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Mar 18 11 11:57 PM
Because there simply aren’t the parts, or they don’t quite have the talent to last, there are certain celebrated young actresses who you can be fairly sure won’t be acting in middle age. Anne-Marie Duff will not be one of them.
Curled onto a sofa in her dressing room at the Old Vic, she exudes an aura not of entitlement, but of belonging, of an institution-in-waiting. Here is an actress who, when the current crop of revered thespian dames have reconvened upstairs, will one day slip into their shoes.
For the moment, Duff is at the critical age of 40 — “I’m an old bird now,” she says, matily – and back in the theatre for the first time since her acclaimed lead performance in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan at the National in 2007.
What took her so long to return? Partly there have been screen roles – as John Lennon’s mother in Nowhere Boy, Tolstoy’s daughter in The Last Station and Margot Fonteyn in the BBC’s Margot. And she’s had a baby boy, Andrew, with her husband James McAvoy, whom she met on the set of Shameless. But also, no one was hiring.
“I wasn’t really asked to do much theatre after Joan, curiously,” she says. “Sometimes when you play one of those roles that’s heralded as being a definitive role for an actor to play, you get associated with it for quite a while. Jobs like that don’t come around. You’re lucky if you get a couple of those in a career.”
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