The Times

30 November 2002

All woman
By Jasper Rees.

From serial television adulteress to real-life femme fatale, Francesca Annis
has packed a lot into her 58 years. And she's got no intention of stopping
now

Francesca Annis is not quite famous enough to be the subject of a
bestselling biography. But if I were a publisher I'd doorstep her until she
caved in and agreed to write her own memoir. It's been quite a life.

Consider the facts. Annis spent her first seven years, more or less, living
on Copacabana beach (she is one-quarter Brazilian). At 16, she went off to
Rome for a year to play Elizabeth Taylor's handmaiden in the epic turkey
Cleopatra. She was taken under Taylor's wing, and no one saw the burgeoning
of the grand amour with Richard Burton at closer quarters. In 1971, she
played Lady Macbeth in Roman Polanski's film, and had an almighty scrap with
Playboy, the producers, when she flatly refused to do a complementary nude
photospread. In the Seventies she became a huge television star, playing all
the adulteresses from Emma Bovary to Lillie Langtry. Turning 40 had the same
unmagical effect on her career as it does on every other actress: the work
got slightly less prominent (unless you count Dune, or playing Prince's
conquest in Under the Cherry Moon).

But at 50 she was cast opposite Robson Green in Reckless. Part of the reason
why the punters found the TV drama so compelling was the fact that it was
shot before but broadcast after she played Gertrude in a celebrated
production of Hamlet, in which she and the megastar playing her son fell in
love and left their respective partners. Annis became a reluctant poster
girl for middle-aged female empowerment. "The media just invented this
person that they felt there was a need for. They've got lots of young people
around and they suddenly wanted a middle-aged woman. I had always been an
actress up until then. Suddenly I became an image. I feel quite good about
it now. I know people will be saying, 'Well, you're lucky.' But it can also,
of course, at the time be very, very painful."

She and Ralph Fiennes are still together after seven years. When she walks
in wearing top-to-toe denim over something black and strappy, you'd never
guess that she's two years shy of 60. We're in a Shepherds Bush restaurant
where her older daughter works. She orders a beer, but I bet they're
secretly supplying her with nectar. How else would she manage to go
all-night clubbing with her children?

See? A great story. Just the one problem: autobiographies don't do it for
Annis. "People can't see what's interesting in themselves," she says.
"You're not the best judge of yourself." She's not even sure people want her
take on anything. "What I think," she says, about to tell about her new
play, and then she interrupts herself: "Do you want to know what I think?"
That's why we're here, Francesca.

As Hugh Hefner discovered when she signed up for Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking
scene but wouldn't get her kit off for his mag, she's got principles. She
even refused to do the cover of Vogue, though implored repeatedly: "I just
would not advertise the make-up or be any part of it." Her principles have
outlasted her Seventies feminist fundamentalism. What she thinks now is that
people have no right to any part of her private life. When journalists ask
her questions about Fiennes, her stock response is: "Aren't you embarrassed
to ask that?"

This privacy bill covers her entire life. She's telling me in the vaguest
possible terms what a high old hedonistic time of it she had in the Sixties.
How good a time? "A very good time," she purrs. "I was a total indulgee of
the Sixties is how I would describe it. I've never seen why you shouldn't
have everything. But you can't have everything at the same time." So we'll
just have to guess the rest.

I only ask because Annis is about to appear in The Vortex, a play Noel
Coward wrote in a youthful flurry. It was terribly outre in 1924, with its
portrayal of pleasure-seeking Bright Young Things drugged up to anaesthetise
themselves against postwar survival guilt. Kenneth Tynan said the play is
"not so much stilted as high-heeled". No producer would touch it, so Coward
produced, directed and starred in it himself at the Everyman in Hampstead:
the West End transfer premiered on his 25th birthday. Annis plays Florence,
a monster of self-centredness who is too busy bedding gilded young
socialites to come to the aid of her addicted son. "I can see why it was
shocking in 1924. Twenty years ago it was not that interesting. It would
have been seen as 'Yes, so what?' Today, I don't think there'll be a person
in the audience who won't feel they've either been there as a parent or are
afraid of going there. It's not shocking but it's frightening in its
closeness."

These thoughts reflect Annis's own status as a parent. Her son, the youngest
of three, has just left school, joining his sisters in "that metamorphosing
time of discovery and how you're going to cope out there". Yet they are now
all older than she was when she was cast in Cleopatra. How good an actress
was she? "How good can you be at 16? If I'd been complete rubbish I suppose
I would have been forgotten." Taylor became a sort of surrogate mother. "I
was called Iris in the film. When I finished I went on to do a film called
The Eyes of Annie Jones and on my first day she sent me masses and masses of
irises."

She seems demob happy now her own mothering duties have been downgraded.
Among the things she's now able to do more freely in the evenings is
theatre. The Vortex is only her second play since Hamlet. It coincides with
a new world order at the Donmar Warehouse, where Sam Mendes has handed the
baton to Michael Grandage, a director with an equally low flop-to-hit ratio.
The novelty for Annis is not only doing Coward - she's never done a play of
his before - but also comedy. "People have always seen me as being very
serious, partly I think because I'm dark."

The darkness comes from Brazil (whom she supported when they beat England in
the World Cup). It may also explain why she plays so many adulteresses. She
once turned down Anna Karenina because she thought the less discerning would
see "the same performance in a different costume". It's also the Brazilian
in her, if we can lower the tone, who says, "I've always wanted a big bum
and small boobs and I've always had big boobs and a small bum."

I only mention this because in his remarkable diaries Kenneth Tynan
remembers the day she shot the nude sleepwalking scene in Polanski's
Macbeth. "Francesca does it very sportingly and with no fuss," writes Tynan
in 1971. "At lunch I opine that Francesca has fesses tristes (sad buttocks).
Roman agrees, adding that he prefers bottoms to breasts." I quote this to
Annis, and she laughs hugely.

She wasn't laughing at the time. At first she turned the role down and hid
in North Africa for several weeks. She got back and they still wanted her.
"I was a great Polanski fan and thought, why should I doubt his ability to
pull this off? I was flattered, I suppose. It was the Playboy involvement
that worried me." She got a clause in her contract saying that she would
only appear nude in character. They asked three times, and each time she
refused. Some way into the shoot her agent advised her that they were about
to sack her. "I said, 'Why?' 'Because Hefner didn't know you had this clause
and he feels now you're mocking his edifice. He doesn't care how much he has
to pay, he's going to sack you.' Then they got me in a room, and they were
screaming at me. 'But you're naked anyway. And look at your pathetic body.
We'll make you look fantastic.' Eventually, they wore me out. I said, 'All
right, I'll do it.' Everybody was very happy with me. And I was left feeling
sick. I've got this very steely side. In the middle of the night, I suddenly
thought, bastards. I phoned up the producer and said, 'I've changed my mind.
I don't care what happens to me. You can sack me and I will make sure
there's a strike and that you cannot employ another single actress in my
part.' They let the whole thing drop."

Publishers are going to be disappointed for the same reason as Hefner:
Francesca Annis sees doing a memoir as the emotional equivalent of going
nude. Pity.

The Vortex opens on December 5 at the Donmar Warehouse.

(Submitted by Tara)