ROMOLA GARAI IS NO THANKLESS CHILD BRITISH ACTRESS TOOK TIME OFF FROM FILMS TO DO 'KING LEAR'.

Byline: EVAN HENERSON

>LA.COM 

Common sense -- and your agent -- will tell you that it's folly to take a year-long sabbatical from the movies when you're 25 and your career is heating up.

But Romola Garai, the British actress, would politely disagree. That is why there was no hesitation over her auditioning for the Royal Shakespeare Company's productions of "King Lear" and "The Seagull" or over accepting the parts of good daughter Cordelia and love-smacked actress Nina once they were offered.

"This is my life," says Garai, who will be on the big screen soon in Joe Wright's hotly anticipated "Atonement."

"This is a continuation of what I always do. It wasn't something I deliberated over."

The RSC double bill, which concludes its run at UCLA's Royce Hall on Sunday, returns to London, where it will play through mid-January with Ian Mc-Kellen headlining "Lear." Prior to joining the productions, Garai's professional stage experience was limited to a 2004 West End appearance in Michael Hastings' "Calico" as the mentally unhinged daughter of James Joyce.

That production aside, her career has been largely in films, often with classic pedigrees: "Nicholas Nickleby," "Vanity Fair," Masterpiece Theatre's "Daniel Deronda" and, most recently, Kenneth Branagh's HBO film of Shakespeare's "As You Like It."

Garai starred in the ill-fated "Dirty Dancing" sequel, "Havana Nights," opposite Diego Luna and in Woody Allen's "Scoop." She next appears in Wright's "Atonement," already considered an Oscar contender, playing the younger incarnation of Vanessa Redgrave's character, and in French director Francois Ozon's film "Angel," portraying an eccentric British writer.

The daughter of a banker, Garai was born in Hong Kong and spent part of her childhood in Singapore. In the West part of the United Kingdom, Garai saw the RSC perform at Stratford and later in London.

"Obviously, if you love theater or if you've been brought up watching plays, inevitably you're going to see quite a few productions, since they have such standing in U.K.," she says.

Garai left the University of London -- where she was studying English -- after landing the lead role in 2002's "I Capture the Castle," and never returned to school. Among McKellen and the other drama school-trained thespians of the RSC, Garai admits she has entered "a different world."

"I'm relatively young in the industry, and I'm not a trained actor," Garai says. "It can be awe-inspiringly intimidating to watch someone like Ian, who has such a technical command of the auditorium.

" 'Humanity' is such an overused word," she continues. "But with Ian, you truly understand how much 'Lear' is a play about a man who is a father. I'm coming at it at that specific point of view since I'm playing his daughter."

Although he jokes that in casting the 5-foot-10 Garai, director Trevor Nunn violated the preferred practice of giving a Lear a "small Cordelia" to have to carry on stage, McKellen nonetheless applauds the actress's work and her stage ethic.

"I couldn't imagine a better Cordelia for the role," McKellen says. "It's also exciting to see her at the outset of her career, at least on stage. It's moving to me that someone of the strongly burgeoning film career she has right now would take more a than year out of her young life and play Shakespeare and Chekhov around the world."

"She's a natural. She's a Shakespearean natural," adds Branagh who cast Garai as Celia in "As You Like It." "She's a combination of wit and emotion, two great things for the classical world, and she's very intelligent, which lends a lovely sort of bite to her work."

Evan Henerson [phone]

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