Dragging Blighty up red carpet by blue collar

Sally Hawkins says the equality battle in <i> Made in Dagenham </i> is still being fought today. Photo / Supplied.

A Britflick on the verge of global success has a star in common with a New Zealand film.

Nervous, petite and a bit shy, Sally Hawkins is about to become one of Britain's most successful exports - and to give the town of Dagenham an unexpected moment of international glory.

The 34-year-old actress from south London has starring roles in six films due for release. That includes Love Birds which she shot in Auckland earlier in the year and has her playing opposite Rhys Darby in a romantic comedy from the team behind local hit Second Hand Wedding. But the first of Hawkins' forthcoming films is British movie Made in Dagenham, telling the story of the 1968 strike at the Ford car works in the east London suburb.

The film also stars Miranda Richardson, Jaime Winstone, Andrea Riseborough and Rosamund Pike, with Bob Hoskins and Kenneth Cranham as the male leads. The film celebrates the 300 women machine workers at the car plant who walked out when their demand for the same pay grading as the men in the factory was refused. Their action led to the introduction of the Equal Pay Act in 1970.

Hawkins' performance as the feisty Rita O'Grady, the machinist at the centre of the story, has already been seen by selected audiences in sneak preview screenings in America and is expected to place her on the Hollywood A-list. Like the international hits The Full Monty and Calendar Girls, Made in Dagenham presents an appealingly gritty, yet plucky image of the British working class.

Karen Durbin, the film critic for the US edition of Elle, has predicted that American women will love the film. "Nigel Cole [the director] has pulled off something we seldom do well in the States, a political movie that's touching and a lot of fun but doesn't sugar-coat the facts," she wrote in a recent feature. "The whole cast is good, but for me the standouts are Sally Hawkins' lovely, low-key turn as the impromptu leader of the walk-out and Miranda Richardson's wily, hard-ass Barbara Castle."

Just as the film Billy Elliot succeeded in taking the 1980s miners' strike to the cinema audiences of middle America, Made In Dagenham's British producers, BBC Films, Stephen Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen, have been told that Michael Barker, the influential head of Sony Distribution, believes the film will strike the same chord and make Hawkins a big star.

The actress, who won a Golden Globe for her lead role in Mike Leigh's 2008 Happy-Go-Lucky, is also to appear in a new version of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre due to premiere at the Venice film festival next month and in Never Let Me Go, an adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel by Alex Garland, author of The Beach. This year Hawkins has also been playing the Irish republican activist Bernadette Devlin in the lead role of The Roaring Girl and will appear in Submarine, from the novel by Joe Dunthorne.

Made in Dagenham is directed by Nigel Cole, who made Calendar Girls in 2003, and he can see similarities in the two films.

"It's that idea of ordinary women getting caught up in something much bigger than them," he says. "But these are very different women to Calendar Girls [and it's a] very different story."

Woolley showed the film to some of the original women involved in the strike earlier this month. "They loved it," he said, "and particularly the way we made it clear that they went on strike because they were being paid as unskilled workers."

The film was inspired by an edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme The Reunion that brought the machinists back together after 40 years.

"I was fascinated by their story, and what struck me was how innocent and unpoliticised they were," said Woolley. "All they wanted was a fair deal."

Hawkins also sees the film, released in Britain in October, as recognition of the women's battle. "Sadly, equality is very much still a fight we're fighting. In the film industry - again - it's men calling the shots and it always has been. It frustrates me enormously," she said. "As the women of Dagenham showed us, It's so important to fight for what you believe is right, even when it's scary."

LOWDOWN

What: Made in Dagenham, blue collar British film about women car workers striking for equal pay

When: Opens in New Zealand on October 28

- Observer