New mum Daisy Donovan’s movie career is starting to take off — at long last.
Thankfully, Daisy Donovan is nothing like her screen persona. While TV Daisy thinks nothing about asking a politician rude questions, or making people look like total fools, real-life Daisy is sweet, polite and charming. The only thing the two seem to share is a sharp mind and giant eyes, which take on a bewildered look in her comedy shows, but are stunning in the flesh.
For now, though, 32-year-old Donovan has left behind presenting and the comedy exploits on shows such as Daisy, Daisy to concentrate on acting. Her latest role is in the new Brit flick Death at a Funeral, which is released today.
It’s a dark comedy about a dysfunctional family who gather for their father’s funeral starring Matthew MacFadyen and Rupert Graves as the deceased’s warring sons. Their differences are soon overlooked when a mysterious stranger threatens to reveal a shocking secret.
As they try to hide the truth from the other mourners, with disastrous yet hilarious consequences, the rest of the family are creating problems of their own. Daisy plays the dead man’s niece Martha, whose fiance Simon accidentally takes a hallucinogenic drug and ends up naked on a roof.
“It’s all quite mad!” says New York-born Donovan. “We found it funny just reading the script, which is always a good sign and, yes, there was a lot of corpsing around the corpse.”
“Matthew was the worst for that. His eyes would fill up with tears and we’d know he was about to laugh, which would send us all off. The corpse never corpsed though. He was played by a stuntman and looked very, very dead.”
The cast list for Death at a Funeral reads like a Who’s Who of British talent. Jane Asher plays the dead man’s widow, Peter Egan his snobby brother, Keeley Hawes his daughter-in-law, Kris Marshall his nephew and Trainspotting‘s Ewan Bremner a family friend. And Daisy admits she was nervous about working with so many established actors.
“I nearly curtseyed to Jane Asher,” she laughs.
Although best known for programmes such as the Ali G-spawning The 11 O’Clock Show, Daisy — the daughter of renowned fashion photographer Terence Donovan — is actually a trained actress. It wasn’t her childhood dream, though. She went to university with the intention of becoming a journalist or working in fashion.
“While I was there I realised I had a choice of drinking until I vomited from my eyes, or filling my free time with activities,” admits Daisy. “So I thought I’d give acting a try. I auditioned for a couple of things and got them both, then fell in love with it.
“But while most actors really persevere with their craft after drama school, I gave it two months, didn’t have the success I wanted and panicked. I just thought, ‘I need a fall-back job’.”
That job turned out to be as a receptionist at the production company Talkback. When producers of The 11 O’Clock Show were searching for a female presenter, somebody mentioned Daisy, and a star was born. It was on the show that she met her now husband, producer Dan Mazer, who was working on the Ali G segments and was one of the writers of Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
Dan’s currently working on the follow-up film, although Daisy is sworn to secrecy.
“He went to the Oscars this year for Borat,” says Daisy, “but I was seven-and-a-half months pregnant and the doctor said I couldn’t. I was so disappointed. He had a great time though and came back with a huge bag of free stuff for me.”
Daisy is now mum to daughter Maisy. “I know it’s the wrong spelling but that’s what we chose,” she smiles. “She’ll have to live with that name now. I actually wanted to call her Myrtle, but that was disallowed.”
Daisy went back to work two months after giving birth, to shoot the film Wild Child, for which she also rewrote the screenplay.
“It’s set in girls school and Julia Robert’s niece Emma is the lead,” she says. “I was told to modernise the script and write myself something stupid, so I’m the sports mistress.
“I have to spend the entire film in the most disgusting tracksuit. You know that when the wardrobe mistress says to you, ‘Please don’t get cross with me for the way you look on film’, it’s not a good sign.
“I don’t mind looking like the back end of a bus for a role, though. It’s quite liberating.”
Death At A Funeral is out today.
By Lorraine Thurlow for The Mirror.
(Source: mirror.co.uk)