We meet in the late afternoon at a jazzy little bistro near the Old Vic. I hadn’t quite prepared myself for the sheer visual impact of Anna Chancellor. Imposingly tall and wearing a simple glamorous frock, she rises to greet me. The dispositions of her face — the dimpled chin, the high cheekbones and the smoky blue eyes — combine in an extraordinary synthesis of softness, elegance and power. It’s like looking at a beautifully designed weapon. She’s playing Amanda alongside Toby Stephens, as Elyot, in Jonathan Kent’s production of Private Lives at the Gielgud. The show originated in Chichester last autumn. ‘I’m thrilled it’s going into town. But I wouldn’t have been’ — and she plunges a made-up dagger into her throat — ‘if we hadn’t. I’d have felt very lucky to have had a go anyway.’
How do you keep it fresh? Play jokes on each other?
‘I don’t think we will, no,’ she says, evidently having considered it. ‘We arrive early at the theatre and play loads of music and dance a lot beforehand. You’ve got to take having fun seriously.’
What kind of dancing?
‘The Charleston to Iggy Pop. Toby tends not to. He doesn’t really like dancing. He’ll be doing his stretching by the side of the stage.’
How does she deal with the ‘high’ after a performance. ‘I hate the adrenalin. I feel like I’ve been touched by a wand,’ she says. ‘Acquire a smack habit,’ I counsel. ‘I wish I could. You can’t nowadays. It’s so yesterday, heroin. Sometimes I bicycle in on my electric bike. And I bicycle home again. Yeah, I know, electric, that’s cheating. I talk too loudly [back at home, she means]. I don’t drink, you see. So I talk too loudly. You probably can’t imagine me being loud, can you?’
Last winter she played the original Moneypenny in a TV biography of Ian Fleming starring Dominic Cooper. ‘I was his assistant at the Admiralty. And Dominic would be getting off with all these wonderful actresses and I was the one who was rather strict and loving and clipped and dutiful. Buttoned-up, with a wry sense of humour and a slightly pained heart. And a soft spot for Fleming but he’s much younger. In the script they did have a kiss and I went, “No no no no no no no no. This is never happening. Never happening.”’
They took it out?
‘Yup. I guarded her chastity. I can hardly believe they actually went with my suggestion.’
I certainly can. She’s articulate, imaginative, and constantly on the hunt for fresh problems to analyse and remedy. But she conceals her exceptional mental powers, unconsciously, I suppose, behind a window-display of flirtatious scattiness. Our 60 minutes whizz past and I have to work hard not to succumb to what she calls her ‘strident and controlling’ manner. She describes a warm-up exercise for actors, which she devised, requiring the participants to stare into each other’s eyes for two minutes. ‘It’s really embarrassing. You go through a very weird feeling. Shall we do it?’ ‘Er no.’ ‘Ah, Lloyd. You’re a coward, you’re a coward, you’re a coward,’ she chants, tauntingly. When we discuss a celebrity scandal involving coke and prostitutes she supplies me with the correct phrases to use and dictates them into my machine. ‘Yeah, the thing is, Anna,’ I say, hoping to salvage some masculine pride, ‘this is my bloody article, and I’ll write it the way I want.’
Those who direct her on stage are probably unaware that the posh bird playing the lead is scrutinising and dissecting their every move. The key to good direction, she says, is ‘to understand who’s got the best idea in the room, at the moment. If you’re really on it, you must be as open open open as possible so you miss no suggestion. And then you’re like a conductor. You must let your ego go, and not mind that it’s not your idea, that’s fatal — to fight for your own idea is fatal — but to sort through who’s got the good ideas and build the accuracy of the story through those ideas.’ She has a suggestion that would instantly raise the standard of stage directing everywhere. ‘If I were a director I’d watch other directors.’ She concedes that vanity and paranoia would never allow this to happen. ‘They’re like little gods in those rooms.’
It’s a job that holds no appeal for her. ‘I like to see odd things, “event” things. Someone doing something in the Rotherhithe Tunnel.’
After leaving drama school in the 1980s she spent many years unemployed and devoted herself to raising her daughter, Poppy. ‘Looking back, it was incredibly lucky because to be busy as an actor with a child is quite hard.’ She directed pantomimes, ‘in a mad, chaotic crazy way’, in church halls near her home in Notting Hill. ‘We did a nativity play in my front room.’ ‘Were you Mary?’ ‘I was Salome.’ ‘In the nativity?’ ‘Yeah. John the Baptist and Herod came into it. And my friend Laura gave birth to Poppy on stage. And my sisters were the three kings carrying bottles of Rive Gauche.’
Her sole ambition is to develop her craft but she’s reluctant to discuss this publicly. ‘The majority aren’t interested: actors boring on about their acting. Quite interesting, isn’t it? People like to watch acting. They don’t want to know how the actor got there. They think it was effortless. And the actor is very irritating if he wants to analyse his work. Yet if Lucien Freud analysed his work, everybody…’ and she mimes awe-struck Boswellian annotation.
Politics infuriates her. ‘Why aren’t people obsessed with what their kids are learning? Why are they fighting in the streets? West Indian kids are killing African kids in the streets. Until we sort out our attitude to our kids everything else is irrelevant.’
She marched against the Iraq invasion in 2003 carrying a home-made banner: ‘Stop Street Wars Before You Start World Wars’. ‘I thought this was going to be the cry. But no. It was only me and Poppy. It wasn’t the common cry.’
She believes politics is infested with insincerity. ‘They have to toe the party line. And everyone sounds as if they’re lying. Dismantle the party-line thing and people would be allowed to have more integrity.’
‘Well, it’s men like me who created this stupid party-line thing,’ I say, adopting her method of flirtatious scattiness. ‘Therefore the solution lies in women-only parliaments.’ The technique ensnares its author instantly. ‘You’re a big fan of women,’ she declares. ‘You’re a radical feminist, Lloyd! Total discrimination! I like that.’
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