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Helen M wrote: David Threlfall--Frank Gallagher in Shameless. lol
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This can, of course, be thrilling for an audience (that particular performance won Duff an Olivier nomination) but takes an obvious toll – such a toll, in fact, that there was a point when she thought she could not continue the career she had set her heart on since she was a child. Midway through a Shared Experience run of Ibsen's A Doll's House, she began to find that she simply could not separate the anguish of her character, Nora, from her own life. "It wasn't even like – events or anything – I was just so miserable. You know when people are drowning and they get taken out of the water and get pumped, and everything just pumps out of them" – her hands follow the flood from her mouth – "it just felt like that was happening on stage. I was just like a shell off stage. I didn't quite – I hadn't realised what was appropriate."And an actor called Patterson Joseph, who played Nora's husband Torvald, was brilliant. He said, 'It's just a job, mate.' At exactly the right moment. And I'll always be grateful to PJ for that. Because I wouldn't be doing what I do for a living if it wasn't for him." That close? "That close. I just thought, 'This is ridiculous. I don't want to be a crazy person.' I was younger, you know – if I did it now it might be very different. I might be able to understand her. Not just experience her, but understand her."It was not until she played Saint Joan, in 2007, that she finally worked out how to hold the two things in balance – to have total emotional commitment while on stage, but then to be able to leave the character, as she puts it, "in the dressing room". "It was a sort of coming of age for me, in terms of my job – I really did learn how to protect myself. Partly that was just working with [the director] Marianne Elliott – she made me feel safe. And yeah, it was curious. It was really a relief."Saint Joan also brought home something else – how rare such parts are for women, how infrequently they come up, and how women's careers on the stage are so brutally shaped by age. "I did think that it was one of those enormous tragedies – how many Hamlets did we have in a row? And yet there will only be one Saint Joan in London for a long time. Sometimes it's frustrating, you know? Because it feels like there's a quota. I've been desperately lucky. That makes a difference. But I'm going to get older soon, and then things will change, and I'm sure I'm going to find myself doggy-paddling for a while. And then things will get interesting again. It's not easy for us birds. We just have to keep praying, because new writing, you know, still isn't full of fabulous female roles. It just isn't."There have been other moments like that, "where I've thought, 'probably can relax about that now'". One of them occurred after Nowhere Boy, for which she got fulsome praise, and "I did think that's kind of interesting! Because I never thought I'd work particularly in film. I thought, 'Oh, I'd love to, but I doubt I'll be that lucky,' and then I worked on this film, and I got such positive feedback, and I thought, 'Oh! I did that!'" It's a bit disingenuous, this stance, given the number of awards and nominations she has collected in her career, and the obvious ambition and focus that lurk like granite behind the obligatory self-deprecation, but also it's infectiously genuine at the same time.Acting school, and working, freed her in other ways, too. As a teenager she'd been so shy, and so obsessed with acting and what she wanted to do that "I didn't have a teen age at all. I didn't even look at boys, never mind … then suddenly it was like, 'Oh my god!' So I made up for a lot of lost time very quickly." Peals of laughter. "It was kind of bonkers. Working hard, partying hard – but also experiencing life, you know. I think creative people need to do a bit of, you know, tuning into every radio station – you just do, otherwise you don't know much about other people. You kind of have to learn a bit about yourself so you can work out how we all behave, and why we do the things we do."And becoming the mother of a little boy has done this for her in ways she did not expect. "I have found that I am very much more emotionally available." A certain shyness perhaps, a looking for how to say this, sends her voice through register after register. "Which is kind of overwhelming. You kind of go, 'woaah!' Everything is much more close to the surface. I'm not quite sure why that is yet. I don't know whether it's just a time factor – that on some level you're just going, 'Right, you need to be able to do this, because you've got to go home and do that', or whether it's just a hugely profound thing. It's curious. It's lovely. It feels quite elemental. Something other."http://www.guardian.co.uk...ff-interview
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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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