I’m still called Duckface but I love ducks, so I don’t really care.” Anna Chancellor accepts that she remains associated with her part as the neurotic Sloane jilted at the altar by Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral, but she also knows it was her big break. “In this business you can get the experience but never the exposure. Luck always plays a part. I can’t complain.”
At 5ft 10in, with high, sharp cheekbones, curly black hair, huge blue eyes and an easy grace, Chancellor has a commanding presence. In person she is warm and laid-back, but to cast her as a wallflower would be wrong. “I don’t think the sweet ingénue roles were ever likely to come my way,” says Chancellor with a laugh. “Perhaps it’s my face, or because people perceive me as ‘strapping’ or something.”
After Four Weddings we saw her being dumped by Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice and as the artist Stanley Spencer’s second wife in Pam Gems’s Stanley at the National Theatre. She shacked up with Zoë Wanamaker for David Mamet’s West End drama Boston Marriage and ravished Rachael Stirling as “a dominatrix sex bitch” in Tipping the Velvet on TV. More recently she shouldered our national security in Spooks.
“I’m 40 now so I doubt I’ll ever get the female lead who’s looking for Mr Right,” she says. Instead, this April, we’ll see her in Five’s Suburban Shootout, which she describes as “Desperate Housewives meets The Sopranos”. Expect drive-by shootings from people-carriers and Mexican stand-offs in posh health clubs as a turf war erupts between two gangs in the fictional town of Little Stempington. “I play a kind of posh Ray Winstone who is dealing extra-strength HRT,” Chancellor explains. “I hope the series works because it was great fun to do.” Caught in the middle of this conflict is the newly arrived police chief’s wife, played by Amelia Bullmore. It’s through this series that Chancellor now finds herself in the touring version of Bullmore’s debut stage play, Mammals. We meet at the Bush Theatre in West London, where the play originated, near the home that Chancellor shares with her 18-year-old daughter, Poppy.
In Mammals, a comedy-drama that was one of the most entertaining new plays of last year, Chancellor plays Lorna, the cool, cruel girlfriend of nice guy Phil. She’s the reluctant weekend guest of Phil’s best friend Kev, who arrives just as Kev has admitted to his wife, Jane, that he thinks he is in love with a colleague. All four’s emotional hang-ups are played amid the parental war zone of scattered toys and half-done washing-up as Jane ‘s two young children, played hilariously by adults, crave attention.
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“Some big theatres turned down the play because they thought the adults-as-kids device wouldn’t work,” Chancellor says, “but surely that’s precisely what you can pull off on stage. Have you seen Mike Leigh’s play at the National? Awful! He might as well have simply put a family on stage reading the newspaper aloud!”
Chancellor finds the domestic tensions in Mammals far more engaging. “Being a mother and working is all I’ve ever known,” she says. “I became pregnant with Poppy at 21 and had to leave drama school and earn a living.” She parted from Poppy’s father, Jock Scott, a would-be poet, four years later, continuing as the main breadwinner through waitressing, modelling and the odd advert.
“I couldn’t even get the tiniest parts in the most far-flung places,” Chancellor says. “My one stage role was as the court stenographer in an Agatha Christie in regional rep under a bullying boss who had halitosis.”
But acting was all she wanted to do. One of four children, Chancellor grew up with step-siblings in a Somerset manor house after her mother remarried when she was 4. At convent school in Dorset she was “an academic disaster” but acted in every stage production. By 16 she had joined her two sisters in London and eventually got into the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art: “Being posh wasn’t fashionable. It didn’t do much for my confidence. But when Poppy came along, acting was all I could do.”
Gradually, Chancellor got small TV parts and then, in 1990, a role in Jupiter Moon, a space opera on the satellite channel BSB that was quickly dubbed “Crossroads in space”: “They stuck me in a tight skirt but, curiously, in doing 115 crappy episodes, I regained my confidence.”
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The success of Four Weddings in 1994 led to regular work on stage and screen, but she didn’t make her Shakespearean debut until 1999 as one of Nigel Hawthorne’s daughters in an Anglo-Japanese staging of King Lear by the revered director Yukio Ninagawa. “What a disaster that was,” she says. “We arrived in Japan to find all the sets and costumes were complete, there was no room for discussion. English actors need dialogue. I once missed a cue in rehearsal and suddenly I was in Tenko. I was kept on stage with Ninagawa screaming orders about my every move!”
The production, already sold out when it arrived in London, was savaged by the British critics but Chancellor found it strangely liberating: “We knew we were in a failure so I spent every performance exploring my role as Goneril. The experience taught me that you just keep going.”
By this time, Chancellor had divorced Nigel Willoughby, a cameraman she had met in 1993 while shooting a Boddington’s advert. “Mammals explores how it’s easy to fall in love, but only time will tell whether you’ll grow closer or apart in a marriage,” Chancellor says. “Amelia captures all the pent-up yearnings that parental responsibility breeds, but then Lorna turns up and says f*** all that. There’s no point rubbing along when real love is still to be found.”
Now that Poppy is about to leave home to study art, Chancellor is able to tour. “Part of me will miss Poppy terribly but part of me is also excited,” she says.
She would love to work in America but is aware of the limited number of good female roles: “In the 1940s we had Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis in all these sassy, smart, fun parts. Nowadays we have fantastic people like Cameron Diaz and Scarlett Johansson but they seem apologetic, fragile female types. Why is that? That’s why I hope Suburban Shootout is a success — it’s got seven great roles for women!”