She's one of the most successful theatre and screen actors of her generation, but Hollywood hasn't seduced her. Francesca Annis prefers the home life, she tells Kate Holmquist.
After a week living in Dublin and rehearsing at the Gate Theatre, Francesca Annis wants to get the landline in her apartment sorted out. Eircom say they'll cut it off unless the bill is paid within 10 days, an embarrassing situation that she has plainly inherited from the previous tenant, but the Gate Theatre's Marie Rooney is on hand, ready to sort it out fast, even though Annis clearly doesn't want to seem to be a bother. Annis has a mobile phone, like everyone else, but when speaking in the evenings to her close-knit circle of children, mother and friends, she says: "I need the weight of a proper landline phone in my hand." This speaks volumes about how this 62-year-old mother, daughter and actress is, essentially, the reliable centre around whom an intimate world of complicated relationships revolves, and evolves.
Ralph Fiennes. These are the two unspoken words in our conversation over a breakfast of croissants and decaffeinated cappuccino in a Dublin hotel. I have it on good authority that, despite tabloid claims, they are not back together. But I've decided not to ask her about him, since I know that if I do, she'll clam up. Annis has turned down a request to appear on the Late Late Show because she refuses to discuss the heart-throb star of The Constant Gardener who was her constant lover for 11 years. You can hardly blame her. Because Fiennes is 18 years her junior, Annis was publicly humiliated in the tabloid press as "hurtling towards old age" when, in 2006, she announced the end of the affair.
Fiennes was appearing in Faith Healer at the Gate Theatre at the time, and now, two years later, Annis has agreed to do her own stint there as Amanda in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Determined survivor and ageing southern belle Amanda, with her past memories of gentlemen callers, is the role that actresses of a certain age and status inevitably turn to. Maureen Stapleton, Jessica Tandy, Julie Harris, Jessica Lange, Gertrude Lawrence, Katharine Hepburn, Joanne Woodward and Shirley Booth have all played the role on stage or screen.
"It's a classic, humane, family drama - the love, the passion, frustration and the blind fury. There's so much to recognise in it . . . I'll get my teeth into it, " she says. Amanda is typical, Annis says, of women surviving "without men".
"Coming to terms with being on your own a lot of the time depends on how isolated you are," she says. She is quoted as saying that, "Too often, older women are seen as victims, but I know lots of formidable women who have marvellous jobs as well as a full erotic life, and children and friends and family." When I repeat this back to her, she responds: "I must have been very young when I said that."
As women, particularly women known as beauties, begin to age, is it doubly hard for them to be lonely? "When you really start talking to people, women are very discerning, they know what they want and don't want, and a lot of women don't want what's on offer," she says.
In the next breath, she says that she needs a daily male perspective on dealing with life and child-rearing, but what she admires about Amanda, in The Glass Menagerie, is that she "lives in the present with no sense of regret". Annis, too, holds that philosophy: "the past is history and the future is abstract, so I think, just get on with life in the present. If you plan too much for the future, you may soon find that there's a custard pie arriving in your face."
From a cynical perspective, the break-up with Fiennes was Annis's custard pie - if the tabloids had had their way. When I suggest that her decision to keep a dignified silence was probably the best way to handle it, she scoffs: "I don't know about dignified." She adds that the reporters who write the stuff that "isn't worth the paper it's printed on" must be "very young" to be so callous.
As the mother of three children in their 20s, the "scandal", as it was termed, must have been particularly excruciating. Annis wears her extended, mutually supportive family on her sleeve - speaking of them readily because this home world is the one she truly belongs to, lives in and, above all, protects.
All three of her children, whom she had with photographer Patrick Wiseman, currently live with her in London. They are Taran, an actress and graduate of Signet Academy; Charlotte, a costume and textile designer with a degree from Central St Martin's, and Andreas, a Cambridge graduate and Keats scholar who recently joined the film industry.
The children help Francesca to care for her 94-year-old French-Brazilian mother, Mariquita, who Annis is determined to keep living in Mariquita's own home rather than a residential care home, and whose story in itself is worth the novel and film treatment.
Mariquita's exotic looks, regal background and strong survival streak explain so much about Annis's temperament. A finishing school-educated daughter of the Booth Shipping Line family, Mariquita grew up on room service in luxury hotels and had "no experience of life", Annis says, making Mariquita sound like a Henry James heroine. At 21, Mariquita rebelled and eloped with a film actor, Anthony Annis, and was promptly "cut off".
