of bonnets, that would be a very bad sign at the age of 23. But I have turned down both modern and classic scripts because they just weren’t right – I’d never reject something just on the strength of the costumes. People today want to be fascinated, and period drama can really deliver that. I remember when Pride and Prejudice went out. Every Sunday we would crowd round the television to watch it and then afterwards everyone would be discussing it.”