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'Margot' is supposed to air on BBC 4 this Monday 30 November: Anne-Marie Duff stars as Margot Fonteyn in 'Margot', the final drama in BBC Four's 'Women We Loved' season.
'Margot' tells the story of the prima ballerina dancing partnership and complex relationship with Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev, forged towards the end of her career. The partnership propelled them into the stratosphere of international stardom, creating a kind of celebrity that had never existed before and securing their place in the hearts of audiences and the history of ballet.
Viewers meet Fonteyn aged 40 in a dark prison cell, having been caught up in her husband, Tito's, attempt to overthrow the Panamanian government. Despite her surroundings, she remains elegantly poised but, behind this façade, is a woman painfully aware of the future.
Nov 28 09 6:04 PM
Nov 30 09 12:26 AM
Anne-Marie Duff: why playing Margot Fonteyn hurt No ballet virgin could star as Margot Fonteyn without going through the pain barrier. Just ask Anne-Marie Duff, writes Luke Jennings For the 40-year-old ballerina, life can be cruel, as Margot Fonteyn discovered at the dawning of the 1960s. Challenged by younger rivals, physically exhausted and isolated from former friends by marriage to a sleazy and adulterous playboy, the Old Girl, as Fonteyn was known by her intimates, was thought to be on her last legs. Enter, in one of classical ballet's greatest ever coups de théatre, a blazing young Russian defector: Rudolf Nureyev. The story of their partnership is a thrilling and poignant one. It's been told many times in literary and TV documentary form, and now, in Otto Bathurst's film Margot, it unfolds as drama. Historically, the problem with ballet films has been that, for the most part, dancers can't deliver lines convincingly and actors can't do pirouettes and pointe-work. Anne Bancroft's performance as a "prima ballerina" in Herbert Ross's The Turning Point (1977) is a case in point, with the middle-aged actress allowed to flutter an arm or two but basically shot in tight close-up, fooling nobody. So how did Anne-Marie Duff, star of Channel 4's Shameless and the BBC's The Virgin Queen, approach the explicitly physical role of Fonteyn? "With great respect," says 39-year-old Duff. "I'd done a wee bit of dance at drama school, but I was very much a ballet virgin." So the BBC placed her in the seasoned hands of Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, aka the Ballet Boyz. "We nearly didn't accept the job," says Nunn, recalling the seeming impossibility of creating a ballerina from scratch in just a few weeks. "But in the end, we made her do a ballet class every day and sent her to watch classes with the Royal Ballet, to see how they walked and held themselves." "I was like a magpie," says Duff. "I'd go to Covent Garden and steal things - looks, movements, gestures - from [principal dancers] Tamara Rojo and Leanne Benjamin." It turned out that, ballet virgin or no, the actress had a certain innate ability. "She's got nice arms," concedes Nunn. "A really nice port de bras. We didn't put her on pointe but we threw her around a bit and gradually she started turning into a dancer, disappearing for a quick weep when things got hard but then coming back for more. She was shocked, I think, at just how brutal it all was." Brutal it might have been, but Trevitt and Nunn's tough love saw the magpie transformed into something like a swan. "My tootsies were sore but my body felt great," says Duff. "There's a kind of osmosis as the perfectionism of that world bleeds into you. You acquire a little of what dancers have, a confidence in the beauty you can create." In the end, she learned an entire mime scene from Giselle and the death scene from Romeo and Juliet, and in the film carries off both very creditably indeed. Duff doesn't look particularly like Fonteyn, but her delicate, large-eyed beauty is suggestive of that fragrant English starriness to which Fonteyn, Audrey Hepburn and the young Princess Margaret subscribed. On the unresolved question of whether Fonteyn and Nureyev slept together, Bathurst's film - quelle surprise - decides that they did. The Dutch actor Michiel Huisman, also coached by the Ballet Boyz, plays the Russian dancer. "He's certainly fucked the Old Girl into shape," remarks Derek Jacobi's Frederick Ashton, watching the pair rehearse Giselle, and while it would be neither accurate nor tasteful to say the same about Nunn and Trevitt and Anne-Marie Duff, it's fair to say that they've very comprehensively relieved her of that ballet virginity.
No ballet virgin could star as Margot Fonteyn without going through the pain barrier. Just ask Anne-Marie Duff, writes Luke Jennings
For the 40-year-old ballerina, life can be cruel, as Margot Fonteyn discovered at the dawning of the 1960s. Challenged by younger rivals, physically exhausted and isolated from former friends by marriage to a sleazy and adulterous playboy, the Old Girl, as Fonteyn was known by her intimates, was thought to be on her last legs. Enter, in one of classical ballet's greatest ever coups de théatre, a blazing young Russian defector: Rudolf Nureyev.
