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Anne-Marie Duff is one of Britain's brightest acting talents. She made her name in the Channel 4 hit series Shameless, and her career has been demanding, thrilling and 'kind of bonkers'
In Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy, the last job she did before taking a year off to have a baby, Anne-Marie Duff played John Lennon's mother, Julia. In a surprisingly straight and eventually rather mawkish film, she was riveting: raw and unpredictable, vulnerable and joyous, physical and flirtatious – especially, and most uncomfortably, with her teenage son.
You can see, meeting her, why she was perfectly cast. There is nothing still or settled about her, at least in this situation. Her face, all angles (though with a glow in it not often evident on screen), changes constantly; her body is always moving – hands running through her hair, or through the air, illustrating a point; voice now confiding, now antic, now actorly-emphatic ("huge" is not just huge, but "HUUUUGE"; "leap" is "leEAP!"), now smiling strict refusal.
This changeability has served her well – she is not an actor who gets asked to repeat herself much, or is often typecast, though, if pushed, she thinks the thread running through her work is probably something about women being tested. "They generally tend to be females who are up against it, don't they?" The accent is London, quick, full of light glottal stops where the 't' in 'it' doesn't happen at the teeth, but at the back of the tongue. "There's not a lot of light comedy going on." She has just come from a run-through of the fractured first act of Terence Rattigan's Cause Célèbre, in which she plays the lead, Alma Rattenbury, a woman married to a man 29 years her senior; he is murdered by her 18-year-old lover (it is based on a true story, from 1935). "I was thinking about this the other day, funnily enough, because of this play – we were talking about Alma being on trial, and I said, 'Well, aren't all the characters – ' and I thought, 'Ah!'" – a sharp intake of breath –"if I look back, pretty much all the women I've played, and been able to really get going, have been women who've been on trial."
So there was Margaret in The Magdalene Sisters, raped and sent to the laundries for the good of her soul. Or Fiona in Channel 4's hit series Shameless, holding her ramshackle, lawless family together – which, incidentally, was where she met her husband, James McAvoy. On screen it was literally love at first sight across a crowded room – though, this being Shameless, a bouncer gets punched, and the police interrupt their tryst by dragging her drunk dad through the door. They worked together again recently, in The Last Station, about Tolstoy and his despairing wife; McAvoy was Tolstoy's secretary, Duff his cold daughter. What was that like, working with your husband? "He's a brilliant actor, so it's all good." Any rules about working together? "No – we're not idiots – we don't need to have rules." But sometimes, I venture ... "No, mate … I'm not going to" – lots of laughter, tailing off high: she was not like this early in her career, happily telling interviewers how in love she was with her then boyfriend David Tennant, for example, but she and McAvoy have made a pact not to talk about each other to the press. So back to the trials: of Shaw's Saint Joan. Or Elizabeth I. Or, in Dominic Savage's Born Equal, a pregnant woman fleeing an abusive man. Or, as Duff puts it, "Margot bloody Fonteyn".
Why is that? Is there something in her that needs this? "Maybe. Maybe I like that pioneer quality. I admire people who overcome obstacles, or who have to commit – I've always really admired commitment, whether it be a commitment to living, or a commitment to love. People who commit to a moment. People who are not somewhere else, but in the room with you." In the cuts there is a comment that comes up again and again. It originated with Howard Davies, who, when she was 25, directed her in a two-hander with Helen Mirren called Collected Stories. "She throws herself at parts," said Davies then, "as if bruising herself on them."
This can, of course, be thrilling for an audience (that particular performance won Duff an Olivier nomination) but takes an obvious toll – such a toll, in fact, that there was a point when she thought she could not continue the career she had set her heart on since she was a child. Midway through a Shared Experience run of Ibsen's A Doll's House, she began to find that she simply could not separate the anguish of her character, Nora, from her own life. "It wasn't even like – events or anything – I was just so miserable. You know when people are drowning and they get taken out of the water and get pumped, and everything just pumps out of them" – her hands follow the flood from her mouth – "it just felt like that was happening on stage. I was just like a shell off stage. I didn't quite – I hadn't realised what was appropriate.
"And an actor called Patterson Joseph, who played Nora's husband Torvald, was brilliant. He said, 'It's just a job, mate.' At exactly the right moment. And I'll always be grateful to PJ for that. Because I wouldn't be doing what I do for a living if it wasn't for him." That close? "That close. I just thought, 'This is ridiculous. I don't want to be a crazy person.' I was younger, you know – if I did it now it might be very different. I might be able to understand her. Not just experience her, but understand her."
