Working with a passion
Try suggesting to Zoë Wanamaker that this is something of a purple patch for actresses of a certain age and she’s having none of it. And yet, just stroll up and down Shaftesbury Avenue and count how many seasoned female performers have their names above the title of West End productions.
There’s Helen Mirren packing them in as the Queen in The Audience, and Judi Dench (alongside Ben Whishaw) doing the same in Peter And Alice. In the autumn, there’s the promise of Vanessa Redgrave as Beatrice at the Old Vic, opposite James Earl Jones as Benedick, in a new production of Much Ado and, at some as yet unspecified future date, Lynda Bellingham in a revival of Kay Mellor’s A Passionate Woman. And, if it doesn’t sound too unchivalrous, each and every one of them is able to travel to the theatre on their Freedom Pass.
‘It’s fantastic, isn’t it?’ says Zoë, who is 64 on 13 May. ‘But Britain has always had strong actresses. Go back half a century or so and think of Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft and Googie Withers and Margaret Lockwood and Anna Neagle. The list goes on.’
She’s right, but what she’s attempting to do is downplay her own contribution to the current roll call. Any day now, Zoë will open in a new production of Peter Nichols’s Passion Play, last revived at the Donmar in 2000 with Cherie Lunghi, Martin Jarvis and Cheryl Campbell.
After a quarter of a century of marriage, Eleanor (Zoë) discovers that her husband James (Owen Teale), is having an affair with her friend Kate (Annabel Scholey). The husband and wife’s interior voices are played by Oliver Cotton and Samantha Bond. It’s a glorious mix, says Zoë, of humour, eroticism and duplicity. ‘It’s human, timeless, painful.’
It was director David Leveaux, with whom she’d worked in 1997 on a production of Electra, for which she won a Best Actress Olivier Award, who asked Zoë if she’d consider the role. She was only too delighted, she says. ‘It’s lovely to be working again in the theatre after a couple of years of film and television.’ The last time she trod the boards was in The Cherry Orchard at the National the year before last.
But then she is an actress who has become something of a byword for versatility, moving easily and frequently between all the available disciplines, at home with drama as much as comedy. And she’s much too self-deprecating to articulate the thought, but she’s never been out of work since she graduated from the Central School of Speech and Drama some four decades ago.
Nor is she one of those actresses who turns up her nose at the prospect of something unapologetically populist. One minute, it’s Sophocles or Shakespeare. The next, it’s Harry Potter (she played Madam Hooch in The Philosopher’s Stone) or more than 120 episodes of My Family opposite Robert Lindsay. ‘We’re all multifaceted,’ she points out, ‘so I enjoy going from one project to another, from serious theatre to crowd-pleasing TV sitcom.’
Ask her to pick personal career milestones and she plumps at length for Piaf in 1978 and another Olivier Best Actress turn in Once In A Lifetime the following year, both for the RSC. She loved the latter because of its American humour, something with which she’d always been very familiar at home, but until that point, never professionally.
She also really enjoyed appearing opposite Judi Dench in Mother Courage And Her Children at the Barbican in 1984, ‘Not least because my character had no lines, which meant I could concentrate on the physicality of it all’. She’d have to nominate, too, The Glass Menagerie at the Donmar in 1995 and Electra, both in London and on Broadway, ‘The first time I was allowed to have a really good scream on stage’.
Zoë and Owen Teale in Passion Play
She also has a soft spot for Love Hurts, an unlikely TV hit in the early 1990s. ‘I was a bit snotty when I was first approached. Acting opposite Adam Faith? Wasn’t he just a pop star? What did he know about acting? How wrong I was. Adam was extremely bright and very much in touch with his feelings. I found him a complete delight.’
Faith died of a heart attack, aged 62, in 2003. ‘And I felt his loss keenly. It was such a shock. He’d had a history of physical disasters, everything from a quadruple bypass to a near fatal car crash. But he’d always bounced back. So how dare he pop off like that. I was very cross with him.’
While appearing in Passion Play by night, she’ll also be filming the latest Poirot adventure for TV opposite David Suchet. Hers is a recurring role as crime writer Ariadne Oliver to whom Zoë is extremely attached. ‘She’s all over the shop but Poirot’s strangely fond of her, the only person he ever calls by her first name. He has a distinct soft spot for her which David and I just love playing.’
Zoë was always going to be an actress, she says, even though both her elder and younger sister didn’t inherit anything thespian from the parental gene pool. Their father, of course, was the celebrated American actor Sam Wanamaker, ‘exiled’ to these shores in the early 1950s, a victim of the McCarthy witch-hunt. Their mother was the actress Charlotte Holland.
The result was that Zoë was brought up in Hampstead, a hop and a skip from where we’re now sitting. Sent to the liberal King Alfred School for her secondary education, she formed a greater attachment to a fellow (male) student than to her studies. ‘My parents decided I needed a little more intellectual rigour and despatched me to a boarding school in Somerset. It was too late. I’d lost the knack of concentrating.’
