“I’m not grateful for the anxiety that comes with worrying about my health. Everything I do is urgent.” She has been grateful for that. The effect of being told that, she says, “inspires and motivates you. An old friend from her university days recently told her, “You never shut up about dying,” and certainly a lot of her work has been about death – from the victims in Silent Witness, to the horrific deaths of young men in The Normal Heart, and Assisted Suicide: The Musical, which Carr wrote and performed. She recently turned 50, a landmark birthday she delighted in. “I was told as a kid I wouldn’t live to be old,” says Carr. But I have lived a life so far that has been amazing Liz CarrĪnother thing they had in common was being told from a young age not to expect a long life. And I know what it’s like to have your childhood thrown into chaos by becoming ill or disabled.” I’m not grateful for having to worry about my health. What I had in common with Linda or Emma is: I know what it’s like to be a disabled woman, and face discrimination every single day. Whereas I can only play what my body can do, and I’m playing the lived experience of it. So you see her breathing like she thinks someone with polio breathes, and then she forgets about it. Of Roberts, she says, “I’m a fan, but what she does is she plays the physicality, she plays the illness. “That’s a big issue.” Ellen Barkin played the role on Broadway, and Julia Roberts in the 2014 film. “The thorny issue of ‘Can other people play disabled characters?’, all of that, I think anyone can play anything, but we’re not even getting in the room to play ourselves,” she says. It is, to her knowledge, the first time a disabled actor has played the role in a professional production. My life was turned on its head to do this performance.” Carr came out of shielding to play her, and it wasn’t without fear. The character is based on Linda Laubenstein, who was one of the first doctors to recognise the epidemic. In The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s play about the HIV/Aids epidemic in New York in the 1980s, she played Emma Brookner, a doctor who, having survived polio, uses a wheelchair. “Sometimes you forget about it,” she says, “because we’re used to it now, and then you go, ‘Actually, I can’t go and do all the things that a lot of people take for granted.’”Ĭarr is still best known for her role in the TV crime drama Silent Witness, playing forensic scientist Clarissa Mullery, which she left in 2020. ‘My life was turned on its head to do this performance’ … Carr with Ben Daniels in The Normal Heart. I had to be there.” It was a good job she turned up, I point out: she won. The awards, for which she was nominated for her role in The Normal Heart at the National Theatre, felt “once in a lifetime – though hopefully not. Going to the cinema, no (though she would love to). “Everything feels like a risk assessment,” she says. And so when she attended the Olivier theatre awards last month, it felt like a big deal, not just because she had been nominated for best supporting actress, but because it was the first time she had been indoors, among so many people – several thousand at the Royal Albert Hall – for a long time. for instance, we’re sitting outside a London restaurant near her home, even though it’s a grey and windswept day, and the hot chocolate she is warming her hands on is rapidly cooling. For most of the past two years, Liz Carr has been shielding or, at the very least, being extremely careful.
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