Winning Ways: Anna Maxwell Martin

Bafta Website
Published: 8th June 09
Author: Matthew Bell
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Anna Maxwell Martin, versatile star of Poppy Shakespeare and White Girl, talks to Matthew Bell about her “challenging” roles and double BAFTA win.

For most actresses, winning a bafta is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Yet Anna Maxwell Martin has bagged two by the age of 30: her first for Bleak House in 2006 and now for Poppy Shakespeare.

Having recently given birth to her daughter and with her partner, film director Roger Michell, working in New York, Maxwell Martin was unable to attend the Television Awards ceremony in April. “It’s really full on. She is my first and it’s a huge shock to the system, but I wish I could have been there now for obvious reasons,” she says.

In fact, Maxwell Martin was asleep while the masks were being handed out: “I heard this crashing and banging and my step kids ran into the room telling me to get up,” she recalls. “I couldn’t believe it; I sat there in shock.”

Maxwell Martin has always wanted to act, though nothing in her Yorkshire roots marked it out as a likely career. “My parents were both scientists. It’s bizarre; I don’t know where acting came from. I used to enter singing competitions and I think they thought, ‘Oh God we’ve created a monster’,” she says, with the first of many explosions of laughter. “But they’ve always been encouraging and supportive.”

Since leaving the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Maxwell Martin has enjoyed a parallel career on the stage that matches her TV acclaim, including roles in His Dark Materials at the National and Dumb Show at the Royal Court. She has also notched up a few films, notably the adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel, Enduring Love, directed by Michell, and Becoming Jane.

On TV, Maxwell Martin has appeared in her fair share of costume dramas.As well as Bleak House, she was in the BBC version of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North And South. But last year she embraced modernity. In White Girl, she was the illiterate, alcoholic Debbie in Abi Morgan’s drama about a family that finds itself a racial minority; in Channel 4’s adaptation of Clare Allen’s darkly comic novel, Poppy Shakespeare, she played a psychiatric hospital patient, ‘N’.

“It was really important to me after Bleak House that I tried to do something different,” she recalls. “Initially it wasn’t that easy because everyone associated me with costume drama and that’s what I got offered. You have to stick to your guns.”

Maxwell Martin has nothing against costume dramas – “They’re just as credible as any gritty piece of drama” – except for the time it takes to get into costume. I hate the corsets, the wigs and the make-up.

“That was the brilliant thing about White Girl and Poppy Shakespeare – I had no make-up and no hair do. I would literally sit in the chair for five minutes while they added bags and spots. For Poppy Shakespeare I wore the same grubby costume every day.”

TV viewers can next see Maxwell Martin as Neil Armstrong’s wife in ITV1’s Moonshot, which marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, and in Dominic Savage’s BBC2 drama, Freefall. The latter, she says, shrieking, is “another depressing piece”, this time about the greed of the City and the havoc it wreaks on people’s lives. Freefall has also allowed her to fulfil a long-held ambition to work with Savage and experience his improvisational approach to filmmaking.

Maxwell Martin worked almost up until the birth of her daughter in April and is currently taking time out before returning to acting. Writing is a possibility in the future – “I’d love to start writing: I think about it and then bottle it” – but she has no plans to follow Michell into directing: “I’d be absolutely terrible. I don’t have the patience to be a director: I’d just start shouting at people. Roger is terribly calm, even in the face of some awful stroppy actor.”

She rates His Dark Materials and Poppy Shakespeare as career highlights. Poppy Shakespeare was a gruelling, though rewarding, experience for audiences, so one would imagine that playing the disturbed ‘N’must have been tough?

“I play a lot of parts that are emotionally challenging and draining; Bleak House was like that too. I sort of fell into that character quite easily. Really worryingly I found her very similar to myself,which makes me sound like a right weirdo,” she replies, between honks of laughter.

“I hate it when actresses sound terribly tortured. It’s a lovely job and I don’t know why people, if they’re working, complain. I suppose doing that stuff is tiring but, God, it’s not as tiring as being a bloody nurse in the NHS. It’s a bit crap when actors go, ‘It’s terribly draining’. I’m very fortunate to do a job I love.”

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Twitterfeed

You can now follow us on twitter and get updated with the latest news on Anna.

our address is https://twitter.com/annafansite you can contact via us by leaving us tweets, just a quick note this twitter account is no way in contact with Anna herself it run by feeds from our site to inform you when we’ve update the site with a new post. anyway remember to follow us if you want to be update for the latest news.

