A photograph of Portugal's Beatriz Batarda in the Shooting Stars booklet shows classic Southern European beauty: raven-black hair, a fine jaw, slight soudade - Portuguese melancholy - in those olive eyes.
But she appears in Jeanne Waltz's short film O que te quero, screening today in competition, as the almost Celtic, tawny-haired girlfriend of the protagonist.
Then she appears one morning in the CineCenter almost unrecognisable, as a willowy Kristen Scott-Thomas-ish figure (above), speaking rather plummy English with an endearing English glottal-stop and Anglo-Saxon irony in her eyes.
By all accounts a superb theatre actress, she played the daughter of her real-life cousin, Leonor Silveira, Manoel de Oliveira's muse, in Abraham Valley; Batarda turned in her finest film performance in Oliveira's La Caixa.
Currently studying at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she is now, she says, attempting to play herself. "I was forced to grow very fast. I rarely got a chance to grow, to push my boundaries. I'm very passionate, but I sometimes lose coherence. What I need is more control, to then let myself go."
If being unrecognisable in the morning is all part and parcel of stardom, Beatriz Batarda has already made it. Or, perhaps more likely, she could yet make an original contribution to Portuguese filmmaking, coming in from a different angle, bringing class and control, pushing the boundaries of a new Portuguese cinema. John Hopewell
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