LADY AND THE VAMP

Sunday Mail
(Glasgow, Scotland)

May 19, 1996

It's Lady Chatterley as you've never seen her... not the sex-starved English rose but a lusty Scots lass.

"Not many people realise that Connie in Lady Chatterley's Lover is the daughter of a Scots aristocrat," says Simone Lahbib.

The sexy actress is using her native Stirling accent - as well has her stunning looks - to wow London theatre audiences.

She says: " I told them at the auditions I wanted to use my own accent. I said: "You do realise she is Scottish?"

Simone follows in the steps of Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristel, who starred in the film version of Lady Chatterley, and Joely Richardson who bedded Sean Bean in a TV drama directed by Ken Russell.

There is a good-humoured, up-front sexuality in Simone's approach to playing the character from the infamous D. H. Lawrence novel at the little Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone.

She says: "There's a scene where Connie takes off her clothes to look at her body in front of the mirror, and I think it is a really powerful image.

"If I stood there in my bra and pants, it wouldn't have the same effect. It's like you have something to hide.

"It's much more vulnerable - and beautiful in a way - to take all your clothes off and stand there completely open to the audience."

"If it had been an insensitive, autocratic male director, then I wouldn't have done the job," says Simone, 30. "But it was a woman, Clare Davidson.

"I recognised on meeting her that she was very open, very warm and very wise. And she listened, and got excited about my ideas for the piece.

"The other actors said we should have a rehearsal where we all take our clothes off, so that nobody feels inhibited. That made me smile - and I thought, how sweet of them to say that."

Simone says that when it came to the nude love scenes with Mellors, played by Peter Tate, she wanted it to happen layer by layer - "so that we weren't suddenly ripping each other's clothes off".

"In the way we've approached it, there's nothing offensive. It's all being dealt with sensitively.

"When you see us nude, we are running about in the rain, and that is very easy to watch. When we do simulate sex, I am fully clothed."

A ballet-trained actress, Simone got her acting break in 1985 when Rikki Fulton suggested her for a role in The Girl in the Picture, a film in which he starred with John Gordon Sinclair and Gregor Fisher. After graduating from Queen Margaret College in Edinburgh, she featured in TV dramas, such as Taggart.

Last year she moved south, and in London Bridge, a 26-part TV drama shown in the London area, she plays a young Scot who escapes to the Big Smoke and finds herself being pursued by a stalker.

Simone's mother, Jean, was born in Stirling. Her French father, Joseph, was head chef at Gleneagles Hotel, and her grandfather was the son of a sheikh who signed up for the Foreign Legion.

Simone, eldest of five children, says she has no time for marriage or children of her own. "My sisters are doing all that for me," she jokes.

"Nicole has one child, Sophie is married with three - and I have two brothers, Mark and Steven.

"I am married to my craft. I haven't met a man I want to wed... I'm not there yet."

When she takes on a role, Simone immerses herself in the part and refuses to socialise.

She says: "I phone all my friends to say, listen, I am not going to be around for several weeks and I'll see you on the other side. They understand that totally."

Simone gets homesick for Stirling. "Braveheart has a lot to answer for," she says. "One international film, and everybody wants to live there!"

 

 

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