The story of their partnership is a thrilling and poignant one. It's been told many times in literary and TV documentary form, and now, in Otto Bathurst's film Margot, it unfolds as drama. Historically, the problem with ballet films has been that, for the most part, dancers can't deliver lines convincingly and actors can't do pirouettes and pointe-work. Anne Bancroft's performance as a "prima ballerina" in Herbert Ross's The Turning Point (1977) is a case in point, with the middle-aged actress allowed to flutter an arm or two but basically shot in tight close-up, fooling nobody.
So how did Anne-Marie Duff, star of Channel 4's Shameless and the BBC's The Virgin Queen, approach the explicitly physical role of Fonteyn? "With great respect," says 39-year-old Duff. "I'd done a wee bit of dance at drama school, but I was very much a ballet virgin." So the BBC placed her in the seasoned hands of Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, aka the Ballet Boyz. "We nearly didn't accept the job," says Nunn, recalling the seeming impossibility of creating a ballerina from scratch in just a few weeks. "But in the end, we made her do a ballet class every day and sent her to watch classes with the Royal Ballet, to see how they walked and held themselves."
"I was like a magpie," says Duff. "I'd go to Covent Garden and steal things - looks, movements, gestures - from [principal dancers] Tamara Rojo and Leanne Benjamin." It turned out that, ballet virgin or no, the actress had a certain innate ability. "She's got nice arms," concedes Nunn. "A really nice port de bras. We didn't put her on pointe but we threw her around a bit and gradually she started turning into a dancer, disappearing for a quick weep when things got hard but then coming back for more. She was shocked, I think, at just how brutal it all was."
Brutal it might have been, but Trevitt and Nunn's tough love saw the magpie transformed into something like a swan. "My tootsies were sore but my body felt great," says Duff. "There's a kind of osmosis as the perfectionism of that world bleeds into you. You acquire a little of what dancers have, a confidence in the beauty you can create." In the end, she learned an entire mime scene from Giselle and the death scene from Romeo and Juliet, and in the film carries off both very creditably indeed.
Duff doesn't look particularly like Fonteyn, but her delicate, large-eyed beauty is suggestive of that fragrant English starriness to which Fonteyn, Audrey Hepburn and the young Princess Margaret subscribed.
On the unresolved question of whether Fonteyn and Nureyev slept together, Bathurst's film - quelle surprise - decides that they did. The Dutch actor Michiel Huisman, also coached by the Ballet Boyz, plays the Russian dancer. "He's certainly fucked the Old Girl into shape," remarks Derek Jacobi's Frederick Ashton, watching the pair rehearse Giselle, and while it would be neither accurate nor tasteful to say the same about Nunn and Trevitt and Anne-Marie Duff, it's fair to say that they've very comprehensively relieved her of that ballet virginity.
Posts: 376
Nov 30 09 8:30 PM
Ian Wylie
November 30, 2009
FORMER Shameless star Anne-Marie Duff reckons it looked like "two farmers with their wellies on". There's just a few hundred miles between Manchester's Chatsworth estate and the Royal Ballet rehearsal rooms in London. Which is where the actress once known as Fiona Gallagher found herself, along with co-star Michiel Huisman, spending six weeks learning how to look like a legendary ballet star. Anne-Marie stars as Dame Margot Fonteyn, one of the greatest dancers the world has ever seen, in an extraordinary new TV film. Margot (BBC4, 9pm tonight) tells the story of the relationship between the prima ballerina and fiery Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who defected to the west in 1961. He was 23 and she was 42 when they first danced together. Nureyev transformed Fonteyn's career when she had been heading towards retirement. They were international superstars decades before the term celebrity became debased and devalued. "She certainly was the leading lady in her own life," says Anne-Marie, "and he was a Russian tornado." Fonteyn and Nureyev's many acclaimed performances included Swan Lake at Manchester's Opera House before Princess Margaret in November 1968. Their on stage chemistry spilled over into the wings with the 90-minute one-off drama showing married Margot in bed with her leading man. "I don't think it's a secret," maintains Anne-Marie. "It was passionate and there was an enormous amount of chemistry between them on stage and in the rehearsal room. There were enough witnesses for us to know that was true. Whether they made love or not is the only thing we don't know. "People saw a change in her and in her dancing. She said she fell in love with him but she always maintained not in the same way that she loved her husband." Sparks also flew on and off the set of Paul Abbott's Manchester drama when Fiona was wooed by car thief Steve McBride, played by James McAvoy. Having met at work in 2003, Anne-Marie and James married two years later. Both their careers have flourished since leaving the Chatsworth behind, with Anne-Marie, 39. playing a variety of roles, including Elizabeth I. She also stars as John Lennon's mother Julia in feature film Nowhere Boy, by Prestwich screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh, which goes on general release on Dec 26. James, 30, has appeared in high profile films including The Last King Of Scotland and Atonement, which resulted in some strange