HOUSE OF BARD

Stella Gonet's star is rising fast at the RSC. Michael Arditti reports

The 1994 Stratford season, which opened yesterday in London, has been the most successful in years, with particular plaudits for its leading actors: Alex Jennings as Peer Gynt, Iain Glenn as Henry V and Toby Stevens as Coriolanus. But no one has received more acclaim than Stella Gonet, returning to her RSC roots for the first time since her television role as Beatrice in the BBC's The House of Elliott.

Gonet first joined the RSC in 1986 for Arthur Miller's The Archbishop's Ceiling. "I only had eight words, but I was on stage the whole time and I had to dance and do all sorts of things. Miller came and we all fell madly in love with him. `She's perfect,' he said of me, which wasn't hard as I had almost no lines. But that became my nickname in the company, `Little Miss Perfect'..."

Her current repertoire is considerably more demanding. She plays three Shakespearean heroines, Isabella in Measure for Measure and both Titania and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as Greta in Anne Devlin's After Easter.

Gonet's career has been dominated by large companies, first at the RSC and later at the National Theatre. Her explanation for this is that she is from a large family, the seventh child of 12, and prefers "situations where families can be recreated".

Her parents met when her father, a Polish soldier, was stationed at Greenock during the War. Her mother converted to Roman Catholicism and they married and moved to Buenos Aires, where their two eldest sons were born. They then returned to Scotland and had ten more children over the next two decades.

Inevitably, family responsibilities dominated Gonet's adolescence. "I didn't rebel...at least not until I left home and went mad in my twenties. I had to look after my brothers and sisters. I'm sure that, if I got on a psychiatrist's couch, there'd be a part of me that wishes I was an only child, but we're a close family; we all get on together. If anyone needs anything, it's a great network."

Although there was no tradition of acting in the family, there was "an awful lot of family entertaining". Her siblings are "all very talented singers. I feel as if each of them could have gone on and done anything in the performing arts, but I was the one who pursued it."

When she first came to London, she tried to disguise her background. "When you go up for an audition, people are very one-eyed," she says. "If they hear a Scots accent, they think that's all you can do.

"When I started work on Hamlet [with Daniel Day Lewis, in 1989], I was very anxious not to let any Scots sounds come out; and then I thought, that's stupid, they're me, I'm sure Shakespeare wouldn't mind. In fact, the highlight of my career was when French and Saunders did a parody of The House of Elliott, because Saunders played me with a slight burr and I thought `yes, she heard'."

The theatre remains Gonet's first love, but the role of Beatrice in The House of Elliott brought her wide recognition and the experience was not as bad as she had feared it might be. "I love to do research and that whole period was so exciting. It was an incredibly liberating time for women and the clothes reflected that. Suddenly, they could put them over their heads, there were no corsets." But the constraints of a popular series format did mean that it was, in some respects, limiting. "There was much more politically that we wanted to be saying, but it wasn't encouraged. "

Now 34, Gonet is keen to have children ("two or three, not 12"). She has no masterplan for her career, the current season at the Barbican being as far as she is prepared to look. "As my mother says, `What's for you, won't go by you'."