Miraculous Miranda

The debut of the disingenuous ingenue

No, says Miranda Richardson, now appearing in Dance with a Stranger, she's no relation to the late Sir Ralph. Just in from London, Richardson, twenty-seven and "a Pisces," has flawless English skin, dyed honey hair, coral lipstick, and imposing earrings. She was a peroxide blonde as Ruth Ellis in Dance, a dark, moody film that was about as boffo as box office gets in England. Ellis was the last woman hanged in England, for a desperate crime of passion—shooting her upper-class lover (Rupert Everett). It's an eerily stunning film debut, and she has worked steadily ever since. She maintains that there's nothing unusual about the way she broke into films—''I wasn't working in Woolie's or anything"—but after years of training in repertory theater she did get a starring role on only her second try. Nowadays, she says brightly, "people are sending me scripts too fast for me to read." Then she adds modestly, "But it's not so many things—I'm just a slow reader."

Cyndi Stivers