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Anna welcomes a Daughter

Anna gave birth to a daughter in April, no other details released but I just like to say a belated congratulation to her and her partner Roger on their new baby girl.

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Q&A Anna Maxwell Martin

The Guardian
Published: 25th Feb 06
Author: Rosanna Greenstreet

Anna Maxwell Martin, 27, played Esther in BBC1's recent adaptation of Bleak House. She was nominated for an Olivier award for playing Lyra in His Dark Materials at the National Theatre in 2004 and has also performed at the Donmar, in 2002's The Little Foxes, and at the Royal Court. Her films include The Hours and Enduring Love. She is appearing in Other Hands at the Soho Theatre until March 11. Born in Yorkshire, she now lives in London.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Having something to look forward to.

What is your greatest fear?

Not having children.

What is your greatest extravagance?

Wasting time.

Where would you like to live?

With Mike Skinner from The Streets.

Who would play you in a movie of your life?

A small Inuit boy.

What is your favourite smell?

My mum.

What is your favourite word?

'Mittens.'

What is your favourite book?

One Hundred Years Of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez.

What is your fancy dress costume of choice?

Wonder Woman.

Cat or dog?

Much to my boyfriend Roger's chagrin, I am obsessed with doggies.

Is it better to give or to receive?

To give.

What do you owe your parents?

I wouldn't know where to start.

What or who is the greatest love of your life?

Ask me in 20 years.

When did you last cry, and why?

When Darren Gough won Strictly Come Dancing - I had a crush on him.

How do you relax?

Coffee and the crossword.

Have you ever had a same-sex experience?

I wish.

What single thing would improve the quality of your life?

Living with Mike Skinner.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Having the most wonderful friends.

What keeps you awake at night?

My snoring boyfriend.

What song would you like played at your funeral?

A bit of Bowie.

How would you like to be remembered?

With a smile.

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Ms Versatility

The Scotsman
Published: 29th March 08
Author: Claire Black

Sitting on a plump, oversized sofa in the quiet of the library at the Soho Hotel in central London, Anna Maxwell Martin is telling me an embarrassing story. Having just finished a well-received run as Sally Bowles in Cabaret – quite a change from the earnest Esther Summerson in BBC1's award-winning adaptation of Bleak House – Martin was shopping in Waitrose when a woman caught her eye. "Oh it's you, it's you, isn't it? From Cabaret?" she says, deadpanning.

Martin, at 30, looks positively elfin. Maybe it's because her hair is cropped short. Maybe it's because she's pulled her legs up beneath her as she sips her peppermint tea. Either way, it fits perfectly with her self-deprecating humour and quick wit.

She speaks in an accent that bears only traces of East Yorkshire, where she grew up, and a great deal more of London, where she's lived for the past eight years. If the honour of being named the "next Judi Dench" by admirers brings a weighty responsibility, she seems to bear it with ease.

"They do that with a lot of people," she says of the accolade. "I'd love to emulate someone like Judi Dench but because we don't have a repertory system anymore it's very difficult to be as good as people like 'the Dame'. I wish I could go and play Lady Macbeth and Beatrice in the same season. But it doesn't happen these days and that means you're never going to be as good as they are, really. It's flattering to be compared but I'll never be able to touch her in terms of what she's done."

Comparisons to Dench may seem hyperbolic to Martin, but the fact is that she is a stunning actor. In a career that has already spanned TV (Bleak House), film (Becoming Jane) and stage (everything from The Little Foxes to Cabaret), she's picked up awards and nominations aplenty.

She brings an intensity to her performances that's quite at odds with how she is in person. Quick to laugh, she fizzes with energy, speaking fast, her accent wandering as she goes. She whizzes from how much she likes Scotland ("a lovely place"), to how much she'd like an allotment ("I'm so boring"), to the size of her "postage stamp" garden, in a matter of seconds.

Martin has lived in the capital since she arrived at the London Academy of Music and Drama (LAMDA) at the age of 21. She now lives in north London with her partner, film director Roger Michell. She craves the countryside.

She grew up in Beverley, East Yorkshire, the daughter of two scientists and younger sister to brother Adam. Her father was the managing director of a pharmaceutical company, her mother a research scientist. Childhood was happy and sheltered. At school she was a swot and although there was not a trace of thespian blood in her family, she was always a "drama queen"; but there were no weekly trips to the theatre or reciting or singing around the piano.

