The Look (in The Mirror) - 20 June 1998

Footloose and Fancy Friel

Following the devastation and heartache of two failed romances, Anna Friel threw herself into her work. In the process, she tells IVAN WATERMAN, she found new inner strength and determination.

She had just been through one of the worst year's of her life. Yet at her 21st birthday party, when Anna Friel looked around at all her family and friends celebrating in the packed wine bar, it dawned on her just how much she was loved. It proved a turning point for her.

Her father pressed a package into her hand and whispered "Happy 21st birthday, darling". Inside was a small case containing several melted gold pieces. It was inscribed, "In case of emergency break glass".

All her friends clapped and cheered as Anna managed a rueful smile. They, like her, knew the message of her father's light-hearted gift summed up the traumatic events of personal life perfectly. Anna had her heart broken twice in less than a year. First by Don't Try This At Home presenter Darren Day, who dumped her for Coronation Street star Tracy Shaw, then on the rebound, by rock singer Robbie Williams. But one year after that memorable party, Ann is more confident, more sought-after and certainly a lot wiser about love and life than she was before.

"I knew I was over Darren and Robbie when my father gave me my present at that party", she says. "It was so touching. I thought some of the people there would think the whole affair was a bit soft. But they stood and listened to my father. They were 'my' people. They wanted to hear what he had to say. He gave me the best present I could wish for - love. I realised it was time to get on with my life."

"When all of that happened with Darren and Robbie I had to take a long, hard look at myself and ask "Am I strong enough to get through this ?" I had my doubts at first. Could I deal with all the betrayal ?"

Chain smoking and sipping tea in a hotel lounge is a woman who demands to be taken seriously. Intense is the word that best describes the teacher's daughter from Rochdale, Lancashire whose oval specs make her look more like a student or a secretary than a top actress and celebrated sex symbol. But she's in control of her life - and her career. Anna shot to fame at 16 playing troubled Beth Jordache in Brookside. And whereas many stars who quit soaps disappear without trace, Anna's talents have been much in demand. She appeared in an episode of Cadfael, was acclaimed for her part as the wilful Bella Wilfer in the recent adaptation of Our Mutual Friend, has major roles in the forthcoming Land Girls and Rogue Trader, and is back on our TV screens on Sunday in The Tribe.

Looking radiant and tanned following her recent holiday with Kate Moss in Punta Ala Coast, Italy,  Anna's hair is cropped short and still flecked with blonde from her recent role as disgraced financier Nick Leeson's wife in Rogue Trader. Her clothes match her simple hairstyle - a plain black cotton dress and cardigan. It's a look which hints at a woman determined to change her image, to appear stronger. Though her tiny, too-slight figure can't help but make her appear fragile and vulnerable, and she obviously still bears the emotional scars of two lost love affairs, she has put her year of heartache in perspective since those awful two days spent hiding behind closed doors sobbing over the end of her relationship with Day.

"I have had to mature very quickly or I wouldn't have been able to come through. I don't hold any grudges against either Darren or Robbie. I still speak to Robbie and we are friends," says Anna.

"But I am still srniling and sharper, and more aware of things happening around me. I am also more guarded, which is a shame. I do feel old for my age".

After moving out of the home she shared with Day last year, she bought a £200,000 flat with high ornate ceilings in a mansion block  in West London and set about the task of decorating herself.

Anna has stopped wanting any form of revenge on Day, who was branded Rat of the Year when he ditched Anna and a week later announced his love for Tracy Shaw. The couple are now engaged.

"Love is so complex and can be so negative" says Anna "But the love I have had never goes. You will always have that love. What happened gave me another element to my personality There were things I have also never felt before. It was difficult, though. That anchor and that stability was taken away from me. I didn't have a home. I was alone for the first time."

"I'm not scared of falling in love again. If I want to spend all of my time with somebody new I won't hesitate. I won't live my life thinking of the consequences. I will live every moment as it comes."

"Hopefully, I'll find a person who will one day be right for me. Love is true when you don't question it and you know you can't live without that person. I want marriage and children - I think I'll be a good mum one day. But I want to meet other people before I settle down.

"I know life is not a fairytale. I think the message there for me and others from Princess Diana's death is to live every day as though it were your last. I am trying to do as much as I can."

Until she does find a special someone, Anna is quite happy to he alone.

"I didn't realise what impact it would have on my life, not having a place of my own and somebody close to me. I was always in hotels and different countries. Now I close the door and it is my home, I am so excited."

"I've only just learned to live by myself, I can choose my friends, get into cooking and be domestic. I'm having this amazing kitchen fitted and my hall is green - its like walking into a library".

It's been a long, often rocky road since she first tasted stardom and controversy as Beth Jordache in Channel Four's Brookside. From the start, her character was a real ratings booster sexually abused by her brutish father Trevor, Beth's family went into hiding in a "safe house" in the Close.