Following her expulsion – ‘on the last day of term, so I was leaving anyway’ – she reluctantly agreed to enrol at Hornsey College of Art. ‘But it was hopeless. I was surrounded by people much more gifted than me who I knew wouldn’t make a living from what they were doing.’ And anyway, she wanted only to be an actress. Drama college, she says, felt like being a round peg in a round hole.
For the first six years after graduation, she moved from one repertory theatre to another. It could not have been a better baptism, she says. ‘I feel sorry for young actors today. How are they to learn their craft?’ For Zoë, it was more than that. ‘Most of my education, I now realise, has come from the research involved in the plays I’ve appeared in down the years.’
She met her husband, actor and writer Gawn Grainger, when both appeared in a 1988 film, The Raggedy Rawney, Bob Hoskins’s directorial debut. She became friends with Gawn and his wife, actress Janet Key, who sadly died of cancer in 1992.
Subsequently, Zoë and Gawn’s friendship blossomed into love and they married in 1994, when she was 45. ‘I’m of the generation who grew up with the Pill and all that freedom. Marriage was never particularly high on my agenda. But I got lucky. I met a very nice man who made me laugh and whose children welcomed me into their house precisely because they could see I made their father happy again.’
Now, she works as often as interesting parts come along – pretty frequently, in her case – and enjoys life with a husband who is, she says, proud of his wife and doesn’t mind who knows it. On first nights, Zoë is all for slipping away quietly. Not Gawn. He’s keen to show off his wife and to celebrate her latest success.
In her spare time, such as it is, she likes little better than visiting art galleries and going to the cinema, and especially the theatre. ‘But I don’t watch television much,’ she says, ‘mostly because what’s on I simply don’t find particularly nourishing.
‘When I think back to The Wednesday Play, for instance, or Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven, they seem like something from a bygone, even golden, age. It comes to something when the best drama on TV these days seems to emanate from Sweden or Denmark. In the end, it’s all to do with good writing.’
Nor does she much enjoy appearing on television as herself. ‘I don’t have the confidence to be a personality,’ she maintains. ‘You have to have an incredible belief in yourself as someone who can be articulate and witty to order – that’s just not me. But I’m happy to stand aside for people who can. I’m much more at ease when I’m speaking someone else’s words in whatever part it is I’m playing.’
And we are the beneficiaries.
Passion Play is at the Duke of York’s Theatre, 104 St Martin’s Lane, London WC2, until 3 August: 0844-871 7623, www.passionplaylondon.com
There’s Helen Mirren packing them in as the Queen in The Audience, and Judi Dench (alongside Ben Whishaw) doing the same in Peter And Alice. In the autumn, there’s the promise of Vanessa Redgrave as Beatrice at the Old Vic, opposite James Earl Jones as Benedick, in a new production of Much Ado and, at some as yet unspecified future date, Lynda Bellingham in a revival of Kay Mellor’s A Passionate Woman. And, if it doesn’t sound too unchivalrous, each and every one of them is able to travel to the theatre on their Freedom Pass.
‘It’s fantastic, isn’t it?’ says Zoë, who is 64 on 13 May. ‘But Britain has always had strong actresses. Go back half a century or so and think of Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft and Googie Withers and Margaret Lockwood and Anna Neagle. The list goes on.’
She’s right, but what she’s attempting to do is downplay her own contribution to the current roll call. Any day now, Zoë will open in a new production of Peter Nichols’s Passion Play, last revived at the Donmar in 2000 with Cherie Lunghi, Martin Jarvis and Cheryl Campbell.
After a quarter of a century of marriage, Eleanor (Zoë) discovers that her husband James (Owen Teale), is having an affair with her friend Kate (Annabel Scholey). The husband and wife’s interior voices are played by Oliver Cotton and Samantha Bond. It’s a glorious mix, says Zoë, of humour, eroticism and duplicity. ‘It’s human, timeless, painful.’
It was director David Leveaux, with whom she’d worked in 1997 on a production of Electra, for which she won a Best Actress Olivier Award, who asked Zoë if she’d consider the role. She was only too delighted, she says. ‘It’s lovely to be working again in the theatre after a couple of years of film and television.’ The last time she trod the boards was in The Cherry Orchard at the National the year before last.
But then she is an actress who has become something of a byword for versatility, moving easily and frequently between all the available disciplines, at home with drama as much as comedy. And she’s much too self-deprecating to articulate the thought, but she’s never been out of work since she graduated from the Central School of Speech and Drama some four decades ago.
Nor is she one of those actresses who turns up her nose at the prospect of something unapologetically populist. One minute, it’s Sophocles or Shakespeare. The next, it’s Harry Potter (she played Madam Hooch in The Philosopher’s Stone) or more than 120 episodes of My Family opposite Robert Lindsay. ‘We’re all multifaceted,’ she points out, ‘so I enjoy going from one project to another, from serious theatre to crowd-pleasing TV sitcom.’
