Sunday 24 April 2011

Anne-Marie Duff

With her performance in Cause C�l�bre a sensation, and past roles as Joan of Arc, Margot Fonteyn and the spirited Fiona in Shameless, Britain's brightest theatre star won't sleep until she's conquered the world

When Anne-Marie Duff turns up at her local caf� in Crouch End, north London, she apologises for being a little sleepy, having not long woken up. That may seem like slacker indulgence at 11 in the morning, but not when you consider that she has a nine-month-old baby boy (Brendan) to look after and a lead role every night in Terence Rattigan's Cause C�l�bre at the Old Vic to attend to.

Viewed with that knowledge in mind it's a wonder she seems so fresh-faced and youthful. The alarming fact is that Duff, who over the past decade has established herself as one of our leading young actresses, turned 40 last year. I tell her that I thought there'd been some kind of printing error when I read this, which, of course, is guaranteed to meet her approval ? "Cheers love," she says, beaming with a flattered grin, "I suspect by the end of this job my age will be more evident."

Like many people, I first became aware of Duff in 2004, when she played the spirited Fiona Gallagher in Shameless. The show, written by Paul Abbott, was wired with energy, a kind of breathless zeal and creativity that was mesmerising to behold. And at the centre of it was the preternaturally capable Fiona.

She was meant to be in her early 20s, but Duff was in her early 30s, yet looked about 17. Seven years and a child later, she still looks back-dated. She's got a slightly dreamy way of talking, which may be due to motherhood, the sleep she's just woken from, or her stage character, who's a kind of wafting, quixotic femme fatale. Along with the red woollen hat she's wearing, the effect is to make her seem slightly ethereal and artistic, but it's obvious that she has that protean gift of being able, with the slightest gesture or wardrobe change, to become anyone.

At the moment she's Alma Rattenbury, a rather posh, louche English musician in the 1930s with a high sex drive, a taste for alcohol and young men, and a much older husband who is murdered by her teenage handyman. Rattigan, that most delicate and restrained of English playwrights, completed Cause C�l�bre just before his death in 1977. It's based on a real-life murder case from the 1930s that had long obsessed the writer, whose illustrious theatrical career was effectively ended by the arrival of John Osborne and the Angry Young Men in the 1950s.

Duff plays Alma as a life-loving, liberated spirit who wants to have maximum fun with minimum fuss. "She is just a very physical person," says Duff, who has a tactile way of expressing herself. "She's engaged with her nerve endings."

It's an intriguing anachronism of a play. Written in the era of punk rock but concerned with the suffocating morality of pre-war, provincial Britain, it feels at once almost parodically stagey and touchingly heartfelt. Duff is a delight, all blowsy flirtation and boozy frolicking. Without spoiling the ending of the play, there's also a tragic quality to the part. Still, while the audience seemed to love it, it's not a play that cries out for a new production. What did Duff see in it?

"Well the fact that it was the centenary [of Rattigan's birth] was interesting," she says a little unconvincingly. "The overt sexual language of the play is surprising and Rattigan writes brilliantly for women, he just does."

Duff grew up on a council estate in Hayes, an unremarkable suburb of west London, and she told one interviewer that she still feels "a bit common". I ask her if the choice of role had something to do with playing against type, but as she points out, she doesn't have a type. "I don't tend to get asked to do the same thing. I thought after I played Fiona, 'Here we go?' But it's like a fruit machine, I never know what's going to come out."

It's true: you'd be hard pressed to see a recurring pattern in Duff's CV. She's run the gamut from working-class heroine to Queen Elizabeth, from Cordelia (opposite Ian Holm's celebrated Lear) to Margot Fonteyn in the BBC drama Margot. It's an impressive list of roles, especially when you consider that Duff was a shy girl from a background that wasn't exactly steeped in the theatre.

She plays down the narrative of girl-from-modest-means-made-good, noting that her parents (Irish immigrants who worked in menial jobs) were keen readers and encouraging of her early interest in acting. Not many teenagers read books on Ellen Terry, but Duff did and she knew from a young age that she wanted to be an actress.

"I was conscious that I didn't fit in with all that Thatcherite crap," she recalls. "Suddenly in the 80s it was all about going to get a job in Barclays and I remember thinking I can't even swallow that, it tastes so foul. You're so self-righteous when you're young."

