The Morton Method

Most rising young film actresses, faced with the prospect of a solid career, are almost absurdly eager to please: They’re diplomatic about their co-workers, willing to share details of their past and present with the media, and reluctant to say or do anything that will ruffle feathers or provoke strong opinions about them.

Well, that isn’t the way Samantha Morton does things. She walked into her agent’s office near Piccadilly Circus, eased her body (she is almost seven months pregnant) into a high-backed chair, and talked frankly about her career, her money problems and British actors, while making it clear she would not discuss any aspect of her own life.

At 22, the feisty, versatile Morton is widely regarded as one of the most promising actresses to emerge in Britain in many years. During the last two years, she has made five films, three of which have secured U.S. release: Fox Searchlight’s recently released “Dreaming of Joseph Lees,” a melodrama set in the 1950s about a young woman forced to make a choice between two lovers; the upcoming “Jesus’ Son,” in which she plays a young American heroin addict; and, most significantly, Woody Allen’s new film “Sweet and Lowdown,” a bittersweet period comedy that has given Morton her most remarkable role to date.

In the Sony Pictures Classics film, which opens Friday, Sean Penn portrays Emmet Ray, an egocentric jazz guitarist in the 1930s; he’s also a pimp and a kleptomaniac. Morton is Hattie, a mute girl with whom he falls in love. He refers to her as a “half-wit,” and she never speaks a single word throughout the film; yet Hattie is the film’s most eloquent character, and she finds ways to maneuver Emmet to her will.

There is one precious, giddy moment when Morton’s Hattie stands in a doorway listening to Penn, sprawled on a bed, strumming a tune on his guitar. Her gradual radiant smile tells us what words do not need to: that she has fallen hard for this man. The film received rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival in September, in no small measure because of Morton’s silent tour de force. There’s already talk of an Oscar nomination for her.

“I hadn’t seen any of Woody Allen’s films,” she said disarmingly. “Not because of ignorance. I mean, I’d heard of him. But I’m 22. He’s a different generation.”

She met Allen in New York and talked with him, but did not read or act for him. When he offered her the role in “Sweet and Lowdown,” she demanded to see the whole script first--a concession he rarely makes for actors. But she got her way, read the script and agreed to make the film.

This candor and directness typifies Morton’s approach. The week we met, she was gracing the cover of the weekly London listings magazine Time Out in an unorthodox pose: She was standing in a field at dusk, wearing a black dress, black socks and muddy boots. The dress was pulled off her shoulders and way down over her hips, revealing the bulge of her pregnancy, while she covered her bare breasts with crossed arms.

Had she had any reaction about that cover?

“No, why should I?,” she responded.

Well, it’s kind of an extreme statement.

“You think so? I love it. One friend of mine said it was old news, being naked and pregnant on a magazine cover, but . . .” She shrugged dismissively.

This self-assurance is an oddity, coming from one who looks so young. Morton has long, fair hair, a high forehead and baby blue eyes that emit a piercing stare. Without makeup, she could pass for 14 or 15--until she speaks, when she sounds very grown-up indeed.

Nothing fazes her. Asked how she got along with her sometimes tempestuous “Sweet and Lowdown” co-star Penn, she said: “The way I’ve decided to work now is that the acting is first and foremost. So I don’t arrive on set and think, who can I get to be friends with? I just wanted to get my work done, get the part right and go home. So I didn’t really have time to think about whether Mr. Penn was a nice man or not.

“You hear rumors about Woody Allen, who supposedly never talks to actors on set. But he did. And Sean was incredibly supportive and professional. . . . I don’t know them socially, and they don’t know me. But we got the job done.”

In fact Morton was surprised by her two experiences of filmmaking in America: “Friends of mine who have worked in Los Angeles or within the studio system said I’d hate it,” she noted. “But I loved the professionalism. I had misconceptions about the American industry. I expected power plays and superiority complexes, people arguing over trailers, things like that. But it was a comfortable environment. I felt very respected.”

She hasn’t been so thrilled by working in Britain. “Here, if you grow up and say you want to be an actor, you’re scoffed at slightly. . . . Over here, I feel I’m going mad. Another thing, and I’ll tell you this from the bottom of my heart, neither Sean nor Billy [Crudup, the star of “Jesus’ Son”] had any ego. Which was so refreshing, because a lot of British actors do.”

Morton has another problem: All of her last five films (even Allen’s) were modestly budgeted, and she has struggled to make ends meet financially.

“I used to tell myself to pay the rent, I needed to work nine months a year. The films I’ve chosen to do have been at scale, except for Woody’s. So I’ve come back feeling I needed more work because of the mortgage. You feel like a fraud--you’re working but you don’t have much money.”

Morton is adamant about her privacy and will confirm nothing about her early years outside of acting. She admits she grew up in Nottingham, a city 150 miles north of London, but has nothing to say about press reports that she grew up in a tough housing project, that her parents separated when she was a toddler, that her father married her teenage baby-sitter, and that Morton spent time in various foster homes. She agrees that nothing in her upbringing suggested an acting career, but she even bridles at the suggestion that she grew up in modest circumstances: “People make all sorts of assumptions, don’t they,” she says. “I’ll never talk about my history or any relationship I’m having. I find it unnecessary.”

That policy even extends to the father of her baby, actor Charlie Creed-Miles (who was in “Nil by Mouth,” Gary Oldman’s bleak drama about alcoholism); the only references she makes to him concern her admiration for his acting

This much is known: She has been acting since she was 11, and she gained a place in an acting workshop in Nottingham, funded by a TV network in the region. “I’d dreamed of going to drama school,” she said, “but then came the realization that you need a grant.” Instead she acted, wrote and directed plays at the workshop, landing an agent when she was 16. Her breakthrough was an acclaimed British TV movie, “The Token King,” and she appeared in various British TV series, including “Cracker.”

I’ve Been Working for a Long Time’

Morton’s first feature film, which brought her considerable attention, was Corinne Adler’s “Under the Skin,” in which she played a young girl who turned to promiscuity as a way of deadening the extreme grief she felt after the death of her mother. By this time, she was 19.

“Even though I’m only 22 now, I feel I’ve been working for a long time,” she said. “Anywhere I’ve got, I feel it’s been worked for.”

Two other films in which she has appeared may yet make their way to the U.S. One is “The Last Yellow,” in which she is an unlikable criminal’s wife tied up and taken hostage by two losers. And in the just completed “Pandemonium,” she plays Sarah, the wife of the 18th century poet Samuel Coleridge.

Morton will now rest and get to know her baby until April, when she plans to return to work. By then she will probably have enough film offers that she also finds attractive and worthwhile.

“I’ve turned down a few films in the past, some of them American, that I could have done standing on my head,” she says. “The money was tremendous, but the writing was diabolical.

“Now,” she added with a sly grin, “thanks to the Woody Allen film, I can keep my integrity.”

But won’t she have another mouth to feed by then? “Ah yes,” Morton conceded. “But you see, my fee’s gone up too.”