9/19/2023 0 Comments Starstruck actors“I was about 15 when it finally went to s. “I’ve always been very independent from a very young age, probably to do with my parents’ divorce,” she said. With ‘Occupied City,’ filmmaker Steve McQueen adapts his wife’s house-by-house, street-by-street guide to the city’s history under German occupation. Movies Column: It’s hard to watch a 4-hour documentary on Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Her father, Mark Powley, was a TV actor best known for starring in the police procedural “The Bill.” Her mother, Janis Jaffa, worked in casting - commercials, mostly. ”Experiences like that made me more proud to be Jewish,” she said.īoth of her parents worked in the industry. When she was 7, a classmate told her they could no longer be partners on the walk to swim lessons because her mother didn’t want her holding hands with a Jewish person. Powley’s parents had an interfaith marriage and she didn’t grow up very religious, but at a young age she embraced her Jewish heritage, sensing that it was something to be defended. “They thought they were in New York.” Her grandmother grew up speaking Yiddish in an Irish accent, and was safe in Dublin throughout World War II, “But you grow up with that weight of that part of history running through your family,” she said. “They accidentally got off during the fueling stop in Ireland, and the boat left,” she said. Bound for New York, they landed in Dublin. Her family’s origin story is both funny and poignant: her maternal great-grandparents fled their home, near the border of Russia and Lithuania, during the pogroms of the early 20th century. Powley seems to take the same approach in conversation, pivoting nimbly between the heavy themes of “A Small Light” to lighter subjects: getting starstruck over the cast of “Friends” or her obsession with the latest season of “Love Is Blind.” (“Pure entertainment,” she calls it.)įor Powley, who is Jewish, “A Small Light” was also personal. We all know living through the pandemic, which was a really stressful time for the entire world, but I’m sure everyone can admit that they laughed about the adversity of the situation. “Tragedy can’t really exist without comedy. Powley said she was particularly drawn to the surprising moments of humor that creators Tony Phelan and Joan Rater wove into the narrative. Powley’s humanizing performance as Miep - who’s vivacious and irreverent, not saintly - also lends extra power to this tale of everyday heroism. She’s headstrong and impulsive, but also open-minded and compassionate - qualities that developed during her difficult childhood: because of food shortages in Austria, her home country, after World War I, she was sent to live with a Dutch foster family.Īfter the Nazis occupy the Netherlands and begin deporting Jews, Miep, newly married to Jan Gies (Joe Cole), helps the Franks and four others go into hiding in the annex, risking her life to bring them food and supplies.Įven though it’s revisiting a well-known tragic story, “A Small Light” feels urgent - and not just because we live in a time when tech billionaires, elected politicians and rap stars traffic openly in antisemitic tropes. The series, which concludes its run on NatGeo on Monday (and is available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu), follows Miep beginning in 1933, when Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber) hires her to work at his pectin company. Powley was worried it would be “another dusty historical drama,” full of “ ‘Downton Abbey’ language,” as she put it. Her resistance to historical material was challenged when she was approached about playing the lead role in “A Small Light,” a limited series about Miep Gies - one of the brave civilians who helped eight Jews, including Anne Frank, hide in a secret annex for two years in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, and she saved Anne’s diary after her arrest in August 1944. I often find myself feeling really distanced from it,” she said between gulps of iced coffee on a recent morning in Manhattan, still adjusting to the time change after arriving from London a day earlier. “I’ve always really shied away from period stuff. There was Minnie, the hormonally supercharged 15-year-old she played in “ The Diary of a Teenage Girl” Claire, a sexually assertive production assistant in “ The Morning Show” Kelsey, Pete Davidson’s spray-tanned friend with benefits in “ The King of Staten Island” and Birdy, a garrulous twentysomething Londoner in “ Everything I Know About Love.”
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