At home in Sannie's skin

Local cinemas will today screen Skin, the latest in what feels like a string of high-profile South African-themed movies.

The film is a retelling of one of the most moving stories to emerge from apartheid South Africa - that of Sandra Laing, a girl born white but reclassified as black under the racist laws of the 1950s and cast out by her family and by her Afrikaner community.

Sandra's mother, Sannie, is played by veteran actress Alice Krige. Originally from Upington, Northern Cape, Krige left for England in 1976 to pursue a career in acting. She got her big break soon after, starring in the 1981 Academy Award-winning film Chariots of Fire. She has maintained a busy career on both sides of the Atlantic, often stealing the show with her supporting roles.

Though she has yet to achieve Charlize-level stardom, Krige is one of the first South African actresses to make it in Hollywood.

What's more, her penchant for sci-fi and horror films - she appeared in Ghost Story, Sleepwalkers, Stay Alive and Silent Hill - has drawn the adulation of geeks the world over. The SF acclaim reached its peak as a result of her starring role in Star Trek: First Contact, in which she was the strangely seductive arch-villainess, the Borg Queen, a character who will be spotted at any Trekkie convention today.

For Krige, Skin marks her first big-screen South African role since the 1970s.

"Typically, American stars get cast in the lead roles in South African movies," she says in her husky voice and unaccented English. "When they did A Dry White Season I think it was Susan Sarandon who got the part.

"I'm immensely grateful to have been cast. [The Sannie role] was offered to an American movie star who shall remain nameless. She turned it down because she wouldn't play a woman so under the heel of her husband."

In the film, Sannie is a loving mother who initially tries to shield her daughter from the cruel scrutiny of the white community and of the apartheid police. But, as a dutiful Afrikaner wife, she eventually submits to the will of her stern husband, Abraham, played by Aussie actor Sam Neil. When Abraham is unable to accept Sandra when the girl takes a black man as a lover, Sannie loses her daughter forever.

It was Sannie's internal conflict that drew Krige, who was only dimly aware of Sandra's story, to the role.

"For me, Sannie's is a heartbreaking story. On a certain level, she was as trapped as Sandra and in the end she's as emotionally damaged as Sandra. She didn't suffer the same hardship, but if you look at photos of her she looked so full of despair."

As part of her preparation, Krige met the real-life Sandra many times, an experience she found moving and useful for her performance. But, she says, there was surprisingly little homework to do.

"I usually do an enormous amount of homework for a role. This time, curiously, I did less. For once, I wasn't trying to get under the skin of a culture; for once, it was my own culture. I'm so used to imagining I'm Russian or Hungarian or German.

"I grew up in a small town in the northern Cape that would have been very similar to Piet Retief [Laing's home town]. So I spent a lot of time re-imagining my childhood and I spent some time with a voice coach to fine-tune the accent."

Despite years of being abroad, Krige still firmly identifies herself as South African.

"I am South African, I'm not American or British. You have to live somewhere else to realise how South African you really are."

The film, says Krige, is true to her childhood experience of apartheid, but its value extends beyond an accurate portrait of apartheid life.

"It speaks of the cruelty of it, and the legacy, which we're trying to cope with today - like so many apartheid films. But I'm particularly grateful to have been a part of this one because it holds up the possibility of redemption, because Sandra is able to forgive her mother. Sandra sought her out and tried to reconnect with her; it's a testament to how remarkable Sandra is, the story of an everyday hero."