questions for his other half. "I'm so unbelievably lucky," insists the London-based actress, reflecting back to her time on Shameless. She smiles: "It's funny. Sometimes you do interviews and people say, 'Well, you're probably only really well known for being somebody's wife. How does that make you feel?' "But for actors being successful is generally getting a job. If you can work a lot, you're really successful. If you work a lot on projects that are interesting and intelligent and great fun to be part of, then you're hugely successful. And I feel hugely successful. I can't believe that I get to be involved with the projects and the people I work with." That includes Margot, which features Con O'Neill as South American womanising politician husband Tito and Sir Derek Jacobi as choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton. As for that dancing: "Obviously we had to have doubles," explains Anne-Marie, "because as much as you can work on your upper body, there's no way you can make your legs look like they've had 20-odd years of dance training. It's impossible in six weeks. I knew I'd never look like Dame Margot Fonteyn in a tutu, moving across the stage. I just really wanted to look and feel like a dancer." Having conquered the world, Fonteyn died in poverty in Panama in 1991 at the age of 71, having sacrificed everything to look after her shot and paralysed husband. Nureyev died of HIV Aids in 1993 aged 54. Anne-Marie admits: "I didn't really know anything about her before coming to this film. So I had no idea what an incredibly huge icon she was. When I said to my mum about being sent the script, she went, 'Ohh…' She was completely in love with Margot Fonteyn. I had no idea. She really was up there with Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Onassis in terms of that kind of image. I was completely clueless. "I met lots of people at the Royal Ballet, older dancers, choreographers, people who did know her. It was tricky sometimes because they were terribly protective of their world. I think they all thought we were going to make some film that was really judgemental and made ballet dancers look like idiots. So that was tough, slowly working my way through. "Some of them were a bit bitchy about Margot because she danced forever and she stole a lot of people's careers. But she was very well loved. I don't think she was too much of a diva. She was young at heart and up for a laugh. Yet I think there were demons and shadows which were never addressed." She adds: "I found it astonishing how huge they were, international superstars in their field. You ask people now, 'Who's a famous dancer?' They might come up with Darcey Bussell. "You can't imagine ballet having that sort of huge influence now because it seems we celebrate more banal achievements, or lack of. It's totally different.
"We don't really celebrate endeavour and there's an awful lot of endeavour in becoming a great dancer. We're a bit frightened of it now. People can't be seen to work too hard because that's kind of dubious on some level, which is crazy too."
Dec 1 09 3:45 PM
Anne-Marie Duff Interview She may be a little slippery when it comes to her private life with James McAvoy, but there's nothing wet about the talent of Anne-Marie Duff, who stars in Nowhere Boy and Margot. 'Hello, I'm Anne-Marie,' says Anne-Marie Duff and holds out her hand. Nothing especially odd about this, you might think - except for the fact that the woman standing before me doesn't look remotely like Anne-Marie Duff, or at least the Anne-Marie Duff I've been expecting. The one I've seen on screen and on stage is a tiny, frail-looking figure with a pixie-ish face, paperwhite skin, hollow eyes, blonde hair and an air of brittle intensity. But this woman is tanned, tactile and supremely self-possessed. When she laughs, she does so unrestrainedly, throwing back her head in an old-fashioned sort of way. She's not even blonde either, but has a tumble of brown curls. It's all very peculiar. What's going on? The answer, it seems, is that at the age of 39, Duff has finally been allowed to grow up. For years, she played women who were much younger than her. At the age of 30, she could easily pass for 17. And she didn't just look young; she looked alarmingly fragile too - even when playing such tungsten-plated women as Elizabeth I or St Joan. If at first glance, the new Anne-Marie Duff bears little resemblance to her younger, gawkier self, you can still detect a few faint wisps of waifdom behind the glossy exterior. Somehow this makes it all the more unsettling when Duff appears as a mature, sexually charged woman as she does in Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy. The film is a fictionalised account of John Lennon's childhood in which she plays Lennon's mother, Julia. Having given up Lennon (Aaron Johnson) into the care of her sister, Mimi, Julia scarcely sees him again until he is in his early teens. By then, he's become a confused mess of cockiness and insecurity. The scenes between Lennon and Julia are strangely uncomfortable to watch - largely because you get a strong sense that flirting comes much more readily to Julia than being maternal. Nothing sexual happens, but the possibility of it hangs constantly in the air. Duff readily admits she knew little about the circumstances of Lennon's upbringing beforehand. 'I'd been a Beatles fan in my teens because it was embarrassing not to be really,' she says. 