An active imagination

“She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so,” writes Ian McEwan in his novel “Atonement.” He is describing 13-year-old Briony Tallis, one of recent literature’s most maddening heroines, brainy but impetuous, controlling but immature and blind to the cues of her heart and others’. “Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing,” McEwan writes -- an ominous foreshadowing of how Briony, in her ferocious need to make sense of a narrative beyond her ken, naively destroys her sister’s and her lover’s lives. It’s the act that dooms the young girl to a life of “Atonement.”

The film “Atonement” opens on Briony tapping away on her manual typewriter her first play, “The Trials of Arabella.” Snatching the completed project, she determinedly marches through her grand mansion of a home, her thin, tiny body turning corners at precise right angles, her gauzy white child’s dress not quite covering the manic certainty with which she holds herself. While the posters of “Atonement” triumph the presence of the grown-up star Keira Knightley, the film wouldn’t work without the innocent destructiveness of 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan.

“This is what I try to do with everything -- is just be the person,” says Ronan, at breakfast with her parents in a Los Angeles hotel. “Be the person I’m playing. That’s what acting is. You’re pretending to be someone else.”

Ronan flew in the previous night from Pennsylvania to attend the “Atonement” premiere, and she’s leaving in a few hours. In person, she has none of Briony’s strait-laced quality. Dressed in a striped T-shirt and high-waisted jeans, she looks as limber and slouchy as any teenager, with a clear, open face and shiny brown hair that tumbles down to her shoulders. She has a casually cheery manner far from the automaton, preternaturally grown-up quality of some child actors. More surprisingly, she speaks in a thick Irish accent.

DAD AS ACTING PARTNER

Ronan might be an acting savant. In a time when there are more than a few talented 13-year-olds around (such as Abigail Breslin and Dakota Fanning), Ronan has managed to scoop up a raft of the most desired children’s parts. In the coming year, she stars opposite Bill Murray in “City of Ember,” director Gil Kenan’s live-action fantasy follow-up to “Monster House.” She plays Catherine Zeta-Jones’ daughter and con partner in “Death Defying Acts” and, most notably, inhabits the role of 14-year-old Susie Salmon in Peter Jackson’s upcoming screen version of “The Lovely Bones.”

Ronan, whose first name is pronounced “Sertia” (it rhymes with inertia, one publicist helpfully points out) lives most of the year with her parents in the Irish countryside, two hours from Dublin. She attended a village school with just three teachers and 59 pupils. Ronan didn’t do the child auditioning circuit but sent videotaped auditions she’d made with her dad, Paul, a well-known Irish stage actor who’s appeared in such films as “Veronica Guerin” and “The Devil’s Own.” He and his wife, Monica, and a friend are all eating with Saoirse, their only child.

In the case of “Atonement,” she and Paul Ronan played Briony and Cecilia (her older sister), in a scene in which the two sisters were lying on the lawn on a hot, hot afternoon. The real Ronan home has a plush garden alongside a river.

“Dad, remember when you used to do -- ‘Cee, what do you think it would be like to be someone else? Cooler, I should hope,’ ” Ronan switches into a flawless English accent, as she quotes lines from the movie. Paul Ronan laughs.

“He used to do Keira’s accent and do her voice. And put on a wig and dress,” cracks Saoirse. She’s so deadpan that it takes a moment to realize she’s totally joking.

“I still can’t fit into Keira’s dresses,” quips her father. “They’re a bit snug.”

It’s clear the family is tight. Her parents still seem slightly surprised that their daughter turned out to be so talented.

CREATIVE IMPULSES

When she was a small child, they used to listen to her create elaborate fantasies with her dolls. “She’d invent them in her mind. It was just amazing. She had great ear for accents, American and English,” recalls Paul Ronan. “It was very entertaining to watch a child so young be so inventive. Coming from Ireland, you usually have a lot of family, with a lot of kids, and you see them in action, but very rarely do you see a child with such innate imagination.”

Describing the turbulent relations between her “Toy Story” Woody doll and her Polly Pockets, Saoirse says, “They used to have affairs with each other, with the help of an English soap opera called ‘Coronation Street.’ ”

“That’s not a reflection on us,” adds her mother, with a smile.

Undeniably, Ronan’s imaginative instincts have carried her far. “Atonement” director Joe Wright remembers seeing her Briony videotaped audition: “The conviction of her performance was there even at that early stage and her total inhabitation of the character.”

Wright says the real Ronan is “totally the opposite from Briony in every way -- warm, very, very funny, very generous with her spirit and incredibly smart. She was my best friend on the set, really. The one thing she does have in common with Briony is an extraordinary imagination. It’s that imagination she uses to empathize with the character. There’s no sense of her dragging it up from inside -- there’s no sense of emotional recall in her [acting method]. It’s all the projection of her imagination and an act of empathy.

“It’s very, very healthy as well,” he continues. “There’s no mopping up to do with her emotionally after each scene. She’s doing a scene where she’s crying or scared or intimidated, and we’d all be watching and be scared or crying or frightened. When it was over, we’d be left in that state, and she’d be up and asking where the tea and biscuits were.”

Ronan says she just stumbled into acting when her father’s agent called and asked if she wanted to audition for an Irish TV series, “The Clinic,” which she did as a lark, and won the part. Another series followed, as did an amusing turn as Michelle Pfeiffer’s daughter in the American film “I Could Never Be Your Woman,” which has not come out in the States yet. “By the time I got to ‘Atonement,’ I knew this is what I wanted to do. This was such a meaty role. There’s no other character like her.”

Ronan hasn’t read the books of “Atonement” or “The Lovely Bones,” as they both touch on topics that aren’t suitable for her yet, she says.

“The Lovely Bones” was another audition that Ronan did with her father on videotape. She had never even met Jackson, or his collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, when her agent called out of the blue to say she’d landed the part.

“It wasn’t one of those things where you hear about it and you jump up and down and scream. We just sat there [on the couch in their living room] and we’re trying to figure out what they just said. ‘Wait a minute, I’ve been cast in a Peter Jackson film.’ For a few days, it was weird. I was just trying to get my head around it.”

Based on the Alice Sebold bestseller, “The Lovely Bones” is the story of 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who’s raped and murdered by a pedophile and narrates her story from heaven as she looks down on her family trying to cope with the tragedy.

Ronan loves Susie as much as she does Briony.

“It’s a funny script and a funny movie,” she says of “The Lovely Bones,” which she’s now filming in Pennsylvania and New Zealand, Jackson’s homeland and the stand-in for heaven. “It makes people think -- even though someone has passed, they haven’t really gone and they’re still with you. After doing ‘The Lovely Bones,’ I feel I’m able to put my mind at ease a little more. I don’t know what happens after you die, but it does put your mind at ease when you see Susie. She tries to make a connection with the living, and she does. But just little connections. She never gets to give her mom or dad a hug again. She has to learn to let go. That’s what her family has to do as well. That’s their journey -- to learn to let go.”

--

rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com