Earlier this year, an Observer reader asked me the question: “Which actor do you think has produced the greatest quality of work across their career?” My answer was Kate Dickie. The Scottish star made a splash in Andrea Arnold’s directorial feature debut, Red Road, in 2006, for which she won a Scottish Bafta, and has gone on to appear in a bewilderingly diverse array of films. These range from Ridley Scott’s sci-fi blockbuster Prometheus (2012) to Robert Eggers’s indie chiller The Witch (2015), Tom Geens’s mysterious, grief-stricken Couple in a Hole (also 2015, for which Dickie won a second Scottish Bafta), and more recently David Lowery’s epic chivalric poem adaptation The Green Knight (2021). In some of these films Dickie takes the lead; in others she plays a supporting role. Crucially, in none of them does she give less than 100%. And as I said in response to the reader’s question: “You can watch three Kate Dickie films back to back and not realise you’re watching the same person.”
“That has actually happened quite a lot,” says Dickie, who is guest of honour next weekend at Screenplay, the Shetland film festival that I have proudly co-curated for more than a decade. “I’ve had people tell me, ‘Oh, I saw a film you were in and I didn’t even realise it was you.’ That’s great because it means that you’re doing your job properly – although it’s maybe not so great for networking. But my whole thing with acting is that I’m here to tell these characters’ stories as best I can, even if they’re not at a great point in their lives. I think I’ve got one of those faces that changes with the characters I play – I’m not a ‘pretty’ person, but I’ve got strong features. And to be honest I generally don’t do a lot of press or interviews or photoshoots because I’m not really bothered about how I look, and I tend to feel that the less you know about me outside of the roles I play the better.”
