Meeting Eileen Atkins

24 March 2007

‘Of course I am not as polished as they are and I haven’t their confidence. I couldn’t possibly, given where I came from.’ She talks about her ‘big mouth’ as if it is an external entity, quite beyond her control, and indeed sometimes it seems as if it is. One thinks of all that fuss when she let slip to a journalist that the Miami Vice heartthrob Colin Farrell, 42 years her junior, had made a pass at her. ‘I worried about how Colin would react to those awful headlines, but he came to the first night of Doubt in New York on Valentine’s Day last year and told me not to give it a second’s thought. He’s a darling boy. I went to a restaurant with him and women were virtually lying across tables asking for him, but you know, that Carly Simon song is very true when it says that “Legend’s only a lonely boy when he goes home alone”. I couldn’t possibly have gone to bed with him, though — it would not have been right.’

A lifelong insomniac, Dame Eileen has been taking Mogadon to get to sleep for the past 44 years, and doubled the dose 12 years ago. She ought to look terrible, but she is a remarkably youthful 72 with luminous pale-blue eyes, regally high cheekbones and glossy, auburn hair. She is talking to me over a mug of camomile tea in the restaurant of the Almeida theatre in north London towards the end of the run of Frank McGuinness’s There Came a Gypsy Riding. All the critics loved her, but some weren’t so sure about the play.

No matter. She knows that by the time this piece appears she will have started filming The Cranford Chronicles, a BBC1 drama serial based on the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, in which she will appear alongside Judi Dench. In plays such as The Killing of Sister George and Vivat! Vivat Regina!, films like The Dresser and on television in Smiley’s People, this woman who likes to describe herself as no more than ‘a jobbing actor’ has portrayed a variety of roles utterly convincingly. It’s helped, she reckons, that she has managed to retain a relatively low profile. ‘I have never wanted to do a TV series because people feel they get to know you when they see you regularly in the same part. I don’t want to be known. It’s useful being a nonentity.’

If she is more passionate than ever about acting, it’s hardly surprising. Each day she now regards as a gift. In the summer of 1995, when she was appearing in Indiscretions on Broadway, she discovered that she had breast cancer. She underwent a lumpectomy and six months of chemotherapy. ‘The cancer is in remission, but it has still changed me. It’s given me a determination to live life to the full. I got my diagnosis about the same time as Linda McCartney. We had a mutual friend in Carla Lane who put us in touch. I had been diagnosed a month before Linda, and was struck, when I talked to her, by her determination, courage and good humour.