You Magazine - 31 October 1999

Star-Spangled Anna

Anna Friel has come a long way since her days as a soap star. With rave reviews for her recent Broadway triumph, and fans who include Madonna and Jack Nicholson, the future looks stellar for the It-girl from Rochdale"

No, sorry, we don’t know where she is... I know,.. I know.., We’re doing everything we can ~...‘The receptionist at the company arranging the publicity for Anna Friel’s latest film Mad COWS is not having a good day. He’s had to turn away two journalists with no interview. Their editors are phoning, furious. ‘This isn’t even my job,’ he confides, exasperated. The real receptionist is sick. Will Anna appear soon? He hopes so but doesn’t know. After a back-to-back marathon of morning interviews, Anna has disappeared for lunch — mobile off.

Another 20-minute wait. More frantic phone calls. Finally, Anna is found, She’s at London’s private members’ club Soho House. Would I go and meet her there, take her to the limo and, as time is so short, conduct the interview in the car as we drive to the photographic studio?

Anna Friel, seemingly oblivious of the kerfuffle, is not having a good day either. She has had a wig fitting for another film this morning, before the first round of interviews arranged by one of the Mad Cows producers, intent on squeezing the last drop from his celebrity catch. She’s jet lagged: Hurricane Floyd turbulence tossed her violently out of her plane seat on a flight back from New York. And now— ‘bloody ‘ell’ — she’s caught in a torrential downpour. Still smiling, Anna sploshes determinedly in her Gina kitten heels to the waiting limo, her tiny frame further dwarfed by her huge umbrella.

‘Can’t smoke?’ asks FrieI. The driver is unrelenting. ‘Go on, babe, please. I’ll blow it out the window,’ purrs Anna. The driver relents. Friel is already smoking. She is dressed in black Joseph trousers, a black backless cashmere Gucci top and a shell bett and bracelet bought on a holiday in Bali. Her impish crop is ragged from the rain. Her skin is smooth and delicately freckled, like an egg. Her eyes are unusually round. Anna may look like a Pierrot doll but she sounds like kitchen sink’s Billie Whitelaw. Quick and opinionated, she delivers more words per minute than a speed typist.

‘I went to Soho House for the first time in ages the other night and I thought, "I’ve not missed any of this at all," chatters Anna. ‘You go out and think, who actually knows you? Who asks any real questions? What do you all really talk about?’ Surprising words from an actress who has been photographed in every hip London hangout with a pick ‘n’ mix of Brit-clique celebrati — Kate Moss, Meg Mathews et al. They don’t look like they’re discussing Nietzsche. Today, her social circle hasn’t changed, but merely expanded with the likes of Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett. Evidently she hasn’t swapped Soho House for the Slug and Lettuce either. But Friel has, she says, changed: ‘I’ve really grown up lot.’ She has returned from New York to London a conqueror. In a short space of time she has gone from soap star to America’s most-wanted: from the cover of lads’ magazines to Vanity Fair. It is quite a reinvention: a direct result of talent, luck, and, not least, careful manipulation of her media image. But the key to Anna’s current status is her recent triumph on Broadway in Patrick Marber’s play Closer. An unknown in New York, she won critical acclaim and the priceless It-factor. Madonna scrabbled around town hunting for tickets. Jack Nicholson said he couldn’t concentrate until he had slept with her.

‘It [the acclaim] was nothing about fame, nakedness, men or soap. People just knew me as the actress they saw perform. I felt respected for the first time,’ says Anna, blowing smoke carefully through the gap in the window. ‘It’s given me an inner peace and confidence I didn’t have before.’

New York also gave her a rare taste of anonymity. Initially just a theatre actress, Friel walked to work through Central Park, hung out, shopped, learned to swing dance: normal things denied to her in Britain. ‘It was a joy,’ she smiles. ‘There wasn’t the bullshit. People were straight with me.’ She slips into a flawless Nu Yoik accent. ‘They were like, "Shud up. Whadda ya talkin’ about?" It [New York, Broadway] saved me. Not,’ she adds quickly, wary of my tape recorder, ‘that I needed saving.’

Anna Friel’s fame started with a kiss —the first lesbian kiss on British television — as Brookside’s Beth Jordache; it created a cult sex icon. Her romances with Darren Day (who dumped her rather publicly for Coronation Street’s Tracy Shaw) and then Robbie Williams fed the tabloid Friel frenzy. Although post-Brookside she increasingly demanded respect as an actress, for her parts in Land Girls and Our Mutual Friend, it was Fuel’s private life that interested the media: ‘They turned it into a soap.’

