As she returns to the West End aged 80, the actress talks about how playing Rizzo in Grease changed her life, Donald Trump’s return and becoming a Londoner
It’s the day of the inauguration when I meet Stockard Channing over a double macchiato in the café at the Wallace Collection in Marylebone, central London. The 80-year-old American actress, beloved for her turns in Grease and The West Wing is, at first, disinclined to comment.
“I don’t really know what to say at this point,” she says, with a hint of weariness. “I mean, it’s going to be interesting. I thought once was enough. Who knew it was going to be the gift that keeps on giving.”
It doesn’t last long. I ask her whether Trump’s first term was a factor in her decision to move to London, where she’s lived since 2019….
Daughters and their complex parental relationships are at the centre of the reason we’re meeting — Channing is about to step back onto the West End stage as Clytemnestra in director Daniel Fish’s new production of Elektra, opposite the Marvel star Brie Larson as her titular furious daughter.
It’s a fairly bonkers show, though Channing cautions me that it has changed quite a bit since I saw it on its second night of previews in Brighton. Fish and designer Jeremy Herbert have created a stark, stylised mise-en-scène, in which a haunting chorus sings Anne Carson’s words (“It’s not an adaptation, it’s a translation” of the original Sophocles play, Channing notes), Elektra uses a microphone and occasionally avails herself of a distortion pedal. A small blimp hangs ominously above the stage….