Absolutely No Beginner : Patsy Kensit’s Learned a Lot--and She’s Only 23

At 17, Patsy Kensit’s career was going nowhere fast.

A former child actress who had appeared in such features as “The Great Gatsby” and “The Blue Bird,” Kensit was skewered in the British press for her lackluster performance in Julien Temple’s 1986 film musical “Absolute Beginners.”

“You know, it was almost kind of an attitude that was going around at the time,” Kensit, 23, said matter-of-factly. The attitude was, she explained, that “it was almost my fault (the film failed) and it had nothing to do with the people who made the film.”

It was her “will of steel,” she said, that helped the diminutive British actress through the “Absolute Beginners” debacle.

“When you are 17, it would have been very easy to say, ‘Forget it. I am going to open a florist shop or go to university,”’ she said during a recent visit to Los Angeles. “At that age you can change your life like that. But I really thought, ‘I am going to get better.’ ”

And she has. She received attention as Mel Gibson’s love interest in “Lethal Weapon 2” and became the darling of the critics last year as the swinging, sexually frank young Englishwoman in Don Boyd’s feature film, “Twenty-One.” The icing on the cake, though, was when Kensit beat out several actresses for the meaty role of the tragic 18th-Century dairy maid Hetty Sorel in “Adam Bede,” based on George Eliot’s famed novel. It airs Sunday on PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre.”

Kensit altered her entire look for “Adam Bede,” hiding her blond hair under a long, black curly wig and wearing chalk-white makeup. Kensit’s Hetty is a naive coquette who betrays the affections of her sweet fiancee (Iain Glen) and enters into an ill-fated affair with a local squire (James Wilby). When she bears the squire’s child, she is put on trial for the baby’s murder after the infant is found dead.

“I was dying to do Hetty,” Kensit said. “I was here doing promotion for ‘Twenty-One’ and I got a call from the director, Giles (Foster), who had directed me in (“Masterpiece Theatre’s”) ‘Silas Marner.’ ”

She was so excited when Foster asked her to play Hetty “it was as if I was told I had a seven-picture deal with Warner Bros. I was so delighted. It meant an awful lot to me that I got it, particularly because I wanted to play the role so badly. It was won against a lot of competition, against actresses whom I consider far superior to me. I was very happy I was being considered above them. Five years ago, it would have never have been that way.”

Foster said Kensit has come a long since he directed her as a teen-ager in “Silas.” ’ “She is very talented,” he said. “She is very deceptive. She has been in the business a long time. She has a lot of experience--a huge amount of resilience. She understands the problems of film, the problems of relating to the text. One of the other reasons I wanted to cast her is she is one of those actresses in England we don’t have too many of--who is both a good actress and a star.”

The British press, Kensit reports, thought she had ulterior motives for taking the part. “A lot of the angles were, ‘This is a great career move for you. You look frumpy in this dress. Do you mind looking like that?’ ”

Kensit paused with a huff. “If the director ever thought I was taking this role because it was a career move or it would change someone else’s perception of me, he would have never given me the part,” she said. “I have won a lot of battles and lost a lot in my career. I realized years ago if the work is not going to be the most important thing, there is no point doing it. There are going to be a lot of disappointments and what has to override everything is that you love acting. All the other stuff (the trappings of stardom) is irrelevant. That comes and goes. I have been through it once with ‘Absolute Beginners.’ I realized then it was all meaningless.”

Kensit’s first farce, the feature film “Blame It on the Bellboy,” opens Friday. Bronson Pinchot, Dudley Moore and Bryan Brown also star in the farce, which has already opened to mixed reviews in England.

“It’s a light comedy,” she said. “I had never done anything like that before. It has gone straight to the top of the charts in England. It’s making a fortune. I never expected it.”

Kensit, who recently married her second husband, Jim Kerr of the Scottish rock group Simple Minds, has no intention of leaving her native country for the Hollywood Hills. “I have a really nice life in England. We have got a few homes around the country and in Europe. I can go and do gardening and go horseback riding.”

And she doesn’t harbor any aspirations of movie stardom. “I am not going for the total mainstream (movies),” Kensit said. “I don’t want to do that. I am just trying to find parts I will get to grow with. I just want to last.”

“Adam Bede” on “Masterpiece Theatre: airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on KVCR and 9 p.m. on KCET and KPBS.