Living Dahl
It's not often that a local girl gets to appear in a film with Johnny Depp but that's exactly what happened to Cecily Harris. She told Chris Morvan her tales of drama, dance, music - and rivers of chocolate
It's not often that a local girl gets to appear in a film with Johnny Depp but that's exactly what happened to Cecily Harris. She told Chris Morvan her tales of drama, dance, music - and rivers of chocolate THE scene that greets me as I pick my way through the overhanging trees of the Harris family home in a lane at the top of Petit Bot is quite bizarre.
A tiny, scandalously fit young woman is throwing martial arts shapes on the shady lawn while our photographer scrambles around on the grass to get a good shot. Welcome to the world of Cecily Harris (also known as Cecily Fay), actress, martial arts expert, singer, stunt double, performer and record producer.
Cecily was back in Guernsey for a week, taking a break from a multi-faceted, London-based career that is really starting to take off, courtesy of stunt duties in the brand new film of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Cecily, who came to Guernsey with her family when she was three months old and went to Forest School before being whisked off into the world of showbusiness, is the stunt double for both Annasophia Robb, who plays Violet Beauregarde, and Julia Winter (Veruca Salt).
Finding a woman at a suitably high level in martial arts, yet who could double for a child, could have proved a headache for director Tim Burton and the production team.
There is a stunt doubles' register, but no one on it is of the right build.
'They couldn't believe their luck when they saw my height,' said Cecily. She stepped in - and the role could prove a stepping stone for her career as an actress.
'I have done a few films lately. There were three martial arts films made in Britain last year and I'm in all of them,' she said. 'In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I doubled for Annasophia Robb and also gave her some martial arts training. There's one scene where the character has a fight with some squirrels and gets thrown down a garbage chute. I had to train with real squirrels for that and, although they're actually more frightened of you than you are of them, the problem the animal handler had was that if you get a group of them, they fight among themselves.'
Even so, for this sequence Cecily was wearing heavy prosthetics to protect her while maintaining her look, with the result that she could hardly see or hear anything.
This is the first time Cecily has done stunts for other actors, although she has done her own in previous films. She clearly had a great time making Charlie, which she was doing all last summer, from June onwards.
Burton, she said, was a bundle of nervous energy, pacing up and down and racing around the set on a bicycle, wearing stripy socks and Doctor Marten boots.
As for Johnny Depp: 'He was lovely - quite shy,' and they had some good chats about squirrels.
The production used the whole of Pinewood Studios.
They created a real chocolate river and waterfall - not actual chocolate, but using foodstuffs, not just special effects,' she said. 'It was fascinating to see how much effort and money went into a split second of film.'
To get to Pinewood from her north London home, Cecily often had to get a taxi as she had to be up and out before the tube started running. 'If I'd known how long I was going to be doing it, I might have moved to the area for a while.'
She recently did move house, in fact, and now has a large space in an old factory building in Tottenham, with room not only to live but to do her training in Pencak Silat, the Indonesian branch of the martial arts in which she specialises and which she teaches.
'It's a great building,' she enthused. 'It's full of actors, artists, sculptors and filmmakers.' And all this in an industrial estate in a not particularly salubrious part of London, the nature of the area being the trade-off that makes it affordable.
Here Cecily can also rehearse with her band, The Morrighan, which has been going for several years now, running in tandem with the film career.
Currently without a record deal, but with CDs under their belt, they make trippy-sounding dance music and have a large enough following to be able to play good-size venues such as Croydon's Fairfield Hall and the Brixton Academy.
As if this weren't enough, Cecily also has an all-girl, sword-wielding martial arts dance group called Babes with Blades, who played at Glastonbury this year. This also features Cecily's sister, Merrilees, who has just finished a year at the Royal College of Music and is shortly going to Cambridge University to study English.
Sometimes Cecily will combine both the music/dance projects, finishing a Morrighan gig and coming out for the encore with a sword, which has gone down well with audiences.
Given the fact that she was identified as a huge talent at a very young age (her acting, dancing and singing fostered by Joyce Cook, Hazel Rowe and Janet Bran) and spent her late childhood and teenage years at a stage school before embarking
on a wide-ranging career that sounds both electrifying and exhausting, you might expect Cecily to seem out of place in a quiet Guernsey setting.
But once the photo session was over and we went inside, she came across as a happy and balanced progression of the person who left the island nine years ago with a head full of dreams, some of which she has realised already, with others well on the way.
The cottage, with its wild garden and small-roomed, candle-bedecked, hippie-influenced interior, may be a far cry from a converted factory in Tottenham, but it is still very special to her and she spends as much time as she can back here, taking a break from the pace of her London life.
And now there's a chocolate factory on her CV too.
