There's a lot more to Anne-Marie Duff than playing Fiona in 'Shameless' - take Cordelia in 'King Lear' and Pegeen Mike in Synge's 'Playboy' for starters, writes Laura Barton
The cafe door clatters open and a burst of cold air rushes in, carrying Anne-Marie Duff behind it. Her face is nipped pink, her frame half-swallowed by a voluminous jumper. There's something very newborn about her. Like a baby bird, pink and scrawny and raw-looking. Duff (33) has emerged as one of Britain's brightest young actors over the last few years.
Garnering praise in equal measure for her appearances on film, TV and stage (she was nominated for an Ian Charleson award for her Cordelia in Richard Eyre's King Lear and for an Olivier for Howard Davies's Collected Stories), she has an astonishing ability to slip from one role to the next almost unrecognisably. People look at her blankly, she says, when they hear she was in Charles II, or The Magdalene Sisters. "And then they look at you again," she squints, "and say oh, oh yeah . . ."
She has become lodged in people's affections in the role of Fiona in Paul Abbott's much-loved TV drama, Shameless. The series relates the tragic-comic story of the sprawling Gallagher clan on Manchester's Chatsworth Estate. Theirs is a tale encompassing alcoholism, drugs, sex, thievery and arson, and in the middle of it all is Fiona - the familial linchpin, shepherding her five brothers and sisters, not to mention their shambolic father, Frank, after the departure of their mother.
"Dad took on the role of both our parents - he did sod all, twice over," is how Fiona puts it. At the same time she wages a personal war against becoming her siblings' surrogate mother, and clings to the great white middle-class hope of Steve, her dishevelled, well-educated car-dealer boyfriend.
Duff has been astonished by the affection shown to the wiry little fighter in velour trackie bottoms. She was in Ireland when the first rush of publicity came out, and so she succeeded in sidestepping the first outbreak of Shameless fever. But when she returned she was amazed to find people recognised her, not to mention the fact that Fiona proved so popular with men.
"I don't know why men like her so much," she frowns. We speculate that it might be something in her peacocky walk, her kind-hearted sexiness, the fact that there is a fundamental sweetness to her nature.
"She's tough though," counters Duff. "I mean, she beat Steve up in the first series."
It is just that fragile combination of unguarded sensitivity and ball-breaking toughness that has secured her a very loyal female following.
In the course of a single episode, Fiona slides between sister, best friend, mother figure, and giggling, girlish lover. To see her carry all these roles is like watching someone struggling back from the supermarket, laden with bags; the pain shows in her face.
In the Shameless Christmas special, when her younger sister, Debbie, tells Fiona she has started her period, but that she first confided in the local shop-owner, a sadness hovers about her, as if she had failed somehow, in her sisterly-motherly duty.
"You can't have favourites," says Duff when asked which role she has relished most. "But I really like Fiona."
THE SUCCESS OF the first series, however, tempered the filming of the second. The Gorton estate where Shameless was filmed had acquired the swagger of notoriety after its TV début. "We got on with everyone really well, filming the first series. We got to know people. But the second series, they felt like it was theirs. People were coming down when we were filming, there was some trouble - and we had to get security on the set. It was a real shame."
It was worse for the male cast, she says. "For Dean [Lennox-Kelly], who plays Kev, and David [Threlfall], who's Frank. For me and Maxine , who's Veronica, it's easier 'cos we look different off-set - but the boys look like that all the time. And because their characters are a bit . . ." Lairy? "Yeah, so people have a go."
Getting decked out as Fiona was, Duff says, one of the best parts of the job. "She sparkles, doesn't she?" she smiles. "I called it putting on my bling - getting dressed up as Fiona."
Duff would go shopping in Manchester with the show's head of wardrobe, looking for Fiona's outfits. "Topshop! It's all from Topshop!" she laughs, and recounts the story of reading an online debate about where Fiona got her tracksuits. "One girl's saying, 'It's Adidas!' I'd like to set the record straight here, it was Topshop." She twinkles. "And they make your arse look huge, those tracksuits!"