'Other than that, though, I didn't know much. But in a way that was an advantage. For me, reading the script was just like reading a bonkers old family saga. I loved the fact that on the one hand it felt like every other f----- up family, but on the other it was the genesis of this genius.' Nowhere Boy is Taylor-Wood's debut feature film and given her background as a conceptual artist, it's a surprisingly conventional affair - understated, performance-led and mercifully free of look-at-me flourishes. Mind you, if it's unconventionality you're after, there's always the fact that Taylor-Wood, aged 43, is now engaged to be married to the 19-year-old Aaron Johnson. I wondered what it was like being directed by someone who comes from a very different place to most directors. 'Sam is incredibly confident, but at the same time she doesn't swagger at all. What was interesting to me was that we were left to our own devices much more than usual. We weren't prodded and poked in that way you normally are. I must say I generally like being prodded and poked a lot… Whoops!' Duff clamps a hand over her mouth, and then compounds the damage by adding: 'I like to be interfered with on set.' What she means, she explains when she's stopped laughing, is that she's used to being given specific directions. 'I like to yield to the conductor of the orchestra. Here, Sam just trusted us to do our jobs. That made me very nervous to begin with because I was trying to inhabit this complicated woman and I was having to make quite large character choices on my own. But at the same time the fact that Sam trusted me gave me a lot of confidence.' A few days before meeting Duff, I'd been to see Nowhere Boy in a small preview theatre in Soho. After the lights went up at the end, I was telling a colleague - quite truthfully - how much I'd enjoyed it when a tall, white-haired man in the back row said how much he had enjoyed it, too. He then remarked that he'd found the film quite strange to watch 'because I'm in it'. He turned out to be a man called Rod Davis, who had played banjo in Lennon's first band, The Quarrymen. If Davis had a criticism of the film, he said, it was that the house in which Lennon had been brought up is always portrayed as being much smaller and grottier than it actually was. But while Lennon's working-class credentials may not stand up to scrutiny, Duff's certainly do. She was brought up on a council estate in Hayes, west London, the daughter of first-generation Irish immigrants - her father was a painter and decorator while her mother worked in a shoe shop. As a child, she was teased a lot - other children called her 'Dumbo' because of her sticky-out ears - and spent most of the time with her nose stuck in a book. 'I was desperately shy when I was wee,' she says. 'Totally lacked confidence socially. When I look back at school photographs, I'm always the one shrinking in the back. What I really wanted to do was become a writer and I don't think the residue of that has ever gone away. I still feel the ultimate achievement would be to write a novel.' What, more so than acting? She nods emphatically, her brown hair spilling forward. 'I think so, yeah. Not that it's ever going to happen.' When she was 11, her parents sent her to acting classes in the hope they might make her less shy. 'I totally threw myself into it from the very beginning. Looking back, I was terribly intense. As far as I was concerned, everything else in life was completely pointless. Instead of having boyfriends and stuff like that, I spent all my time acting, or trying to act. As a result, I had to catch up later.' At drama school, she applied herself with the same doggedness, keenly aware of the sacrifices her parents had made in sending her there. 'I knew that there was no easy way into that world for someone from a council estate. I'd always felt that if I wanted it, it wasn't just going to come to me - I was going to have to get on the bus and get there myself. But I was absolutely the runt of the year at drama school. Never considered to be a front-runner, or anything like that. 'In retrospect, that was rather a good thing because it meant that by the time I'd left college I'd written about 150 application letters. I got a job almost immediately.' Were you always ambitious? This is always a killer question in interviews. The conventional response - much favoured by actors and actresses - is to react with shock, even affront, and insist that any success they've enjoyed has been due to astonishing good fortune, rather than their unstinting determination to reach the top. Duff, however, isn't falling for anything as obvious as this. 'Oh, I must be ambitious, mustn't I?' she says. 'I'm sure I always have been. I think you can only get away with pretending you're not for so long. After that, it becomes ridiculous.' We are sitting on a sofa in a west London hotel that clearly prides itself on the eccentricity of its decor. There are swagged drapes with great golden tassels, plaster cherubs mounted on the walls and a mass of Edwardian tat on the shelves. It's the sort of place where any shrinking violets are likely to be swallowed up in the soft furnishings. Duff may once have been crippled by shyness, but those acting classes seem to have paid off in a big way. Certainly, there's no sign of shyness now. As for the intensity, this comes through whenever she feels strongly about something - her speech gets faster and faster until it turns into a kind of quick-fire babble. She is, she says, a very picky sort of actress. 'I'm a right pain in the hole for my agent. I won't take certain parts if I think they're offensive or banal. For instance, I won't do a film if I think it's full of violence for violence's sake, or a television drama if I don't think it's intelligent writing. 