The Daily Mail Website
Published: 24 February 2007
Author: Stuart Husband
Source
Anna Maxwell Martin has a winning line in self-deprecation.
Take her appearance: 'I've been told I have an 'interesting' face,' she says, 'meaning it has this rounded shape, with tiny eyes and no cheekbones.'
Take her life: ?I lead the dullest existence.'
Take, even, her name. 'Oh, it was a hideous mistake,' she cringes. 'There was already an Anna Martin in Equity, so I added my granddad's name, and it makes me sound like I'm trying to be an aristocrat. And people sometimes hyphenate it, which is even worse.'
The one thing that even Anna can't denigrate is her ability as an actress.
She's only been working for five years, but she's already been nominated for an Olivier Award for her performance as Philip Pullman's heroine Lyra in the mammoth National Theatre production of His Dark Materials, and she won the Best TV Actress Bafta last year for Bleak House, in which she played the tragic Esther Summerson.
She's now starring alongside a bona fide Hollywood princess - The Devil Wears Prada's Anne Hathaway - in the Jane Austen biopic Becoming Jane; Hathaway is Austen, while Anna plays her sister Cassandra.
And she's nearing the end of a triumphant West End run as Sally Bowles in the latest, and one of the bare-bottomed, edgiest, versions of the musical Cabaret.
She protests that she's been 'incredibly lucky,' but then capitulates: 'I suppose it's simply that I love my job. I've never wanted to do anything else. And you've got to be passionate about it,' she adds, rallying, 'because you tend not to get paid very much and be unemployed a lot.'
Anna is a study in contradictions. She's 28, but could pass for a decade younger, thanks to her boyish haircut and elfin figure (she was 24 when she played the 12-year-old Lyra).
She's dressed conservatively, even borderline-primly, for our meeting in the bar of London's Soho Hotel - a royal-blue ruffle-neck blouse and matching beret - reminding you that she's become known for what she describes as 'crinoline dramas, demure-looking parts.'
But in a couple of hours' time she'll be writhing on stage as Bowles - 'a whoring, coke-sniffing freak,' she says, gleefully - and she's soon punctuating her comments with one of the throatiest and most abandoned laughs I've ever heard, and talking candidly about everything from her cleavage, or lack of one ('I only really had one when I appeared in Dr Who with Simon Pegg as a humanoid,' she says, 'which was downloaded to a site called See Lyra's Boobs, which is a little bit dodgy, I think') to her boyfriend Roger Michell.
He is the 50-year-old South African-born director of Notting Hill and the recent Venus, starring Peter O'Toole (the pair met four years ago, when she appeared in his production of Honour at the National Theatre) and the couple share a home in North London.
'He thinks I look like a supermodel,' she says, with a grin. 'Well, he's never actually professed that viewpoint, but I'm sure he would. If pressed.'
In Becoming Jane, Anna is back in crinolines. The film tells the story of Jane Austen's development as a person and a writer, suggesting that the events of her own life - a romance and aborted elopement with a pecunious lawyer, played by James McAvoy, and her subsequent determination to make her own living on her own terms - decisively informed her writerly themes and incisive, ironic tone.
It's subtle and moving, and not just a 'worthy Brit-lit chick-flick?' laughs Anna.
'That surprised me too, it was why I wanted to do the film. It really tries to show how her writing was wrung from her own experiences, and portrays Jane Austen as a very modern heroine, in that she wanted to marry for love, rather than money and when that didn?t work out she decided to make her way on her own. It was Girl Power long before the Spice Girls ever thought of it.'
Cassandra also lost her intended husband - he was killed overseas - and the two sisters built up an insuperable bond, supporting and protecting each other and dying as spinsters.
'Their relationship was something Annie and I talked about a lot,' says Anna. 'Back then, you had a very different connection to your siblings than we do now.
'Today we're going out and getting jobs and we have a much broader social circle; then, particularly if you were female, your family unit was everything; sisters shared bedrooms until they were adults or they married, they were confidantes, they bonded intensely.
'We really wanted to show that closeness. Cassandra was the sensible one,' she adds.
'She was trying to rein Jane in; she was very aware of how to try and advance in society when, like the Austens, you had no money. But Jane had this passion for writing, and Cassandra was like a rock for her.'
Anna has nothing but praise for Anne Hathaway. 'She was particularly meticulous about getting Jane right, which, as an American playing a British icon, I guess you'd have to be,' she says.
'But she was desperate to do it, passionate about it, and never lazy or arrogant. She's a lovely girl.'
And then there's Julie Walters as a clucking Mrs Austen. 'Julie is the loveliest person in the history of the universe,' says Anna flatly.
'She's definitely someone whose career I'd like to emulate. I'd love to be playing old grannies when I'm middle-aged and beautiful and young at heart. The depth and range of her roles is amazing.'
Like Walters, Anna has no vanity about her work; her buzzwords when she approaches a role, she says, are 'integrity' and 'truthfulness.'