She spent days hanging around the Arndale, Manchester's hulking city-centre shopping arcade, watching the girls strutting around the foodcourt in their prides. "They're so confident!" she says. "And they have so much bling! You think Fiona is bling with her big gold hoops, but they have lots of them, all up their ears," she laughs. "But it would be so heavy - I'd be like this!" She hunches her shoulders up to her ears. "I couldn't think about anything else. And anyway, everything looks larger on screen."
She almost didn't go to the audition for Shameless. When the script arrived, she thought they'd made a mistake. "I just thought they'd got the wrong person. It's for this 21-year-old, and it's Manchester. And you know, do they know how old I am? Do they know where I'm from?" Indeed, Duff sounds little like Fiona, her voice floats faintly across the teacups, soft, well-spoken, with a scrawly London edge.
"Well, I was born in London," she offers. The family moved out to the suburbs when she was young, following her father's job as a painter and decorator. But the community was still very much tethered to the city. "I consider myself a Londoner really," she says.
Despite her southern heritage, the Mancunian lilt didn't prove too difficult to master. "I was lucky really, 'cos Manchester, that was all very popular when I was younger. Madchester, you know." She reprises the flat, Fiona intonation, "Liam Gallagher," she says.
She speaks fondly of the rest of the cast, particularly its younger members. "I'd never worked with children before, and they were just brilliant," she says, stating the individual brilliance of each, one by one. "Rebecca [Ryan, who plays Debbie] - she's like the eighth-best Irish dancer in the world and she says she wants to be a games teacher. We're like, sorry love, you're going to be a film star."
Such prodigious talent is particularly dazzling to Duff who, though she began amateur dramatics as a timid 11-year-old, did not act professionally until she reached drama school.
The one member of the cast Duff will not talk about is James McAvoy, who plays her on-screen partner Steve, a role that has spilled over into real life. Indeed, she politely ring-fences all of her private life, save to say she lives in north London, enjoys cooking, has one brother and her mother collects all of her newspaper cuttings. She would sooner talk about her work, wax lyrical about Paul Abbott's writing quirks, his tendency to make up words and defuse a serious scene with a dash of slapstick.
"But I won't be in Shameless forever," she says. Will she even be in the next series? Her mouth forms a neatly sewn line. "I really can't say."
FOR THE TIME being she is preparing for a return to the theatre, rehearsing Days of Wine and Roses by J.P. Miller at London's Donmar Warehouse. Last year, she played Pegeen Mike in the Druid production of Synge's Playboy, directed by Gary Hynes. "Theatre's more real life in a way," she says. "When you're filming television, it's like you're in a little bubble - you know, all the responsibility is taken out of your hands because there's always people to tell you what you're doing: what time is my car picking me up? What clothes am I wearing today? What am I having for my lunch? Theatre's not like that, and your audience is there in front of you."
Since she left London's Drama Centre, she has never had to fight for work. She has done TV in Ireland and Germany, as well as the UK,a flawless, captivating performance in Peter Mullan's stark, award-winning film about the Magdalene laundries, The Magdalene Sisters - a theme she reprised for the TV drama Sinners - and then several costume dramas, including Charles II and The Aristocrats.
She is, she says, now quite well-versed in the art of wearing corsets. So they come more easily to her than tracksuits. She recalls filming, that hot summer in Prague, when their makeup was melting and between every scene the actors were frantically trying to cool down. She mimes lifting skirts up above her knees and huffing and puffing like a fishwife, and, for a moment, amid the mid-morning bustle of a north London cafe she gives a glimpse of an 18th-century Fiona, feisty and sparkling among the dirty crockery. - (Guardian Service)
Shameless is on C4 on Tuesdays, 10 p.m., Days of Wine and Roses previews at the Donmar Warehouse, London, from February 17th