'Thanks be to God, I've always been able to be that way. But if I'd been out of work for three years then obviously I'd be grateful for anything I got.' Of course, being one half of a celebrity couple can hardly have done her any harm - she met James McAvoy when they both appeared in Channel 4's Shameless and they married in 2006. Not that Duff and McAvoy behave in a remotely starry way: they live in Crouch End in north London - an area that even local estate agents would hesitate to call fashionable - are seldom photographed at parties and have vowed never to talk about one another in interviews. She does, however, concede that the fact their careers took off at the same time made life much easier at home. 'I can only tell you from my side,' she says carefully. 'I know for a fact that it's very difficult being in a relationship where one person is not having any luck. It's a real challenge. I don't think that just applies to actors, but it is quite common in acting.' When I ask her another question about her marriage, she arches her eyebrows and shoots me a look of mock-reproach. 'Are you pinning me down like a journalist?' she asks. 'I'm Anne-Marie "bar of soap" Duff, remember.' The implication is plain; she can slide out of any question she wants to. All right then, but does she think that success has distanced her from her roots? She thinks about this for some time, and then says: 'I never felt like I belonged where I grew up anyway, so I don't have lots of friends from my past. I remember when I was at drama school, people would often go home and find they couldn't speak the same language as everyone else. Other people would be suspicious of them. 'I was very lucky in that my parents were very broad-minded. Because they had come from another country and hadn't been able to fulfil their dreams, they wanted me to be more of myself, if you know what I mean. I still feel very much of my family, of my blood. However, I don't feel I have to defend where I came from, or anything like that. I think I've got quite a healthy attitude to my past.' These days, she says, almost all her friends are actors or actresses - although for reasons she finds a bit puzzling, a lot of them, like her, come from Irish backgrounds. 'It's weird, isn't it? I suppose it's all to do with common ground, common jokes. I do love actors, though. I think they're a fantastic bunch of people, although most of them are pretty f----- up, it's true. But they do tend to be very forgiving souls. Some of the other people in the business, the satellites, they aren't very forgiving admittedly. But we don't have to deal with all that crap - at least not most of the time.' For a long time, Duff took a pretty unforgiving attitude towards her own work. It's only in the past couple of years, she insists, that she's felt properly formed as an actress. The turning point was her performance as St Joan at the National in 2007. 'For the first time, I felt I knew how to tell a story and how to function as an actress. I could tear myself to pieces on stage every night and then go home and be absolutely fine. I found I was able to understand another human being on a level that I'd never felt before. It was a real Road to Damascus for me. Finally, I stopped thinking like an ingénue.' Since finishing Nowhere Boy, Duff has also played Margot Fonteyn in forthcoming BBC drama Margot - a part which involved her having to learn to dance like a prima ballerina in just six weeks. 'I'd done a bit of ballet at drama school, but very little. I had people from the Royal Ballet teaching me every day. It was very intense but great - I had complete access to anything at the Royal Ballet: performances, rehearsals, classes… My friends who had been dancers were all green with envy.' Come the new year, though, and her diary is quite blank. 'I've got no idea what I'm going to be doing. Actually, I quite like that. It's a bit like being single again, you know? You could walk around the corner and meet the love of your life.' Whereas McAvoy has cranked up his international profile by doing a few Hollywood films, Duff has no particular desire to head off to Los Angeles. 'I don't see myself as being better at my job or happier because I'm in an enormous Hollywood movie,' she says. 'I was in a film with Sir Michael Caine quite recently [Is Anybody There?] and I remember him saying: "When you're a movie star you read a part and you think: How can I change this to make it more like me? And when you're a movie actor you think: How can I change myself to become more like the part?" I'm not really interested in changing something to make it more like me; that doesn't sound like very good fun at all.' When our time is up, she holds out her hand once again. Her handshake is strong and confident. Not remotely like a waif - or a bar of soap.
'Hello, I'm Anne-Marie,' says Anne-Marie Duff and holds out her hand.
Nothing especially odd about this, you might think - except for the fact that the woman standing before me doesn't look remotely like Anne-Marie Duff, or at least the Anne-Marie Duff I've been expecting. The one I've seen on screen and on stage is a tiny, frail-looking figure with a pixie-ish face, paperwhite skin, hollow eyes, blonde hair and an air of brittle intensity.
But this woman is tanned, tactile and supremely self-possessed.
When she laughs, she does so unrestrainedly, throwing back her head in an old-fashioned sort of way. She's not even blonde either, but has a tumble of brown curls.