When Trevor  tracked them down and started threatening more violence and abuse, Beth and her battered murn Sandy (played by Sandra Maitland) murdered him and buried his body beneath the patio. It was a storyline that gripped the nation. Anna was only 16 at the time, but MPs were asking questions about the morality of her character in the House of Commons.

Then she became the first soap character to share a lesbian kiss on British TV. Her controversial clinch with friend and fellow actress Nicola Stephenson kept everyone glued to their sets.

By the time Beth was jailed for murder and finally killed off, Anna had become an icon of "babe power", a favourite pin-up with Loaded-reading lads, and had established herself as an actress with a future far beyond the soap suds.

"I realised that people enjoyed seeing me half-naked on the covers of magazines and being called a 'babe'," she says of those days. People also related to what the character Beth had suffered.

"Kids were writing to me asking how to handle sex abuse in their homes and deal with their sexuality. When those kind of questions are asked you do tend to look at yourself a lot. You're wondering, 'Where do l want to go ?' 'Who am l ?' 'What do l stand for ?' and 'What really is bad taste?' "One girl wrote to me saying I was 'courageous' doing the story. I wrote to her telling her she was ten times more courageous than me facing up to her sexuality. There was so much insecurity corning through. They needed support and something nice to be said to them. If I can have that affect, then it's worth getting issues across in a soap at 8pm.

"Part of the problem is being a role model and having such a responsibility. I though Princess Diana was invincible. There wasn't a better role model for any girl to follow. But now she's gone." Darren and Robbie are gone too, along with any notion that Anna is merely a soap siren.

 

Since leaving Brookside she has been working non-stop. And last month at the Cannes Film Festival she was compared to movie starlets such as Kate Winslet, signalling her arrival into the big league. Over the coming weeks we will see her as a reporter in Moscow in The Stringer, and as a promiscuous evacuee called Prue in the romantic comedy Land Girls, set on a farm in Dorset during World War II.

For Land Girls, she lived in a cottage in North Devon with co-stars Catherine McCormack and Rachel Weisz, and got to make hay in a barn with Steven Mackintosh (her co-star in Our Mutual Friend) who plays a farmer's son.

"Amazing, isn't it?" Anna jokes. "I get snogged by the same bloke in two different productions. Is that a record? But seriously, we had an incredible time down there. It was like being in a great little club.

"Prue is quite a character. She's outspoken - she says what she thinks as she thinks it, which is very much like me. But she teaches the other girls a lot about enjoying life. At the same time she works hard so she reckons she's entitled to enjoy herself - in any way.

'Working on the land was amazing. We learned to use farm implements but milking the cows was tougher. I didn't realise how big they were! They let off so much steam at one point they fogged the camera lens.

"But we bonded with the cows. When they had calved each one was named after a member of the cast or crew, so a part of me will be down in the West Country forever.'

Before Land Girls, Anna appears in something much darker. The Tribe, a controversial new film containing a great deal of full-frontal nudity and free sex, is being shown on Sunday on BBC2. In one scene Anna's involved in a naked three-in-a-bed romp with Jeremy Northam and Jonathan Rhys Myers.

The story, written by award-winning playwright Stephen Poliakoff, concerns a band of '90s-style hippies, who live in a drug-induced high in their own secluded community. Northam plays a high-flying property developer sent to evict the bizarre cult, who dress in black, from their base. Instead, he ends up being seduced by their erotic lifestyle.

"One day we went into a shopping mall in our black costumes - the locals didn't know there were cameras focused on us and gave us some very strange looks," says Anna.

"But in those circumstances you could get away with much more and really stare back and not feel self-conscious, intimidated or embarrassed. You had this weird feeling of having power.

"The nudity was imperative to the plot, in order to show how these people were 'free' with their lives. How they gave pleasure to each other. You have to trust the story, trust the director and the writer. There was no problem there. I'm a big girl now anyway."

 

Anna says the latter with a confident, cheeky grin which leaves you feeling that she has definitely found life AD - After Darren.

She now looks back with something bordering on embarrassment on the naive girl she was just a year ago. "I was such a novice," she admits with a slight grimace. "It makes me cringe when I think of some of the things I would say in front of some very important people. It got me a reputation for being 'little girlie' which I don't think I am at all.

"Now I want to work with great actors and directors, and not because I am just a pretty girl or because I can put bums on seats. But I want to be respected for the right reasons.

"I want to touch hearts and change a few people's minds about me. I want to entertain. I don't know how long all that is going to take, but I am going to put that effort in.

"At the moment I feel I'm the most together I have ever been. The most stable, the most strong - the most truly happy I have ever been. I feel as if I know where I want to go and that I have a really exciting life ahead of me."

And she smiles rather nervously, takes yet another puff on a cigarette, and concludes in a brave voice, "It's up to me what I make of it, isn't it?"