Consequently, as Anna says, she has ‘grown up in front of the camera’. Fortunately, the camera loves her. Anna’s cheekbones rival those of her friend Kate Moss. And she has a model’s chameleon-like qualities. In cut-off jeans she looks like a hungry urchin; in a long dress she’s 100 per cent Hollywood. Today, at the photographic studio, Anna prefers the jeans.

‘Let's chop these up a bit, customise them,’ she says playfully, grabbing some jeans in the dressing room, before rummaging through the racks of clothes. ‘Wow, look at these sequins.’

Anna loves clothes. She and Kate Moss play fashion shows at her Kensington flat. She loves Gucci, Galliano, Marc Jacobs, Earl Jean jeans -‘Have you discovered them yet?’ — and Patty Shelabarger. Her style? ‘I like to dress simply but add special bits of my own.’ And now she’s Anna Friel the star (not Anna Friel from Brookside) , designers give her clothes: ‘Bloody fantastic.’

Anna also loves to buy stuff. ‘Whenever I get upset I shop,’ she explains. ‘It’s my biggest therapy. My dad gets mad. He’ll say, "Your gold card bill has come through. Do you know how much you’ve been spending? You don’t need any more shoes. You’re Imelda Marcos!" Friel says she owns 150 pairs of shoes. Her assistant, laughing, says this is an underestimate. Some therapy.

During the changes between shots, Anna strips down naked and wanders around, without a flinch of self-consciousness. You cannot help but look: she has the perfect pert body of a teenager. But Hollywood seems to prefer its stars to come with eating disorders. During the shooting of her first Hollywood film, Sunset Strip, she was told to stop eating doughnuts and ‘lose that tummy’. What tummy? ‘I know. I Will argue my point, but at the end of the day you still think, "Have I got a tummy?" Anna makes more of an effort now: yoga - ‘I hate the gym’ - vitamins, catnaps and ‘the key’, drinking lots of water. ‘But with all the flying and inconsistent meals and stuff, it’s hard.’

And then there’s the man thing. Although she had a brief fling with a theatre actor in New York, Anna is single. ‘The thing I’m most scared about is.. .how am I ever going to be able to have a normal relationship while I’m living this life?’ she frowns. ‘It’s a time thing. I’m never in one place and you need at least a few months to spend time with someone, to trust them. Otherwise it’s never real. The only answer is to work my backside off and get all my drive out of the way first.’

She wants children. ‘If I didn’t meet Mr Right I’d go to the sperm bank and get the best genes on earth,’ she hoots. ‘But really I want what my parents gave me.’ A close family unit. Parents who are ‘still desperately in love’. ‘I can make myself a successful actress, I can make myself rich, but those are the things you can’t make happen. But, you know, I’m independent. I’ve got everything I need, maybe not everything I want...’ she remarks, without self-pity.

Friel’s family keeps her Gina heels firmly on the ground. The family home in Rochdale is a ‘peaceful, calm retreat’. She’s very close to her parents, Des and Julie, both teachers. Indeed, Anna has chosen to celebrate the new millennium with her family in a house in Donegal, rather than at an Elton John-style bacchanalia. She needs someone to deny the diva. ‘A lot of very successful people become very lonely because they’re not lucky enough to have real people around them to say, "What yer doing?" They just get, "Yes, yes, yes," because so many people have vested interests.’

With her family, Anna can act her age. While many 23-year-olds are busy contemplating whether to bunk off a college lecture, Anna must manoeuvre through a world which, beneath the glitz, is as vicious as the cosmetic surgeon’s knife. Tellingly, she refuses to let her mother redecorate her old bedroom. Like a memorial to a dead child, it’s exactly the same as it was before she was famous: pine furniture, cat-scratched wallpaper, teenage novels, posters of River Phoenix and Johnny Depp rolled up inside the wardrobe. In an extraordinary life, the ordinary becomes sacred.

‘Almost done, babe?’ Anna asks the photographer. She was meant to leave an hour ago and has a script to read this evening. Many other media-weary stars would have stomped off by now. But Anna’s not a particularly starry star despite her insistence that the new grown-up Anna Friel knows how to say no, ‘doesn’t care what people think’, she wants to be liked. And she’s infinitely likeable. After the last shot is taken, Anna tours the studio, air kisses the crew goodbye and promises tickets to the premiere. ‘Byeeee!’ Slipping into her kitten heels, cigarette in mouth, she disappears under her umbrella and battles back into the pouring rain.