It's all very peculiar. What's going on? The answer, it seems, is that at the age of 39, Duff has finally been allowed to grow up. For years, she played women who were much younger than her. At the age of 30, she could easily pass for 17. And she didn't just look young; she looked alarmingly fragile too - even when playing such tungsten-plated women as Elizabeth I or St Joan.
If at first glance, the new Anne-Marie Duff bears little resemblance to her younger, gawkier self, you can still detect a few faint wisps of waifdom behind the glossy exterior. Somehow this makes it all the more unsettling when Duff appears as a mature, sexually charged woman as she does in Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy.
The film is a fictionalised account of John Lennon's childhood in which she plays Lennon's mother, Julia. Having given up Lennon (Aaron Johnson) into the care of her sister, Mimi, Julia scarcely sees him again until he is in his early teens. By then, he's become a confused mess of cockiness and insecurity.
The scenes between Lennon and Julia are strangely uncomfortable to watch - largely because you get a strong sense that flirting comes much more readily to Julia than being maternal. Nothing sexual happens, but the possibility of it hangs constantly in the air.
Duff readily admits she knew little about the circumstances of Lennon's upbringing beforehand. 'I'd been a Beatles fan in my teens because it was embarrassing not to be really,' she says. 'Other than that, though, I didn't know much. But in a way that was an advantage. For me, reading the script was just like reading a bonkers old family saga. I loved the fact that on the one hand it felt like every other f----- up family, but on the other it was the genesis of this genius.'
Nowhere Boy is Taylor-Wood's debut feature film and given her background as a conceptual artist, it's a surprisingly conventional affair - understated, performance-led and mercifully free of look-at-me flourishes.
Mind you, if it's unconventionality you're after, there's always the fact that Taylor-Wood, aged 43, is now engaged to be married to the 19-year-old Aaron Johnson.
I wondered what it was like being directed by someone who comes from a very different place to most directors.
'Sam is incredibly confident, but at the same time she doesn't swagger at all. What was interesting to me was that we were left to our own devices much more than usual. We weren't prodded and poked in that way you normally are. I must say I generally like being prodded and poked a lot… Whoops!'
Duff clamps a hand over her mouth, and then compounds the damage by adding: 'I like to be interfered with on set.' What she means, she explains when she's stopped laughing, is that she's used to being given specific directions.
'I like to yield to the conductor of the orchestra. Here, Sam just trusted us to do our jobs. That made me very nervous to begin with because I was trying to inhabit this complicated woman and I was having to make quite large character choices on my own. But at the same time the fact that Sam trusted me gave me a lot of confidence.'
A few days before meeting Duff, I'd been to see Nowhere Boy in a small preview theatre in Soho. After the lights went up at the end, I was telling a colleague - quite truthfully - how much I'd enjoyed it when a tall, white-haired man in the back row said how much he had enjoyed it, too. He then remarked that he'd found the film quite strange to watch 'because I'm in it'.
He turned out to be a man called Rod Davis, who had played banjo in Lennon's first band, The Quarrymen. If Davis had a criticism of the film, he said, it was that the house in which Lennon had been brought up is always portrayed as being much smaller and grottier than it actually was.
But while Lennon's working-class credentials may not stand up to scrutiny, Duff's certainly do.
She was brought up on a council estate in Hayes, west London, the daughter of first-generation Irish immigrants - her father was a painter and decorator while her mother worked in a shoe shop. As a child, she was teased a lot - other children called her 'Dumbo' because of her sticky-out ears - and spent most of the time with her nose stuck in a book.
'I was desperately shy when I was wee,' she says. 'Totally lacked confidence socially. When I look back at school photographs, I'm always the one shrinking in the back. What I really wanted to do was become a writer and I don't think the residue of that has ever gone away. I still feel the ultimate achievement would be to write a novel.'
What, more so than acting? She nods emphatically, her brown hair spilling forward. 'I think so, yeah. Not that it's ever going to happen.'
When she was 11, her parents sent her to acting classes in the hope they might make her less shy. 'I totally threw myself into it from the very beginning. Looking back, I was terribly intense. As far as I was concerned, everything else in life was completely pointless. Instead of having boyfriends and stuff like that, I spent all my time acting, or trying to act. As a result, I had to catch up later.'
At drama school, she applied herself with the same doggedness, keenly aware of the sacrifices her parents had made in sending her there.
'I knew that there was no easy way into that world for someone from a council estate. I'd always felt that if I wanted it, it wasn't just going to come to me - I was going to have to get on the bus and get there myself. But I was absolutely the runt of the year at drama school. Never considered to be a front-runner, or anything like that.
