Pretty young actresses. What is to be said? You can’t live with ‘em, you can’t shoot ‘em. Paraded before the jaded hack’s eyes by an ever-changing cast of publicists, they talk of love and death, work, art, sex, cigarettes, Jack Nicholson and babies. Then they’re gone, either into the Hollywood empyrean like Catherine Zeta Jones or into English oblivion like Joanne Whalley. Whatever happened to her? And now, here’s another, Anna Friel – 24, very pretty – “the most fancied young TV personality of the nineties” – chain-smoking Marlborough Lights, wearing a pink and white “I’m a naughty girl tee-shirt” and, yes, Jack Nicholson did once announce that he couldn’t concentrate until he’d slept with her, a handy remark heavily disseminated by her Hollywood agents. Anna Friel, the perfect PYA package. So what’s it to be – empyrean or oblivion? Well, after March 1st, we should know.
That is when she opens in the Almeida’s production of Lulu, adapted from two plays of Frank Wedekind by Nicholas Wright, playing opposite Alan Howard and Tom Georgeson and directed by Jonathan Kent. It’s the big one.“This is a major, important thing, a true test. I’m not off the stage in this. It’s the equivalent for an actress of playing Hamlet. The director says that, the writer says that…..”
It’s only her second stage performance. The other was a six-month run in Patrick Marber’s Closer on Broadway.
“It was the most brilliant time in my life, living in New York, twenty-two stories up, being the toast of the town, going out every night and getting recognition from these great people – Pacino, Madonna.”
Yet, in spite of that gaudy triumph, plenty of television and eleven films – three not yet released, her image is still, alarmingly, dominated by the role of lesbian patricide Beth Jordache in Brookside. Aged 16 and six months into her A’Levels at Holy Cross College in Bury, she became an overnight soap star, easily the best thing in that ludicrously nasty show. For two and a half years, she fired up the male population – notably with an eight second lesbian kiss - and divided the female. Then she said she was leaving. Obligingly they let Beth die in her cell of a mysterious heart complaint.
“The viewing figures,” she giggles, “went down….”
Brookside descended into melodrama – “Now they’re all lesbians!” – while Friel ascended into babedom, appearing almost naked in the lads’ mags and being offered £1 million to become a pop star, a new Kylie or Martine. She turned it down. In fact, she turned down a lot in that first post-Brookie year, notably a mass of highly-paid parts in British and American television.
“I did bits of TV but it was quite a slow year. I was offered lots of money, loads of TV series. But I knew I still wanted to hold out until I got a film. There was still a snobbishness about TV and film, now I think I could do both. The first film I did was for a tenth of what I had been offered by American TV – unbelievable money and I was only twenty! But I thought I’d plenty of time to do that, I don’t need it.”
The problem has been that none of the films have quite worked out. Some have been unremarkable and some downright bad, like the hopelessly ill-judged Rogue Trader. One Hollywood venture – Boy and Girls, produced by Dustin Hoffman – she walked out of in disgust, the director having reneged on his agreement to let her play her part as an Englishwoman rather than an American. Now she has three films waiting for release – one of them being Barry Levinson’s Everlasting Peace – and , frustratingly, no clear idea of when they will surface. Any one of them could be her breakthrough, or, as the case may be, not.
Meanwhile, other big film parts keep eluding her. In three sucessive auditions, she’s been down to the last two but, each time, she has lost out to the bigger name. The most painful was when Martin Scorsese chose Cameron Diaz as the safer option.
And so, eight years into her PYA career, Friel finds herself delicately poised. She’s not a film star, definitely not a pop star, she doesn’t want to be a babe again and, in spite of Closer, she still hasn’t quite achieved theatrical credibility. Lulu could solve all that – auspiciously Lulu is her real middle name - and she has significantly made no plans for what she will do after its runs in London and Washington end on July 16th. Plainly she wants to allow for the possibility of a massive hit.
For she is, frankly and openly, ambitious. Like Keats, she would rather fail than not be among the greatest.
“I wouldn’t want to be a jobbing actor. The thought is horrible. A bit part in this and a bit part in that. It would destroy me. I wouldn’t have any lust for life any more. It’s not about stardom exacly, it’s just not being hot, I suppose. Oh a bit part in Casualty….” She squirms violently. “… oh, don’t mention that please.”
“I didn’t.”
“No, I know, it’s me talking to myself. God! I don’t think I deserve things not to work out. I work really hard. I’m a great believer in deserving.”
