Queen of the screen - Anne-Marie Duff
If you had to nominate two women as hard acts to follow, how about Helen Mirren and Harriet Walter? Both played Elizabeth I last year and now Anne-Marie Duff is the latest incarnation of the whey-faced, red-haired, fiery-tempered Virgin Queen in a new BBC version of one of our favourite royal stories.
At least Duff has youth on her side — relatively, anyway. Her delicate features and scrubbed schoolgirl look belie her age (35) and won her the part she is best known for, Fiona, 20-year-old chief of the Gallagher siblings in Channel 4’s shockingly hilarious drama Shameless. Duff admitted that walking through Manchester council estates in her Fiona costume of tight jeans and plenty of gold drew more whistles and beeps from men in white vans than she’d had in the rest of her life.
The daughter of Irish immigrants, Duff grew up on another council estate, in Hayes, Middlesex, and was sent for acting lessons by her parents to cure her shyness. When she eventually landed at the Drama Centre (where her best friend was Paul Bettany) she claims she was the runt of the year, playing children or pages. “Nobody thought I’d ever work.”
Happily they were wrong. She was “noticed” for her work at the National Theatre as Cordelia opposite Ian Holm in King Lear and with Helen Mirren in Collected Stories and then reached a wider audience with her performance as a pregnant teenager banished to a convent in the harrowing The Magdalene Sisters (best film at Venice 2002). The same year she starred in the BBC TV drama Sinners, also set in the now notorious Magdalene laundries, suffering both the grim storylines and the bullied convent girl look of greasy hair, dirty fingernails and body like an ironing board. “She throws herself into a part,” said one director of Duff, “almost as if she’s bruising herself against it.”
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Duff claims to be baffled by her repeated Irish roles — “It’s bollocks, I’m a Londoner” — but shows no sign of escaping them, the last being Mona, an alcoholic fantasist from Belfast, in the 2005 version of Days of Wine and Roses at the Donmar. Duff also regularly plays vulnerable characters, which is why, she says, she enjoyed playing Elizabeth — for her “independence, vanity, pig-headedness and astonishing intellect”.
For the past two years Duff has been dating her co-star James McAvoy, her car-thief boyfriend in Shameless, who is nine years younger than her. She has consistently refused to speak about him except to say that the age gap is not a problem, and she blushes whenever his name is mentioned.