Here is part of an interview/article in the Telegraph. In answer to the question, I say yes!

Is this the new Judi Dench?

Like her forerunner, Anne-Marie Duff has won critical acclaim on both stage and screen – and is unspoilt by stardom.

In the course of the play – and an extraordinarily compelling performance – Duff fleshes out the woman at the centre of a national scandal, a magnet for the era’s combined fascination and revulsion with the whispered, explosive topic of sex. Her Alma is, by turns, captivating and desperately foolish, amoral and courageous, cocky and devastated: by the end of her trial, all the pretty frivolity has been crushed out of her, like a butterfly pressed between two stones.

It is perhaps fitting that Duff should play Rattenbury with such empathy, because there are few actresses so acutely aware of the perils of self-exposure. Duff lives with her husband, the actor and film star James McAvoy, and their baby son in Crouch End, north London. Both actors are frequently interviewed, and when pressed, as they inevitably are, to provide some tastily confessional gobbet about each other, they steadfastly refuse to discuss their relationship. Duff has said: “It’s precious to me and what is precious to me is not up for grabs.”

Although the couple occasionally appears together at red-carpet events, there are no gushing magazine photo-spreads thereafter. Duff is fond of explaining her caginess in interviews by paraphrasing a Henry James quote to the effect that if you give too much of yourself away, people will swallow it up without even tasting it. It appears not only to be a recipe for sanity, but throws the spotlight back upon her work: Duff’s growing reputation as the finest British actress of her generation is bolstered with every performance.

Duff, now 40, occupies a unique position in the panoply of younger British actresses. Her closest forerunner is perhaps Dame Judi Dench: an actress who could comfortably veer between Shakespeare and sitcoms, working in television, stage and film to critical acclaim, but who has never appeared in the least carried away with the trappings of stardom. Dame Judi, who at 76 has now attained the undisputed status of a national treasure, also achieved that rare thing in showbusiness: a long and happy marriage to the actor, Michael Williams, before his death in 2001.

Perhaps, professionally, there is also a growing awareness among serious actors that the celebrity machine, once it goes into overdrive, can become the active enemy of artistic success. In America, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, both talented actors in their own right, have now become a media roadshow, privileged prisoners of their own fame: the interest in their private lives is so intense that the entire world acts as a kind of giant, distorting mirror. Their lives, bizarrely, now seem bigger than their roles: Jolie’s most recent films – from the action thriller Salt to the spy spoof The Tourist – have been disappointingly one-dimensional.

In contrast, Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, the Oscar-winning Spanish stars who have recently married and had a son together, are intensely guarded about their personal life. Bardem in particular, as one of the most critically respected male film actors in the world, seems determined that his family will not be reduced to tabloid fodder: what is offered for consumption, after all, will end by being consumed.

Duff and McAvoy, quietly pursuing their deliberately ordinary family life in north London, are effectively the British anti-Brangelina, and – far from resenting them for their reticence – the country seems to like them all the better for it.

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