It was not until she played Saint Joan, in 2007, that she finally worked out how to hold the two things in balance – to have total emotional commitment while on stage, but then to be able to leave the character, as she puts it, "in the dressing room". "It was a sort of coming of age for me, in terms of my job – I really did learn how to protect myself. Partly that was just working with [the director] Marianne Elliott – she made me feel safe. And yeah, it was curious. It was really a relief."
Saint Joan also brought home something else – how rare such parts are for women, how infrequently they come up, and how women's careers on the stage are so brutally shaped by age. "I did think that it was one of those enormous tragedies – how many Hamlets did we have in a row? And yet there will only be one Saint Joan in London for a long time. Sometimes it's frustrating, you know? Because it feels like there's a quota. I've been desperately lucky. That makes a difference. But I'm going to get older soon, and then things will change, and I'm sure I'm going to find myself doggy-paddling for a while. And then things will get interesting again. It's not easy for us birds. We just have to keep praying, because new writing, you know, still isn't full of fabulous female roles. It just isn't."
Duff, who grew up in the suburb of Hayes, felt herself to be a Londoner, always, but never English – her parents are Irish, from rural Donegal, and from Meath; a father who loved to cook, and read, but worked as a painter and decorator, and a mother who was such a good athlete she thought of going professional, but, in London, worked in a shoe shop. Duff was such a shy child that they sent her to acting classes when she was 11, to bring her out of herself and make her more confident; when it turned out that she desperately wanted to make this undependable pursuit her life, they gave her a gift for which she is still grateful: "They were so encouraging – not pushing, but encouraging. Healthy love, I always think is … wanting the person you love to be more of themselves. And I think for a parent that's a challenge, because you have to let a baby spread its wings. And that's what they did."
For a while it was a very different story at her big London comprehensive, where being an avid reader set her apart. "I did go through this whole phase when I was obsessed with the classics, and nothing else would do – I was such a pretentious pain in the arse." She failed to get into drama school the first time round, waited a year and tried again, and suddenly, among lots of other people intensely interested in acting and the classics, "I didn't feel uncomfortable any more – and I thought, 'Ah, thank Christ for that'."
Working-class, a self-described "runt of the year – never considered to be a front-runner, or anything like that," she has always been aware of the need to work doubly, triply hard, and doesn't take anything for granted: she wields gratefulness like a lucky charm. It has obviously paid off – the 150-odd applications she sent off before she graduated meant that she was working two days later, a fact that made her almost pinch herself with delight. "I remember getting a bus back from rehearsal, my very, very, very first job, and going through town and just sitting there thinking, "Oh! I do this for a living now! This is really exciting. I'm doing something I planned to do all this time!"
There have been other moments like that, "where I've thought, 'probably can relax about that now'". One of them occurred after Nowhere Boy, for which she got fulsome praise, and "I did think that's kind of interesting! Because I never thought I'd work particularly in film. I thought, 'Oh, I'd love to, but I doubt I'll be that lucky,' and then I worked on this film, and I got such positive feedback, and I thought, 'Oh! I did that!'" It's a bit disingenuous, this stance, given the number of awards and nominations she has collected in her career, and the obvious ambition and focus that lurk like granite behind the obligatory self-deprecation, but also it's infectiously genuine at the same time.
Acting school, and working, freed her in other ways, too. As a teenager she'd been so shy, and so obsessed with acting and what she wanted to do that "I didn't have a teen age at all. I didn't even look at boys, never mind … then suddenly it was like, 'Oh my god!' So I made up for a lot of lost time very quickly." Peals of laughter. "It was kind of bonkers. Working hard, partying hard – but also experiencing life, you know. I think creative people need to do a bit of, you know, tuning into every radio station – you just do, otherwise you don't know much about other people. You kind of have to learn a bit about yourself so you can work out how we all behave, and why we do the things we do."
And becoming the mother of a little boy has done this for her in ways she did not expect. "I have found that I am very much more emotionally available." A certain shyness perhaps, a looking for how to say this, sends her voice through register after register. "Which is kind of overwhelming. You kind of go, 'woaah!' Everything is much more close to the surface. I'm not quite sure why that is yet. I don't know whether it's just a time factor – that on some level you're just going, 'Right, you need to be able to do this, because you've got to go home and do that', or whether it's just a hugely profound thing. It's curious. It's lovely. It feels quite elemental. Something other."
Anne-Marie Duff is appearing in Cause Célèbre at the Old Vic, London SE1 (0844 871 7628) from March 17 until 11 June.