'In retrospect, that was rather a good thing because it meant that by the time I'd left college I'd written about 150 application letters. I got a job almost immediately.'
Were you always ambitious? This is always a killer question in interviews. The conventional response - much favoured by actors and actresses - is to react with shock, even affront, and insist that any success they've enjoyed has been due to astonishing good fortune, rather than their unstinting determination to reach the top.
Duff, however, isn't falling for anything as obvious as this. 'Oh, I must be ambitious, mustn't I?' she says. 'I'm sure I always have been. I think you can only get away with pretending you're not for so long. After that, it becomes ridiculous.'
We are sitting on a sofa in a west London hotel that clearly prides itself on the eccentricity of its decor. There are swagged drapes with great golden tassels, plaster cherubs mounted on the walls and a mass of Edwardian tat on the shelves. It's the sort of place where any shrinking violets are likely to be swallowed up in the soft furnishings.
Duff may once have been crippled by shyness, but those acting classes seem to have paid off in a big way. Certainly, there's no sign of shyness now. As for the intensity, this comes through whenever she feels strongly about something - her speech gets faster and faster until it turns into a kind of quick-fire babble.
She is, she says, a very picky sort of actress. 'I'm a right pain in the hole for my agent. I won't take certain parts if I think they're offensive or banal. For instance, I won't do a film if I think it's full of violence for violence's sake, or a television drama if I don't think it's intelligent writing.
'Thanks be to God, I've always been able to be that way. But if I'd been out of work for three years then obviously I'd be grateful for anything I got.'
Of course, being one half of a celebrity couple can hardly have done her any harm - she met James McAvoy when they both appeared in Channel 4's Shameless and they married in 2006.
Not that Duff and McAvoy behave in a remotely starry way: they live in Crouch End in north London - an area that even local estate agents would hesitate to call fashionable - are seldom photographed at parties and have vowed never to talk about one another in interviews.
She does, however, concede that the fact their careers took off at the same time made life much easier at home. 'I can only tell you from my side,' she says carefully. 'I know for a fact that it's very difficult being in a relationship where one person is not having any luck. It's a real challenge. I don't think that just applies to actors, but it is quite common in acting.'
When I ask her another question about her marriage, she arches her eyebrows and shoots me a look of mock-reproach. 'Are you pinning me down like a journalist?' she asks. 'I'm Anne-Marie "bar of soap" Duff, remember.' The implication is plain; she can slide out of any question she wants to.
All right then, but does she think that success has distanced her from her roots? She thinks about this for some time, and then says: 'I never felt like I belonged where I grew up anyway, so I don't have lots of friends from my past. I remember when I was at drama school, people would often go home and find they couldn't speak the same language as everyone else. Other people would be suspicious of them.
'I was very lucky in that my parents were very broad-minded. Because they had come from another country and hadn't been able to fulfil their dreams, they wanted me to be more of myself, if you know what I mean. I still feel very much of my family, of my blood. However, I don't feel I have to defend where I came from, or anything like that. I think I've got quite a healthy attitude to my past.'
These days, she says, almost all her friends are actors or actresses - although for reasons she finds a bit puzzling, a lot of them, like her, come from Irish backgrounds.
'It's weird, isn't it? I suppose it's all to do with common ground, common jokes. I do love actors, though. I think they're a fantastic bunch of people, although most of them are pretty f----- up, it's true. But they do tend to be very forgiving souls. Some of the other people in the business, the satellites, they aren't very forgiving admittedly. But we don't have to deal with all that crap - at least not most of the time.'
For a long time, Duff took a pretty unforgiving attitude towards her own work. It's only in the past couple of years, she insists, that she's felt properly formed as an actress. The turning point was her performance as St Joan at the National in 2007.
'For the first time, I felt I knew how to tell a story and how to function as an actress. I could tear myself to pieces on stage every night and then go home and be absolutely fine. I found I was able to understand another human being on a level that I'd never felt before. It was a real Road to Damascus for me. Finally, I stopped thinking like an ingénue.'
Since finishing Nowhere Boy, Duff has also played Margot Fonteyn in forthcoming BBC drama Margot - a part which involved her having to learn to dance like a prima ballerina in just six weeks.
'I'd done a bit of ballet at drama school, but very little. I had people from the Royal Ballet teaching me every day. It was very intense but great - I had complete access to anything at the Royal Ballet: performances, rehearsals, classes… My friends who had been dancers were all green with envy.'
Come the new year, though, and her diary is quite blank. 'I've got no idea what I'm going to be doing. Actually, I quite like that. It's a bit like being single again, you know? You could walk around the corner and meet the love of your life.'
