dessa Young dropped out of her Sydney high school a couple of days after her 17th birthday. The teenager had two big Australian movie roles to her credit, her performances celebrated on the film festival circuit, and had decided year 12 meant “the learning part was over and then it was all about testing”.
Now 24, Young has been living in the US for six years – the past four of them in New York . She takes a star turn as a 1920s English maid in French director Eva Husson’s film, which comes out in Australia this week. Her character, Jane Fairchild, is prevented from marrying her secret upper-class lover Paul Sheringham by the strictures of class, gender and religion, having been raised in an orphanage where she was trained then pressed into domestic service.
Until then, Young is learning from the best, such as O’Connor, with whom she shed inhibitions in bedroom scenes. “There’s an alchemical luck to that,” says Young of their casting. “It doesn’t help to necessarily dilly dally talking about these things: we both knew what we needed to check in with each other about, and then we just got to make each other feel comfortable.”, who are broken by the death of their two sons in the trenches of war.
In that role, Young felt some of the “lostness” of her character. “I felt absolutely incapable, I felt like I was doing the worst job in the world,” she says. Really? “Yeah, I felt I was being unspecific. I was deeply uncomfortable and unsettled for six months of shooting, and then I realised, actually, I don’t think there was any way to feel comfortable and settled.”