When Anthony had "half his face blown off in Burma" during the second World War, the couple went through a challenging role reversal, with Mariquita becoming the carer and leader. Having worked her way up through the Red Cross during the war, she was no longer the ingenue and had become a capable carer. Annis eventually recovered and became a pioneer in the newly-emerging film travelogue industry.
Six years ago, Anthony died, shortly after the couple's 68th wedding anniversary. Since then, Annis says, "my mother has never been alone for one day," - with the help of Social Services and carers, she adds. Recently, Annis and one of her brothers celebrated Mariquita's birthday. "Look how amazing that is - I'm in my 60s, my brother is in his 70s and my mother is in her 90s and there we all were, having a glass of champagne, celebrating my mother's extraordinary life and all still together.
"We always lived in an extended family, with aunties and grannies, and my mother has always been wonderful to all of us. I will do everything I can to keep her in her own home for as long as possible," Annis says.
She doesn't like to see elderly people ending up in residential care unless it is absolutely necessary. "It's bewildering to me how the government says that older people should 'stay at home' and at the same time there are not enough services to keep older people at home. Everything is so fragmented now. We should experience the extended family and the whole experience of taking, and feeling, responsibility for our older people. There's nothing glamorous about getting older. It's the human experience that will bring value to it."
Nothing glamourous about ageing? Not quite true if you're Francesca Annis, who looks utterly amazing. "I don't look amazing," she insists, with a slightly self-disparaging glance towards the floor.
We won't argue over it. She says her beauty regime is, and always has been, soap and water, followed by any sort of moisturiser that she never spends more than £18 on. She has never had cosmetic surgery to allay ageing - hasn't had to - believing that she has dedicated her life to something far more fundamental. Originally a dancer, Annis still takes dance and yoga classes nearly every day. In a pair of black combats, with a black pullover, a serviceable all-weather coat and a cap pulled down over her head, she cuts a youthful figure strolling up O'Connell Street.
Rearing teenagers, who were aged 12, 16 and 18 when Annis left Wiseman for Fiennes, couldn't have been any easier for her than for anyone else, especially in the context of a relationship breakdown: "It was a journey and it hasn't finished," she says. The family are extremely close. "My children and I are friends. When they were young, we never watched much TV. Patrick and I had no TV. We always ate proper meals together - all three courses, never fast food - and that takes time. And that is the time when you are sowing the seeds of communication. Right now, it's paying off."
What has also paid off for Annis has been her refusal to be a Hollywood sex object. She famously turned down the cover of Vogue magazine three times because, as a feminist, she refused to sell cosmetics. Her naked bottom did appear in Polanski's Macbeth (1971), when Annis played the treacherous Lady Macbeth at the age of 26 - much to the embarrassment of her children, who found the film listed on the syllabus for their A-level studies.
Annis's career started with a role as handmaiden to Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra (1963), proceeded to Armchair Theatre on the BBC (1964), and then nearly 100 classy roles, often on TV, including the role of Lillie Langtry in a TV mini-series (1978). Hollywood cinema was never her milieu, perhaps because her dark, exotic looks had her typecast as "the bad girl", which she didn't want to be, and never allowed her to be cast as "the girl next door", she believes.
She doesn't regret it, though, because London was the place she wanted to educate and rear her children. To support her family and fulfil her own acting ambitions, she went for BBC roles in dramas such as Wives and Daughters and Deceit. She has been able to live well, she says, thanks to a series of lucrative US TV mini-series that she made in the 1980s, including one in which she played the role of Jackie Onassis.
Today, Annis is far happier playing the Gate, and her main ambition for the future is to create a one-woman show about pioneering feminist Mary Wolstonecraft and tour it around schools and community centres. It's the joy of doing a project she believes in that matters to her, more than the money.
Her acclaimed appearance last year as Lady Ludlow, alongside her friend Judi Dench, in the five-part BBC television series, Cranford, should surely have brought her film offers far beyond the world of schools and community centres, but that hasn't happened. So where are the current versions of Tennessee Williams, writing great roles for older actresses? Annis shrugs: "I don't know." With talent like hers available, that seems mad. u
The Glass Menagerie opens at the Gate Theatre on February 12th, with previews from next Thursday, February 7th. See www.gate-theatre.ie