"There was nothing at all," she says. "I wish I could say I saw something that inspired me – Judi Dench or Ian McKellen – and I then thought, 'Oh, I want to act.' But I didn't. I was watching Cary Grant films and that was about it. I never wanted to do anything else other than act. Maybe I just like attention."

Nevertheless, she chose not to go straight to drama school, studying history instead at Liverpool University. So why, with the certainty that she wanted to act, did she delay? "It sounds like I was being very emotionally mature, but it really was a mixture of things," she says. "I don't know whether I knew I wasn't ready. Maybe I've said that in hindsight, to sound clever. I always maintained that I wanted to go to drama school from when I was really little but I come from a very academic family and I think I would have felt odd not going to university. I think there was also a sense that if you're going to do drama you need something to fall back on.

"It's not true. I mean, you can't fall back on a degree, anyway – you can't even get a job with a degree these days. It was what was expected of me and what I expected of myself."

As it was, after an inauspicious start at LAMDA ("I was just so lazy"), things picked up and when she was in her final year she landed a part in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes at the Donmar Warehouse. It was a particularly cherished achievement because it came in the year that her father was diagnosed with a rare cancer. "I can still remember acutely the feeling of being told I'd got that job," she says. "I was with my parents and my dad died shortly after that. For them to know that they had paid for me to go to drama school and it was OK ..."

And it certainly has been. The only quiet spell she has had since graduating was the period after Bleak House when she was sent nothing but costume dramas. "Part of the reason I became an actor is because I like doing lots of different things: different accents, different ages," she says. "That's what I've focused on. I've never been interested in playing the same roles all the time or playing anything like myself. I've always waited so that I can do things that I feel passionate about. I trained to be an actor so I want to use that."

Her newest role is another change. She plays N, a psychiatric patient in Channel 4's feature-length, darkly humorous drama Poppy Shakespeare, based on Clare Allan's award-winning novel of the same name. It's an astonishing performance.

"I read that part and I just thought, 'I can do something with this'," she says. "I 'get' her, what she's about. It was the same in White Girl (the provocative drama in BBC2's recent White season] – the foundations are all there to tell you why these women are the way they are, and I find that really interesting."

There's something about the performances Martin gives that lifts them beyond what we're used to seeing; a seriousness about the roles she picks, which she then excels at. She's less happy about the attention that has increasingly come her way as a result.

"The being on show, someone talking to you in the street, or being recognised, going to an awards thing where you have to have your photo taken, it's terribly uncomfortable," she says. "The people who act because they like all that – they love a premiere or whatever – well, they're not going to last very long. The reality is that if you're not in it because you love hanging around a set for 13 hours a day, or you love rehearsing for weeks on end, being torn apart by your director, then you might as well stop now."

Full of chat when we meet, Martin says that in bigger social situations she struggles. "I have battled with shyness," she says. "You have to get a grip in this business because you have to go to things all the time but there's no way on earth I could accept an invitation to something that I'd just have to turn up to on my own. I couldn't do it. It would kill me."

Martin is nothing if not contradictory. A self-confessed "prude" who happily cavorted as Sally Bowles ("you get used to it"), an extrovert who'd rather die than work her way round a room networking, super-critical of her own work but seldom interested in reading reviews, she's a compelling mix of self-consciousness and self-promotion, burning ambition tempered with Yorkshire humility.

"I didn't want to be an actor to be a film star. I wanted to be an actor to do all the plays I love," she says, before quickly adding: "And I'd quite like to be a film star. But I want to do everything. With film I do think that you've got to look a certain way and I don't really think that I fit that bill."

Her features have prompted the euphemisms "unconventional" and "interesting" in some quarters, and sometimes even less flattering descriptions.

"I don't think they're being mean, it's more that they're saying I don't have film star looks. And I think that's a good thing.

"I wouldn't change it. It does mean that Hollywood is not knocking on the door saying, 'Come over, come and be in a movie.' I'm not Keira Knightley, but I'm quite glad. It means that I've been able to play a 12-year-old on the stage, a single mum of three kids on a council estate, and someone on a psychiatric ward. I've been able to do lots of different things.

"But people do comment and it is weird. I don't know why. I'm obviously odd-looking."

In fact, Martin isn't odd-looking at all. She's pretty. She has piercing blue eyes, a petite nose and the kind of smile that completely lights up her face.

