Hand doubles

Hand doubles

Pianist Ivana Gavric was just about to graduate from the Royal College of Music (RCM) when the call came through. After audition by picture message - to compare her hands with those of the anonymous actress in question - her phone went and a voice said, 'Great, we'd like employ you. The film is Breaking and Entering, the director is Anthony Minghella and the actors are Juliette Binoche and Jude Law.'

Gavric's initial response was complete shock. 'When they told me that Binoche was playing a poor Bosnian woman living in London, which is exactly what I am, I thought it was a complete joke.' Until, that is, a car picked her up the following morning to take her to the shoot.

For the 26-year-old, the piano playing was the easy bit. 'For the profile scene, I had to sit behind Binoche, put my arms through her armpits and play the given piece - a simple three-part Invention by Bach - on a very rudimentary keyboard and where the keys didn't properly compress. Which was fortunate as I had great difficulty seeing the music and probably played any old note.'

Some professions are so obscure that they don't even carry a proper title. Hand doubles, music doubles, or whatever you want to call them, are a bit like that. And while the work can at first seem exciting and wide-ranging - anything from replacing the hands of a leading Hollywood star to a fortepiano performance in a period drama - don't think it's an easy way to make a fast buck. Because of the unusual nature of the work, there is no set fee. Payment, which could be anything from £300 for a 15-hour day's work, depends largely on how good a negotiator you are. But how do you get work?

'That experience was especially nerve-wracking, as I had to get it right every time,'

Like most things, it seems to be a combination of being in the right place at the right time and a little bit of luck. In Gavric's case, the opportunity came through the RCM's Woodhouse Centre. She had already appeared in an episode of BBC2's The Line Of Beauty, a three-part drama series based on Alan Hollinghurst's Man Booker Prize-winning novel. 'For that I was basically playing the part of a pianist,' she says. One episode featured a concert scene where Gavric had to play bits of a Chopin Sonata and Beethoven's Les Adieux (which was also used as part of the soundtrack), and another where she was shown warming up. 'That experience was especially nerve-wracking, as I had to get it right every time,' she says.

Like Gavric, Martin Cousin was also a student at the RCM when he was recommended to meet with the director of a new Australian film called Shine in the mid-1990s. 'They were looking for a hand double for the actor Noah Taylor, who was playing the adolescent David Helfgott - and for someone who knew Rach 3,' he says. 'Most of the time they took shots of just me playing while they focused on the keyboard, but there was a prolonged bit where I had to sit pillion-style with Noah and play on a dummy keyboard with David's own recording playing in the background. If anything, the hardest thing was actually mimicking someone else's performance, the rubatos and so on, because you're not feeling it naturally yourself. But it's a lot easier than giving a concert,' he laughs.

In terms of time, Cousin had to be on call in London for about two weeks even though, he says, the entire thing consisted of about two full days of filming. And then, because they hadn't finished in time, they had to fly him out to Adelaide to complete the concert scenes: 'The worst part was getting on a plane for 26 hours and then having to play a concert back in London four hours later!' But to make up for that, Cousin did receive a flat fee of £1,000 for his input ('They basically offered me what I thought the job was worth, so I didn't have to negotiate very much'), plus a credit on the movie.

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