Whereas McAvoy has cranked up his international profile by doing a few Hollywood films, Duff has no particular desire to head off to Los Angeles. 'I don't see myself as being better at my job or happier because I'm in an enormous Hollywood movie,' she says.
'I was in a film with Sir Michael Caine quite recently [Is Anybody There?] and I remember him saying: "When you're a movie star you read a part and you think: How can I change this to make it more like me? And when you're a movie actor you think: How can I change myself to become more like the part?" I'm not really interested in changing something to make it more like me; that doesn't sound like very good fun at all.'
When our time is up, she holds out her hand once again. Her handshake is strong and confident. Not remotely like a waif - or a bar of soap.
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From a Blogger review on Margot full write up http://colonelmoseleysstageblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/colonel-moseleys-tv-reviews-margot.html
Following "Enid" and "Gracie!", BBC 4's "Women We Loved" series which explored the agonies of fame concluded with "Margot". Based upon Meredith Daneman's authoritative biography, the screenplay was written by Amanda Coe who also wrote the excellent "Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story" (http:/colonelmoseleysstageblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/colonel-moseleys-tv-reviews-filth-mary.html.) Directed by Otto Bathurst, the film presented the latter part of the career of Peggy Hookham, born in Reigate in Surrey in 1919, who was to become Dame Margot Fonteyn, the only prima ballerina assoluta of the Royal Ballet. The title role amongst a heavy-weight cast was brilliantly played by the exquisite Anne-Marie Duff. Already of a certain age at the beginning of the film, the camera lingers long and often on the elegant and charismatic Margot who has a chameleon-like quality. With her almost bulging childlike eyes, her face has a waif-like quality, not unlike Edith Piaf. The similarities do not end there for in that small lithe body we have countless contradictions - the girl from the poor background applying herself to rise to the very highest level of her art. We see the blood, sweat and tears literally entailed in dance training and the adulation heaped upon its greatest and most glamorous star. Never a classical beauty, we learn of the cosmetic surgery on her nose and face and the pain from her arthritic feet. The blood soaked ballet slipper at the end of a performance may be a cliche, but here it reflected the truth. It was the price paid for the thirty two successive fouettees performed by Odette/Odille in "Swan Lake", arduous enough for any ballerina, let alone one over the age of forty. Margot had worked and fought her way to achieve her success and global fame. The pragmatic and almost cynical attitude of Ninette de Valois, acutely played by Lindsay Duncan, towards her slightly waning star, demonstrated the precarious quality of the hard-won fame of even a pre-eminent ballerina. Before Nureyev's defection, Margot was a jet-setting global superstar and icon, rubbing shoulders with Warhol and really was "on the biscuit tins" (like Princess Diana was later to be "on the tea towels"). Staying at the top of the profession was evidently as challenging as the ascent to success. At this point however Margot seemed to be "on the cusp" artistically. Clearly the Seymours and other up-and-coming ballerinas were laying claim to her crown and the physical demands of her art were taking their toll. The Royal Ballet even reduced her status to "visiting" artist rather than permanent prima ballerina. Dark clouds were massing on the horizon. Then Nureyev appeared . The personal and artistic chemistry they forged elevated them even higher in the pantheon of an art form already predisposed to immortalise its leading figures. This story begins with Nureyev's defection to the West in 1961. A wildly passionate bohemian figure, Nureyev sets out his stall from the beginning, impetuously getting a taxi from the airport to Margot's home, instead of meekly awaiting the car she had sent for him. Nureyev, played by Michael Huisman, is handsome, charismatic and vital to the core. He is exotic and roughly sensual and his connection with Margot is evident from the outset. We see the frisson created by contact between the pair hot, sweaty and panting in the rehearsal room. The atmosphere is electric and this supercharged connection clearly translated to the stage and allegedly the bedroom. We see a raunchy love scene between Nureyev and Margot, twenty years his senior. Their coupling is confirmed by Puck-like gossip, Frederick Ashton, played by Sir Derek Jacobi, who saucily comments that the boy had certainly "***ked the old girl into shape." Confusingly, in real life it appears Ashton confirmed that their relationship was platonic.
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Anne-Marie Duff's award for Best Supporting Actress broke in her hands on stage as she made her acceptance speech. She laughed: "I didn't break it - it just fell apart." The 39-year-old actress beat her Nowhere Boy co-star Kristin Scott-Thomas to the title but insisted there was no rivalry between them. Duff said: "Kristin and I get on so well and she sent me an email to wish me luck for tonight - genuinely. So I think she'll be delighted to know it went our way, and I think that's the point isn't it?" http://www.spaldingtoday....nment-news/Sir-Michael-s avours-his-BIFA.5888633.jp Photo http://www.life.com/image/94077483
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