Linda Bassett makes family life feel lived in, particularly when nobody is getting along. We value the matter-of-fact delivery and the sense that her characters have spent years dealing with the people beside them.
Fi1m perspective
In East Is East (1999), Linda Bassett’s Ella Khan sounds accustomed to disagreeing with the people around her. Alongside Om Puri, she makes the marriage feel established before we arrive: the familiarity matters as much as the quarrels. We were moved by Ella because Bassett makes the pressure of living with George matter without asking us to admire her endurance. With Jimi Mistry’s Tariq and Archie Panjabi’s Meenah, she is part of an ensemble that sounds used to these family arguments.
That plainness has a substantial history in new writing, including her long association with Caryl Churchill. Fen (1983), made with Churchill and Joint Stock, marked an early shift from devised work; Waiting for the Moon (1987) brought her first film notice. By the time East Is East became her screen breakthrough, Bassett had already played Ella on stage. Her description of performing Churchill is useful here: “You have to not get in the way of the words.”
Supporting parts as Nelly Boxall in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002) and Cora in Calendar Girls (2003) kept her within ensemble film-making. The more sustained television role came when she joined Call the Midwife in 2015 as Nurse Phyllis Crane, a no-nonsense district nurse. These roles sit within a career frequently shaped by casting as resilient, working-class or matriarchal women. That is a useful description of the work she is offered, but a limited way of looking at an actor whose stage work includes the demands of Churchill’s Escaped Alone (2016).
The reservation is about what a film does with her credibility. East Is East sometimes softens its harshest material, and Bassett’s convincing account of the marriage makes those changes of tone harder to accept. We can believe Ella and still wish the film took more care with what she has to endure. Start there for Bassett and Puri, but expect a family comedy whose handling of violence is less assured than its acting.
Biography
Linda Bassett is an English actress. She was born on 4 February 1950 in Pluckley, Kent, and brought up in Pimlico, London. After working as an usher at the Old Vic, she studied English at the University of Leeds but left after a year to join a community drama group. She made her London stage debut in 1982 and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991.
Bassett played Ella Khan in the 1999 film East Is East, for which she received a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Her other film roles include Nelly Boxall in The Hours (2002), Cora in Calendar Girls (2003) and Ms Brenner in The Reader (2008). On television she has portrayed Nurse Phyllis Crane in Call the Midwife since 2015.