I asked how being self-righteous fitted in with being bashful and she says she was only self-righteous about what she wanted to be. About everything else she was timid; a mousey, withdrawn girl. "If you'd asked me to talk to a boy I'd have shat myself," she laughs. "Boys, friends, I didn't have any of that."

The social life came along when she won a place at the Drama Centre, the drama school in north London that produced near contemporaries such as John Simm, Paul Bettany and Helen McCrory. It was a formative, self-affirming time in her life. "I lost my virginity," she says matter-of-factly. "I fell in love. I thought, 'This is great. It fits.'"

But it was also an exacting atmosphere, disciplined and relentlessly demanding. "There were all these rules you had to obey, often for intangible reasons. I was always receiving these letters saying that if I didn't get my shit together I'd be out. We used to call Central [School of Arts and Drama] Butlin's and they used to call us 'the Trauma Centre'. It was very tough on women, but then it did produce actresses like Helen McCrory and Geraldine James, people with great emotional depth."

She left college in 1993, "just when that whole Brit cool stuff was beginning". The intervening years, she says, have seen a huge transformation in acting and the culture at large, in which celebrity has had a deforming impact on so much, not least the idea of how young women should look and behave. She doesn't envy actresses emerging into the business nowadays.

"It's a curious time for young women," she says. "There's this obsession with physical perfection. Jesus wept, what teenagers are putting themselves through! That's a terrifying development that luckily I didn't have to confront because one's so self-conscious anyway."

Although she has an attractive face, warm and animated, Duff does not conform to the model looks that increasingly dominate casting decisions. She's in that convenient position of being pretty enough to play the lead, but also blessed with enough imperfections to do character parts. That, and a large talent, should serve her well over a career that's shaping up to be long and substantial.

Not that she's immune to the contemporary focus on a very specific kind of beauty. She says reviewers have even written that she's not attractive enough to play certain roles.

"It's never enjoyable watching yourself," she says, "because you're never as good looking as you hope you are. You're not expecting to be Penelope Cruz? but I'm a female of the species. I have my hang-ups and all of that."

Nor has she entirely escaped the clutches of celebrity culture. She's married to James McAvoy whose successful Hollywood career includes starring roles in Atonement, The Last King of Scotland and this summer's most anticipated blockbuster, X-Men: First Class. They met when they played lovers in Shameless. "We were living with the young 'uns, in the same block of flats, and because I was playing someone younger, I felt a bit frothy. The four of us, James, Dean [Lennox Kelly] Max[ine Peake] and I hung out all the time. Manchester's a great city to be in, and none of us were married with kids, so we all had a ball."

Both she and McAvoy are studious about avoiding celebrity-couple questioning, taking care not to talk about their relationship and private life. It's an admirable stance in many ways and probably a wise one, too: some newspapers and magazines have been known to get a little over-excited about the fact that she's eight years older than McAvoy.

She takes a similarly disconnected approach to reviews, which she says she hasn't read since 1996, when she appeared in War and Peace at the National. She says she's successfully avoided seeing or hearing anything about Cause C�l�bre by not reading newspaper art sections and only checking her emails on her phone, where there's "no temptation to massage the keys and find yourself somewhere?"

The system hasn't always worked, however. When she was appearing in George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan at the National in 2007, she was equally determined to banish reviews from her eyeline. "I thought, no, I love this, and it's about what we've been through as a company. Then I got in one night and put the telly on and the Late Review was on, and just at that moment Tim Lott and Jeanette Winterson were saying, 'Well, she's? all right.' My husband was filming away abroad ? people are never there when you need them. And I called him and he said, 'OK, I'm going to have to tell you about a couple of nice reviews, just to cheer you up.'

The truth is that Duff, who has all the makings of a theatrical dame in the Judi Dench mould, has had almost nothing but nice, and very often rave, notices. This is partly because she is a fine and accomplished actress, but I suspect there's another reason, which is not unrelated. Somehow, without trying to be familiar or upstanding, she conveys a winning decency as a person, someone who has a naughty side, but is also fundamentally trustworthy. It's an odd mix of innocence and knowing, the girlish and the maternal. This quality, whether she's aware of it or not, can't help finding its way into her characterisations. It was there in Fiona Gallagher, and it's there in Alma Rattenbury. You could call it a kind of truth, even when the age she appears is such a persuasive lie. ?

Anne-Marie Duff stars in Cause C�l�bre at the Old Vic until 11 June (oldvictheatre.com)


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/apr/24/anne-marie-duff-interview

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