Post by The Exodus on Sept 23, 2011 0:40:21 GMT -6
Character: Antonia “Toni” Vandeleur
Age: 35
Gender: Female
Occupation: Professor (Theatre), director, playwright
AI: Helen McCrory
Personality: When most people think of professors, they imagine scholarly, dry cerebrals who are slow to laugh and quick to drone about their dull and overly specific interests. Others still picture washed-up hippies who long for days when the philosophical ideals of yore weren’t being squashed by “The Man”. And then there’s Toni. Toni is a fast-talker with a quick wit and friendly nature. Some are off-put by her sarcasm, others by her intelligence. However, most who know her agree that she’s a good friend to have, whether for a cup of tea and deep talk or for a night wandering through Pigalle for the hell of it. She teaches two acting classes, one theatre history class, and one directing class at Descartes University.
History: Born in Rotterdam to Dutch parents, Toni was the precocious and bossy eldest child of two. Her earliest memories involve teaching her younger brother Edward the proper way to play imagination games and getting woefully exasperated when he couldn’t grasp her complex system of rules. The Vandeleurs moved to Paris when Toni was six, so her mother (a professor of medicine) could take a top position at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie. Her father, a linguist and poet, stayed home with the children and instilled in Toni a love for words. She wrote her first original piece of fiction at seven and was hooked by the heady thrill of her father’s approval. Of course, Toni’s love of language was also helpful in learning French in school and avoiding the chastising that befell Edward, who had a harder time grasping the nuances of the romance language. Toni also excelled in biological sciences under the tutelage of her brilliant mother. She dazzled teachers, meanwhile she made friends, if not easily, then well. Toni jumped from clique to clique during her formative years, collecting the best people from each group as her friends and eventually earning her the respect of most of her schoolmates, if not always their friendship.
However skilled she was academically, Toni had little love for most of her school subjects. Rather, she enjoyed the rewards and praise doled out for her marks and the connections she made with her teachers. Her real love in school were the arts, theatre in particular, much to her mother’s dismay. She wasn’t an innately stellar actress, but she worked twice as hard as the other cast and crew members to do well. It was the one thing that actually challenged her and she thrived off of it.
When the time came, there was never a question of “if” Toni would go to college. Rather, her parents and teachers waited with bated breath to know what she would study. She shocked them all by eschewing undergraduate offers at the Sorbonne and Erasmus to instead study abroad at Drama Centre London. Of course, her written English and acting, which had largely been done in French and Dutch, was scarcely enough to scrape by with and English was a trick to master. During her first year at university, Toni was a loner with a funny accent who devoted much of her free time to mastering the local language, which she learned from a barkeep in London, Timmy Rathbone. He was ten-years her senior and her first love; one that shocked her conservative and intellectual parents. She brought him home just to appall them, but things between the two didn’t get very serious. By the next year, she had mastered English, was dating a theatre history student and Timmy had taken up with his landlady. The new boyfriend, Ralph Lewis, introduced Toni to the right people—directors, producers, and other actors, and of course, Shakespeare. Toni swiftly became a specialist in the classics: Shakespeare, Chekov, Moliere, to name a few. And after a few years with the Royal Shakespeare Company after college, Toni returned to Paris for her post-graduate studies and earned her doctorate at thirty. She spent her thirty-first year abroad directing a version of “Othello” in New York City. She then spent another six months living in Verona, muddling through the Italian language and customs, to research for a reimaging of a historically-accurate “Romeo and Juliet”, which she directed and produced later that year for the RSC. When she finally returned to Paris again, she was offered a position teaching various theatre classes at Descartes University.