Ask her to pick personal career milestones and she plumps at length for Piaf in 1978 and another Olivier Best Actress turn in Once In A Lifetime the following year, both for the RSC. She loved the latter because of its American humour, something with which she’d always been very familiar at home, but until that point, never professionally.
She also really enjoyed appearing opposite Judi Dench in Mother Courage And Her Children at the Barbican in 1984, ‘Not least because my character had no lines, which meant I could concentrate on the physicality of it all’. She’d have to nominate, too, The Glass Menagerie at the Donmar in 1995 and Electra, both in London and on Broadway, ‘The first time I was allowed to have a really good scream on stage’.
Zoë and Owen Teale in Passion PlayShe also has a soft spot for Love Hurts, an unlikely TV hit in the early 1990s. ‘I was a bit snotty when I was first approached. Acting opposite Adam Faith? Wasn’t he just a pop star? What did he know about acting? How wrong I was. Adam was extremely bright and very much in touch with his feelings. I found him a complete delight.’
Faith died of a heart attack, aged 62, in 2003. ‘And I felt his loss keenly. It was such a shock. He’d had a history of physical disasters, everything from a quadruple bypass to a near fatal car crash. But he’d always bounced back. So how dare he pop off like that. I was very cross with him.’
While appearing in Passion Play by night, she’ll also be filming the latest Poirot adventure for TV opposite David Suchet. Hers is a recurring role as crime writer Ariadne Oliver to whom Zoë is extremely attached. ‘She’s all over the shop but Poirot’s strangely fond of her, the only person he ever calls by her first name. He has a distinct soft spot for her which David and I just love playing.’
Zoë was always going to be an actress, she says, even though both her elder and younger sister didn’t inherit anything thespian from the parental gene pool. Their father, of course, was the celebrated American actor Sam Wanamaker, ‘exiled’ to these shores in the early 1950s, a victim of the McCarthy witch-hunt. Their mother was the actress Charlotte Holland.
The result was that Zoë was brought up in Hampstead, a hop and a skip from where we’re now sitting. Sent to the liberal King Alfred School for her secondary education, she formed a greater attachment to a fellow (male) student than to her studies. ‘My parents decided I needed a little more intellectual rigour and despatched me to a boarding school in Somerset. It was too late. I’d lost the knack of concentrating.’
Following her expulsion – ‘on the last day of term, so I was leaving anyway’ – she reluctantly agreed to enrol at Hornsey College of Art. ‘But it was hopeless. I was surrounded by people much more gifted than me who I knew wouldn’t make a living from what they were doing.’ And anyway, she wanted only to be an actress. Drama college, she says, felt like being a round peg in a round hole.
For the first six years after graduation, she moved from one repertory theatre to another. It could not have been a better baptism, she says. ‘I feel sorry for young actors today. How are they to learn their craft?’ For Zoë, it was more than that. ‘Most of my education, I now realise, has come from the research involved in the plays I’ve appeared in down the years.’
She met her husband, actor and writer Gawn Grainger, when both appeared in a 1988 film, The Raggedy Rawney, Bob Hoskins’s directorial debut. She became friends with Gawn and his wife, actress Janet Key, who sadly died of cancer in 1992.
Subsequently, Zoë and Gawn’s friendship blossomed into love and they married in 1994, when she was 45. ‘I’m of the generation who grew up with the Pill and all that freedom. Marriage was never particularly high on my agenda. But I got lucky. I met a very nice man who made me laugh and whose children welcomed me into their house precisely because they could see I made their father happy again.’
Now, she works as often as interesting parts come along – pretty frequently, in her case – and enjoys life with a husband who is, she says, proud of his wife and doesn’t mind who knows it. On first nights, Zoë is all for slipping away quietly. Not Gawn. He’s keen to show off his wife and to celebrate her latest success.
In her spare time, such as it is, she likes little better than visiting art galleries and going to the cinema, and especially the theatre. ‘But I don’t watch television much,’ she says, ‘mostly because what’s on I simply don’t find particularly nourishing.
‘When I think back to The Wednesday Play, for instance, or Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven, they seem like something from a bygone, even golden, age. It comes to something when the best drama on TV these days seems to emanate from Sweden or Denmark. In the end, it’s all to do with good writing.’
Nor does she much enjoy appearing on television as herself. ‘I don’t have the confidence to be a personality,’ she maintains. ‘You have to have an incredible belief in yourself as someone who can be articulate and witty to order – that’s just not me. But I’m happy to stand aside for people who can. I’m much more at ease when I’m speaking someone else’s words in whatever part it is I’m playing.’
And we are the beneficiaries.
Passion Play is at the Duke of York’s Theatre, 104 St Martin’s Lane, London WC2, until 3 August: 0844-871 7623, www.passionplaylondon.com