'It's like with Cabaret,' she says. 'People were saying oh, how can you ever follow the film? But we were very keen on making Sally Bowles truthful to what the play was all about, this atmosphere of decadence and despair.
'In the play she's very messed-up, drunk and drugged, sleeping around, probably not a terribly happy person, and that's what I've tried to show.'
For Anna, the daunting thing about Cabaret wasn't the long run, or taking on the long shadow of Liza Minelli.
'It was the singing,' she laughs. 'I'm not a singer or dancer. So genius vocal coaches and choreographers have done their best to mask my deficiencies. And the whole thing has consumed my life. I can't drink,' she says, eyeing her peppermint tea stoically.
'I can't go out to smoky rooms. I've lost touch with my friends. When I finish the run I'm going to go wild. But Sally's nothing like me - I prefer knitting to debauchery - and I wasn't a natural choice for the producers, so I'm eternally grateful that they gave me the chance.'
She grins broadly. 'It's filth, it's sleaze, it's everything I got into acting to do.'
Anna was born in Beverley, in East Yorkshire; she can slip back into the accent as into a hot bath, but any 'by gums' have long since been drama-schooled out of her.
Her father was the managing director of a pharmaceutical company, and her mother was a research scientist who gave up her job to bring up Anna and her elder brother Adam.
The Martins can boast an exotic Inuit ancestry - 'it accounts for my strange look and my hamster cheeks,' suggests Anna - but its background was pure science rather than arts.
'Sitting at home listening to Tina Turner and watching old Cary Grant movies was the extent of my cultural life,' says Anna.
'So it wasn't like I ever saw Dame Judi Dench's Lady Macbeth and had my eureka 'that's it' moment.
'But I was a drama queen - I'd be completely hyper one minute and terribly depressed the next, and this was at the age of 4 - and I never considered doing anything else but acting.
'I think my parents found it a little baffling, particularly when my brother went into the arts as well.' (Adam runs a 'graffiti art' business called beautifulcrime.com that sells Banksy-syle art through galleries). 'I suppose,' she concludes with a shrug, 'they just encouraged us to be ourselves.' She breezed through school, with a high play-lead count and intense drama-club activity, but opted to take history at Liverpool University.
'I loved the subject, and got a good degree, but I actually couldn't wait to leave and for what I saw as my real acting life to begin,' she says.
'I don't remember any of the history stuff. It's embarrassing. If we go out to dinner, my boyfriend will deliberately bring things up to test me, like the dates of World War 2 or something, and I'll be flailing. I get these pitying aren't-you-supposed-to-have-a-degree kind of looks.'
Anna does remember the year she got into the London Academy of Dramatic Art - 1998.
'I'd applied to RADA and gone on a waiting list,' she says, 'but when I walked into LAMDA I felt it was the right place to be.'
She certainly thrived to the extent that she landed a job, as Alexandra in a Donmar Warehouse production of The Little Foxes, before she completed the course.
'I still remember the feeling on the day I got that role,' she beams. 'Nothing will ever beat it. We all dreamed of the Donmar, the Royal Court, and the National. And now I've done them all. I guess I can retire.'
But the Little Foxes job was also special for more personal reasons; Anna's father lived to see his daughter's strange career choice vindicated before succumbing to cancer.
Anna has worked steadily ever since that debut in 2001; her only extended period of 'resting' occurred, paradoxically, after her Bafta triumph in Bleak House, but that was because 'I was just getting offered the same kinds of roles, and people would have been so bored with me they'd have shot their TVs.'
It shows a rare willingness to hold out for projects she believes in, something she says Michell has helped her with: 'He's taught me to be much more practical and less emotional about the business, because I can see, via his side of it, that actors are hired on the flimsiest of pretexts.
'If I don't get something it's not because I'm terrible and I'm never going to work again, it's because they wanted someone with green eyes or someone just like Anne Hathaway or something you have no control over.'
Her never-knowingly-over-aggrandised default setting is in full effect when the subject of Hollywood, which will surely come calling on the strength of Becoming Jane, is broached: 'I don't tick too many of their boxes,' she opines.
'I'm not a great beauty, or a size zero, and never will be. I'm just someone who's done quite well in the UK and is just getting into British films. So if it happens, great, but I won't go and tout myself around when they've never heard of me.'
True to form, Anna's next film appearance is another 180-degree turn; she plays Madonna, a gay restaurant manager and 'real dweeb' who idolises Mrs Richie in a comedy called I Hate My Job.
'It's an emotional Ugly Betty scenario,' says Anna. 'She's terribly anal and closed-up.' A beat. 'She was a joy to play.'
Beyond that, there's finishing Cabaret, resuming her life, and attempting to hold to her new year resolution: 'To not think too much about any of this, just try to get on with it, and attempt to capitalise further on my extraordinary talent.'
Actually, she didn't say that last bit; but then, she wouldn't, would she?
Comments