The one-time soap star from Rochdale hangs out with Madonna and Sting, and Salman Rushdie reads bedtime stories to her daughter. Now she's setting off for LA. Annabel Rivkin meets an actress on the up and up.
Anna Friel is quite a serious person. I'd always imagined her to be a beamingly cosy Northerner: for all her waifish charm, a big-bosomed landlady in essence. An yet here she is, stalking through the Claridges lobby, a poised, considered young woman, patrician in head-to-toe Ralph Lauren camel cashmere and violent red lipstick shrieking from the middle of an unmade-up , neat and freckled face. she doesn't smile for the first few minutes - she's chilly, windswept and preoccupied, but her manners are beautiful.
She has driven through the gales , from her house in Windsor to talk about Goal!2, her new movie and the second in a $100 million football trilogy and starring a - thankfully - unspeaking David Beckham. The films, heavily sponsored by Adidas and Siemens, chart the fate of a Mexican boy from the barrio who becomes Newcastle United's star player. By the end of sequel he is Real Madrid's newest acquisition (enter Beckham) and the third in the series will see him moving to Los Angeles (re-enter Beckham) and competing in the World Cup. Anna plays his girlfriend, a Geordie nurse called Roz.
"I admit to not being the biggest football fan", she says in her faded Rochdale accent that gradually moves south as she absorbs my vowels like a parrot. "But it intrigues me. And what interested me about Roz was that she is the complete opposite of the Footballer's Wife. She represents all those women who are married to footballers and don't go shopping and spend all their money, someone who is grounded and not at all interested in fame. It's amazing that Beckham has got so involved with the films and they'd always planned for the next one to be set in LA which is weird."
To her chagrin, she had no opportunity to hang out with the players (Zidane and Ronaldo are among the other real Madrid heroes who pepper the footballing sequences). "because when I wasn't shooting, I was rushing around breast-feeding or having to deal with leaking breasts which grew and grew and grew and got so hard and so big that I couldn't fit into any of the costumes. They were like rocks".
She started work on Goal!2 when her daughter with the actor David Thewlis, Gracie, who's now 18 months, was eight weeks old (the baby came on set - she always does) and got some stick in the tabloids for being a bad role model and dieting herself stupid in order to film a nude scene which, incidentally, is so dark, brief and in profile that it really doesn't count. "My whole family is quite petite, so I have those genes on my side, but I find it quite tiresome that we all have to keep talking about sizes and shapes and how much weight we can lose," she says, not quite crossly. "I was lucky with my baby weight but I had awful other things like my gums growing over my teeth". These pregnancy growths in her mouth were so bad that her doctor photographed them for a medical journal and they had to be cut away twice before receding naturally after the baby was born. "But I loved my pregnancy", she says. "I think I blossomed and I felt goddess-like and very secure. I found it comforting to have a little thing growing inside me and very calming".
Her pregnancy was a surprise. She had suffered from endometriosis, not to mention an episode six years ago with a burst ovarian cyst that was so severe her stomach filled with two litres of blood and she developed septicaemia.
Now, at 30 - although she feels as though she's been around forever thanks to her star turn as the abused, homicidal and scandalously Sapphic Beth Jordache in Brookside; a part she won at 16 and walked away from at 18 - she is more settled than ever before. "I was so completely anxious before I had a child, but now my biggest worry is something happening to her so anything other than that I can handle. That's not to say that I'm calm and collected because that would be a load of bollocks. I wish it were the case but it's getting better as I get older."
She would like more children but wants to give Gracie the spotlight for some time yet. "She's at the ultra-cute stage and it's marvellous", she says. "She#s radically independent and doesn't think of herself as a baby at all. She's got a doll and lots of other babies".
The eldest child of two teachers (she has a younger brother who is training to be a doctor), Anna's first professional role was at 15, playing Michael Palin's daughter in Alan Bleasdale's GBH. She hasn't really stopped working since, although the big Hollywood break has so far eluded her. "I think I've made 16 films now", she says. "But no one ever sees them". Certainly her theatre work has gained more acclaim than her screen choices.
