London Evening Standard 14 May 1999

Anna's toasting Broadway with Marmite and teabags

SHE'S COME a long way from Brookside. Today, at the ripe old age of 22, Anna Friel is the toast of Broadway - and Broadway has never had a more British flavour. In her first UK interview since making her stage debut at the end of March, she reveals how she staves off loneliness in the Big Apple with regular supplies of Typhoo teabags and Marmite from her family.

She also describes how she was so nervous that she was physically sick before facing an audience for the first time, and how Broadway's Britpack have become firm friends in the Big Apple.

Friel has won rave reviews as a feisty young lap-dancer in the all-British cast of Closer, Patrick Marber's coruscating take on sex and sexual politics - despite having had no dramatic training and never having appeared onstage in front of an audience before. This week, her pixieish features adorn the cover of the New York edition of Time Out, and she is pictured in a far more revealing pose in the current issue of the New Yorker. Friel has been nominated for a Drama Desk Award - a useful guide to the Tonys - as best supporting actress and already has a quarter-share in the Critics Circle Award that went to the ensemble cast of Friel, Natasha Richardson, Rupert Graves and Ciaran Hinds, while the show itself is nominated for a Tony as best play.

The city has taken to Friel just as it has taken to Oscar-winning Judi Dench, who is packing them in a block away in Richard Eyre's production of Amy's View, while Alan Cumming is down the road in Sam Mendes's Cabaret. Friel got the call to audition for Closer when she was filming in Los Angeles at the end of last year, shooting the Seventies music- biz picture Sunset Strip, latest in a string of movie roles - Land Girls, Rogue Trader, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Mad Cows.

"I was surprised to get the call because I had auditioned in London two years earlier, when it first went into the West End, and didn't get it," she says over a drink at the Paramount Hotel the butt of several in-jokes in Closer. "They didn't think I was mature enough for the role and I agreed. I had not been through enough pain ... but now I know more than enough about being left and being cheated on and all that stuff." She grimaces at the memory of being spurned by her fiance, Darren Day. "In fact," she adds wearily, "I don't want to mention the words love or relationships because everyone goes on about my heart being broken, as if it's never happened to anyone else."

Friel admits she was nervous before she opened in Closer under the microscope of the Broadway critics, her theatrical experience being limited to the amateur dramatic workshop she had attended after school from 13 to 16. "During rehearsals, I went through so much paranoia and insecurity and ridiculous thoughts, thinking I will never be able to do it," she says. "I was shaking and sweating and, on one occasion, I was sick before I went on. But, with hindsight, I think that was a good thing because by the time previews began, I was able to enjoy it. I still get nervous and wonder how I can still do it ...but I love it. "It is such an excitement: it's the best training I've ever had because you are always trying to get the perfect performance."

Offstage, Friel lives in an apartment building four blocks from the theatre, where the neighbours include fellow cast members Rupert Graves and Ciaran Hinds. "The flat's great," she says. "It's on the 22nd floor, it's got two bedrooms so my family can stay whenever they come over. They bring me Marmite and Typhoo teabags, and my mum always brings Cadbury's chocolate."

After the evening performance of Closer, the cast congregate for drinks in Richardson's dressing room and usually go out to dinner together, even though it is often midnight by then. She has no plans to move permanently to America. "New York's a wonderfully liberating and exciting place to be, especially at my age, but I could only live here if I lived in London too," she says. "And LA is great to work in, but I couldn't live there - I don't want to become part of the machinery."