Let us now praise famous women — or at least those who arrive for their close-ups with dues paid and actual talent.
Alice Eve is one of their exemplars. At 26, the London native has brightened Broadway and West End stages in Tom Stoppard's acclaimed Rock 'n' Roll. She knows her way around a movie set, too, having last displayed her dead-on American accent in the indie caper Big Nothing. Later this year she will appear with Harrison Ford, Sean Penn, and Ray Liotta in Crossing Over, an immigration drama set in L.A. Picking at a plate of fish and chips beachside in Santa Monica, the Oxford-educated Eve blithely invokes Martin Amis and George Soros to underscore her arguments.
The eight-shows-a-week meritocracy of Rock 'n' Roll taught her that movie-making's comparatively languid pace can be deceptive. In the theater, "if you fuck it up, you can tell yourself, 'Well, I've always got tomorrow,'" Eve says. "On a set, when you think, God, I missed that beat! — you can't fix it."
That sense of craftsmanship would flummox the reality stars clotting Hollywood these days, but Eve simply shrugs. "There are a lot of girls you read about who don't do anything but be read about," she says. "But I think you can do your best, can't you? Otherwise, what hope is there?"