Confident enough in her ability in terms of her career, she's happy not to plan too much. "It's weird, because I really did have a plan when I left drama school," she says. "I had my pipe dreams. They were the Donmar, the National, the Almeida and the Court. And I've managed to do all of them.

"I think I'm in a funny position with work. I don't really know what will come next because I'm not going to head off to Hollywood, I'm not going to do that."

But would she really want to go to Los Angeles and make movies?

"I wouldn't want to go out there and tout myself around but if something came up..." she trails off. "I've been close a couple of times when it's been between me and someone else and they've got it. That's happened twice and I sort of think, well, if it happens it happens, and that would be great, but I'm not going to move out there for six months and try and work it because it's clear I can't."

And no sooner is that low note sounded before mercurial Anna returns. "I don't feel that I've got to this age and I've not proved myself yet. I've done some good work. I've proved myself a bit and I've got loads more to show. If I'm lucky enough to get the parts I'll be able to do that."

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My perfect weekend: Anna Maxwell Martin

The Telegraph
Published: 8th Aug 08
Author: Sylvia Roger

Sharing a cottage with old university pals is an encore to relish for actress Anna Maxwell Martin

My perfect weekend involves meeting up with a group of friends from Liverpool university. There are nine of us, four couples and me. The other four girls all met their husbands at Liverpool. Zoe found Neil, Kate found Jono, Jenny found Shaggy and Vicky found Martin. I've been a bridesmaid to three of them. In fact Kate had all four of us dressed in big bright frocks trooping down the aisle behind her.

Sometimes my partner, Roger [Michell, the director], joins us and everyone adores him, but mostly I do these weekends on my own, because they are a huge part of my life and it's fun playing the gooseberry.

We've all stayed really close for 10 years, there's a great bond between us and we've continued to meet four or five times a year since we joined the real world.

Usually we rent a cottage somewhere. In fact the nine has now swelled to 13. In the last two years each of the couples has produced a baby. Number four arrived in July. All four babies are girls. It has added a whole new dimension to our weekends. It reflects our relationship of "all girls together" and we wonder whether the children will form a new gang or whether, as they grow older, they will rebel and dislike each other.

The idea is that we all pile up on Friday evening, act sensibly and save ourselves for our big day on Saturday, but that doesn't quite happen. There is so much history between us that inevitably we stay up late chatting and drinking, just as we did at university.

Saturday morning always involves a long walk in the countryside or a big park. Although babies in backpacks have joined the group, it's otherwise exactly the same - lots of fun and laughter, because we are tuned into each other.

In the afternoon, the men stretch out in front of the television to watch football or another sporting event, but some changes have gradually evolved. Nowadays, the dads will bathe the babies and put them to bed. This leaves us girls free to prepare for the big night out -and, just as it was in our Liverpool days, it's a lengthy process.

I come from Beverley in East Yorkshire and no one there would step outside their front door, or even their back door, on a Saturday night - or any other time, for that matter - unless they were dressed to the nines. It was the same when we were in Liverpool. We dressed to court attention. My skirt was so short it was more like a bikini. I don't know how I managed to stand for hours in queues to get into the clubs and not freeze to death.

Now that I live in London, it's all much more casual. I have a few nice clothes, but I also love to poke around in the "nearly new" and charity shops.

Armed with a bottle of bubbly we help each other with hair and make-up until we are ready to emerge - four yummy-mummies and me. The baby-sitter arrives and we are off. It's more civilised these days, usually a nice restaurant for dinner, but fuelled by alcohol we soon become overexcited. I'm a loud person and before long we are provoking reproving looks.

We stagger home and Neil regales us with his stories - which I wouldn't like to repeat, especially to his mother - and Vicky, who is a white witch, reads the tarot cards. We girls believe her implicitly. Before she got married, her name was Potter and the boys mockingly call her Harry to try to undermine her skills. Eventually someone will start crying, with laughter or grief, and everyone shouts: "Chestnuts!" It's just something that has developed.

There's even the obligatory dressing-up box that comes out, and the boys put on ridiculous garments, often disguising themselves as women.

On Sunday, we'll have a big fry-up before we go our separate ways. We will continue to meet all our lives. Nothing will change that, although more babies are in gestation even as I speak.

I'm not only the gooseberry in the group, I'm the honorary aunt, the godmother and, who knows, one day, if the time is right…

• Interview by Sylvia Roger
• Anna Maxwell Martin stars in The Female of the Species at the Vaudeville Theatre, London (box office 0870 040 0084 ) until October 4

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I Really Hate My Job (2007)

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