Counterbalancing all this anguish is the solidity of her background. Born in Rochdale to two teachers, Des and Sheila, she has one brother, Michael, who after a brief show business foray that included being the Hovis boy in the TV ad, is now studying science at St Andrew’s. She is phenomenally close to her family, flying her parents out to wherever she happens to be. And Des, having left teaching for web site design, now handles her internet persona – check out his remarkably slick work at www.netshop.co.uk/annafriel/. He also tried to put a stop to the numerous sites where her head was stuck on to various naked bodies by buying up the name annafriel.com. Nevertheless, there are still plenty of seething fan sites out there.
She was an A student at school and, prior to Brookside, intended to be a barrister.
“I was really serious about that. I thought it’s what I’d be best at doing. I was a real workaholic. The work ethic is born and bred in me. Saturdays would be tidying my room and Sundays homework. I was in the debating society at school and I was a really good arguer. But then Brookside suddenly changed everything. I don’t regret it but I’m frustrated with not having the knowledge I would have had if I’d stayed on at school. I just think I’d like to be more articulate. I suppose I could teach myself by reading more but I’ve just been reading stupid scripts and they don’t teach you anything.”
The family, she says, is everything to her.
“No matter what is thrown at me in work, there’s always something more important to me which is my family. Of course, you take acting incredibly seriously but you know there are more important things. It enables you to make dangerous decisions because if it all fails and I’ve made the wrong decisions – like not doing the popstar thing – then I’ve still got somewhere I can go back to.”
Her own love life has, inevitably, been well-documented. There was a photographer called Matthew who seemed to vanish as the career took off, there was low-cred TV personality Darren Day, who ditched her for Tracy Shaw, another soap star, there was somewhat higher cred Robbie Williams and now there is very high cred actor David Thewlis who, she proudly tells me, is just about to deliver his first novel. She has a house in Windsor and the flat in Clerkenwell – a converted ballroom, currently deocrated with nude drawings of her taken from the Lulu set – where we met. Thewlis is “desperate to be a dad” and she wants children too. But a clock is ticking. Recently an ovarian cyst burst “filling my stomach with blood” and threatening her fertility. The doctor told he she was all right, but advised having a child no later than about 30.
Thewlis, am amiably shambolic figure, pads in and out as we talk. Friel seizes every opportunity to address him – “Hey, darling. I’ve spilt some wine on the sofa!” “Are you cooking?” “Are there any crisps? David, have we any crisps?” When we have finished, she flings herself at him, wrapping her legs and arms around his torso, an excitable waif clutching a calm, friendly ape, and then, to his embarrassment, making him do some card tricks. He’s good, I don’t know what happened either to the cigarette or the pack of cards. On top of all that, she even kisses me when I leave, a first among interviewees whether PYAs or not.
This faintly neurotic excess is hard to read. Is she being calculatedly exciting, naturally high-spirited or is she simply nervous? I’d go for the last. Throughout our conversation it is clear that she is terrified of not being “hot”. Preparing for Lulu is clearly hard on her nerves. She admits to night terrors.
“I wake up sometimes and yell, ‘David, it’s all gone wrong!’ What if it doesn’t work? What if I can’t do Lulu? That would just be it. He just says then I’d have to make it right.”
Strong-minded – thanks, presumably, to her family – she has taken on the responsibility for all her career decisions. She decided to leave Brookside, she turned down pop stardom and easy TV parts, she held out for the movies and now she’s taking a huge risk with Lulu. None of it, apart from Brookside, has yet quite worked out. She’s still hot, but she can feel a chill wind. And she knows the stakes.
“Joanne Whalley? I don’t know what she’s doing now. It just show how important it is to choose your work incredibly carefully and not get bracketed – like just being a television actress or, worse, a soap star. It’s horrible being told by some producer you are the money or you’re not the money. I mean Catherine Zeta Jones? She might burn herself out. If she’s happy with that, fine. But, for her sake, I hope she doesn’t. She’ll have to work on her acting as much as she has on her career and take some really good roles – I suppose that’s what she did with Traffic.”
And then a shadow falls across the face.
“Who the f*** am I to talk about her. What do I know?”
Well, what does she know? Swinging between wild confidence and stark terror, she knows she can have everything and the family or nothing and the family. And, big as the family is, everything is much, much better. Okay, I’ve been here many times before with plenty of PYAs. But, every time, there is this awful poignancy. Prancing around her huge ballroom and squirming on her enormous sofa, all Friel wants is to “make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make them forget about their lives for an hour and a half.” It’s not much to ask. Is it?