In 1999, at 22, she left London with Patrick Marber's play Closer, for a heavily plaudited run on Broadway. The move came at a good time. Having come down to London with her then boyfriend Darren Day (who unwisely left her for Tracy Shaw) , she dated Robbie Williams, a relationship that ended when he went into rehab, and she dabbled in what we now know as the Primrose Hill set. A few late-night photographs later, she was labelled as wild. "I went to New York to do Closer and then I came back and all our paths just changed. I don't think I did anything purposefully or thought ' I'm not going to see you guys any more' but we lost contact". Perhaps her quietening down was about a sense of self-preservation. "Maybe the change was subconsciously on purpose", she posits, "but it's incredible that stigmas can stick for such a long time. I look back and I don't regret anything".
She's recently given up smoking again after vowing never to go back to it after Gracie was born. "Filming got me started. Also I was beginning to feel like Miss Goody Two-Shoes. I'm a big wine fan but it's not easy to tolerate hangovers when you have a baby. I can't do it and you start to feel horrible because they somehow look deep into your soul. Babies have such raw emotions and it's unbelievable what the absorb". This is no reformed party-girl. she had her equivalent of student pound-a-pint nights on the razz in front of photographers. And then she grew up.
"Any self-destructiveness comes in the form of worry", she says, two slices of carrot cake down and sunny/ I think my tape recorder is dying (it is revived by batteries from a kind Claridges staff member) and my ensuing panic elicits her sympathy. "Oh we all have days like this.. now what can I do to help darling?" She's bouncier then talking about Celebrity Big Brother, directors she admires, her married gay best friend to whom she was best woman, the coconut cake she made yesterday or her baby than she is when talking about her past or even her work - ambitious though she clearly is. "I used to think worry was good for me", she says, "that it made my conscience very loud. I would justify it and give myself hell. My hugest fear is of being lazy".
She believes that much of her groundedness, her work ethic and indeed her survival under surveillance since she was 17 come from having happily married parents who provided her with an enormous sense of security. "I was one of the few people in my class at school who didn't have divorced parents and it makes you think that even if you are having difficulties in your relationship you should push on and try everything because it massively affects children. I am very happy with David but you never know what's around the corner so you just hope for the best".
The couple met on a plane to Cannes two and a half years before they got together. "The next time we met he was in a relationship and nothing happened. Then we went to dinner with some friends and he moved in after about two days". That was six and half years ago and, apart from a troubling time a few years ago when they spent six months apart, have been thoroughly happy ever since. she is proud of David's writing, his acting (The Big Lebowski, the Harry Potters) and protective. She was offended when a journalist referred to him as shambolic. "I am allowed to call him shambolic because I am his woman", she says firmly.
The friends who threw the dinner at which they fell for each other are rumoured to be Sting and Trudie Styler. There have been dinners with Madonna and weekends in Scotland with Billy Connolly where Salman Rushdie read Gracie her bedtime story, but Anna is very discreet about her address book and David, who is about to have his first novel published (The Late Hector Kipling, a satire about the art world of the YBAs), hates giving interviews.
The couple are not married and are in no hurry. "I don't think there's any point", she says. "not yet. When I was younger I thought I'd meet the man of my dreams and get married and then have a child but it all went higgledy-piggledy and happened in the reverse order. I think I'd feel a bit stupid: 'Hello - here I am in my meringue.' But never say never".
They have lived in Windsor for four years; a town where Anna fell for when visiting her godparents who also live there. "I like the touristy element of it, the fact that it's filled with different people", she says. "I love the backdrop of the castle and I like the historical element. I'm a huge collector of Arts and Crafts antiques. My house looks exactly as it would have done in 1890 when it was built - apart from dishwashers and fridges and things". They have kept David's converted ballroom in Clerkenwell and she, to her evident delight, has just got her hands on a 300-year-old tumbledown cottage in the hills of Majorca. "We are quite a strange couple in many ways", she says. "David owns Clerkenwell and I own Windsor and all our finances are separate and we aren't married but we have a child together. David's just bought another house in Windsor so we are both getting into property. It's the only thing where your money's safe".
Presumably with Goal!3 starting shooting in the summer, money is coming in but Anna is not profligate, preferring to binge on vintage rather than designer and speaking to her father daily about her finances. She's also got herself a new LA agent after being pleasantly surprised by how many of the powerful ones were throwing representation at her. I think a reinvigorated Anna Friel is on the market and, with guts and looks, that Tinseltown break will surely happen any minute now. "Everything is hotting up again", she says, "and I'm very excited". Looks like David Beckham is not the only one set on conquering Hollywood.
Goal!2 opens on 9 February.