Film Star by Rowan Coleman Page B

together, I would sort of forget who she was until I’d look up suddenly, or catch her reflection in a mirror, and she would be Imogene Grant, international movie star again. Then my mouth would go dry and I had to pinch myself hard to make myself realise how amazing it was to be acting with her. Amazing—I had started to use that word a lot.
    But it was amazing because Imogene always had time for me. She invited me to her Winnebago for tea, let me look at her photos and told me stories about all the people she’d worked with. Or sometimes we just talked about films we liked or books we had read. We both loved Anne of Green Gables —we talked about that for hours.
    Until I met Imogene I had sort of thought that all incredibly famous people would be divas—a bit like Brett Summers used to be before she was fired from Kensington Heights for throwing tantrums and acting like the centre of the universe—but a hundred times worse. Always going everywhere with hundreds of helpers, bossing people around and demanding a dressing roomfull of white flowers and French bottled water served at precisely one degree below room temperature, and instantly firing anyone who got it wrong.
    I had thought Imogene might be like that, but the only help she had was her PA Clarice, who she treated like a best friend, and her dog Muttley, a black Labrador cross who went everywhere with her. Sometimes her mobile phone would ring when I was with her and she’d look at the number and say, “Ruby, do you mind if I take this?” And of course I’d go away so she could talk to whoever it was in private. And once I glanced back and saw her talking and laughing and twiddling her hair and fluttering her lashes and I thought that whoever was calling her must be someone she was in love with.
    I didn’t ask her who because she is famous for keeping her private life private and would never sell photos of her wedding to magazines for millions of pounds like some people I could mention, which, let’s face it, is just not classy.
    And I did see a lot of Jeremy—because we had a lot of scenes together and he was a perfectionist. So we rehearsed and rehearsed them between takes. And even when Art thought we had a scene in the can, Jeremy would sometimes ask to do it again because he thought he could do it even better. And I didn’t mind working likethat. I didn’t mind because just by watching and listening to Jeremy I felt I was learning from him. Acting with him was like nothing else I had ever done. All the other actors I had worked with were either kids from school, who were all great but still beginners like me, or soap actors. And sometimes soap actors are amazing and sometimes they are on a sort of autopilot and just going through the motions in front of a camera.
    But Jeremy was always switched on, always in the moment. And I believe in him so much that when we shot the scene where Professor Darkly is stalking towards me about to cut out my heart with the Sacred Knife of Avalon, my heart really was pounding in terror, my mouth really was dry, and when I looked around me all I could see was a dark chamber with no way out, and not the green screens at all. When Art shouted cut there were tears streaming down my face and I hadn’t even known I was crying. We didn’t need to do any more takes for that scene. Afterwards, Jeremy, back to himself again in an instant, came up to me and gave me a fatherly hug.
    â€œOh, Ruby,” he said. “You’re going to be brilliant one day.”
    If anyone else had said that to me I might have been offended by it, but when he said it I felt—well— amazing.
    And the other nice thing about Jeremy was that he put up with my mum hanging around without showing that he minded at all. In fact, when I had a scene and he didn’t, he even let Mum go for lunch with him, twice. Mum couldn’t stop talking about him and about what a gentleman he was