Annabel Capper in “Operation Mincemeat”

[I’ve spent most of my Armitage-available time the last two days starting to make a Richard Armitage fan video! Wow, does it require concentration. Seriously. Six hours of work for three minutes of video? And I don’t even have to film the clips I’m using, just find them. It’s fun. However: My admiration for the doyennes of Armitage fan video, always high, is now climbing minute by minute. This is hard work. Anyway, in consequence of that this is going to be another Armitage-poor post. I promise to turn back to our handsome hero shortly. And this is really the last of the Capper materials I have in hand at the moment, anyway. So if you’re tired of reading about Ms. Capper, this will be the last post for the foreseeable future. It’s hard to obtain more detailed material on the career of someone who mostly appears in stage productions or things not purchasable or stealable via the Internet. I promise to stay on the job.]

Annabel Capper as Hester Leggett in Operation Mincemeat (2010). My cap.

Just a few weeks ago, Ms. Capper appeared in the role of Hester Leggett in the documentary, Operation Mincemeat, shown on BBC 2. If you’re in the UK you can still watch it on the BBC iPlayer. The documentary took its material from a celebrated book of the same name by Ben Macintyre (who also narrates this program) concerning a WWII-era British intelligence project that sought to put false intel in the hands of the Germans by attaching it to a dead body that would be left in a place where the Germans were likely to discover it. As part of this project, a number of fake documents were deposited with the body in order to increase the believability of the ruse, including a picture of a fiancée (“Pam”) and two love letters from her. Leggett is one of the women to whom these letters were attributed by posterity.

Quoting from Macintyre’s book (pp. 78-80): “The job of drafting [the love letters] fell to Hester Leggett, ‘The Spin,’ the most senior woman in the department. Jean [Leslie — also interviewed in the documentary — whose picture was used as that of Pam] remembered her as ‘skinny and embittered.’ Hester Leggett was certainly fierce and demanding. She never married, and she devoted herself utterly to the job of marshaling a huge quantity of secret paperwork. But into Pam’s letters she poured every ounce of pathos and emotion she could muster. These letters may have been the closest Hester Leggett came to romance: the chattering pastiches of a young woman madly in love, and with little time for grammar. … As the official report on Operation Mincemeat acknowledged, Hester Leggett’s effort ‘achieved the thrill and pathos of a war engagement with great success.'” [Book available partially on Google Books; search “Hester Leggett” to see the texts of the letters, which really are works of art.]

The clip opens with Patricia Trehearne, Section Assistant 17M, 1941-1945, describing a feigned jealousy over who would get to write these letters; then it moves to the fake “Pam” (Lyndal Marwick) reading the fake letter, and then Ms. Capper enters as Hester Leggett, about halfway through the clip.

Another too-short performance, but we see another side of Capper’s acting range, as she channels a sort of effusive, would-be Hepburnesque, war-era spinster. She hits it really well, I think. The wretched hairdo and the awkward lighting of her prominent jaw make her look like the popular image of a spinster, and she seems like the individual described in Macintyre’s book.

So in addition to her work here as woman on the job with hidden depths of passion, we’ve seen her as composer’s muse and grieving sister in non-speaking roles, and as Shakespearean siren, and as whatever you want to call her role in Sensitive Skin (I’ve only seen clips, so I’m going to save the adjectives for that until my DVD arrives and I can see where she fits into the story).

What can’t this woman play?

~ by Servetus on December 22, 2010.