The Saturday interview: Northern spirits

Yorkshire actress Jodie Whittaker and Newcastle-born Anne Reid play the same character, Ruth Bowen, at different ages. Steve Pratt talks to them about their characters, the North-South divide and the supernatural.

ANNE Reid has had an extraordinary career. I mean, how many actresses can say they’ve been married to Ken Barlow and bedded by James Bond? Or at 75 be so in demand that she tells of turning down three roles before Christmas.

And now the Newcastle-born actress, who comes from a family of journalists, including one who worked on The Northern Echo, is saying to me “and you can quote me on that”. This always makes you perk up as the phrase carries the implication that she is saying something that perhaps won’t find favour with everyone.

We are talking about how The Mother, the film in which her 60-something woman had an affair with a handyman half her age (played by a pre-007 Daniel Craig) and how it boosted her career. “It certainly helped, because people stopped asking who I was, which was great,”

she says.

“In this business it’s not what you do but where you do it. If you do it in Middlesbrough or the Bolton Octagon nobody takes a blind bit of notice, but if you do exactly the same performance at the National Theatre everybody jumps up and down.

“I really do believe that. They get very excited in London more than if you did that same wonderful performance in Manchester that should have got Olivier awards. That’s England isn’t it, that’s the business.”

She learnt gradually about the North-South divide. “When are they going to cotton on that we are much brighter, that the people from the North are a great deal cleverer, funnier, more interesting than people south of Watford. And you can quote me.

“I get so fed up with this snobby thing. You gradually realise that all the great comics, like Victoria (Wood), Alan Bennett, so many wonderful actors, just people generally, come from the North.”

When she speaks about her brothers being journalists in the North-East, I mention finding a publicity picture in The Northern Echo photo library of her and other Coronation Street cast members reading a copy of the newspaper. “Fans send me the most terrible pictures of me as Valerie Barlow with great fat cheeks and I hate them.

“I don’t want to be mean, but I would rather tear them up and send them another one. Some of them are so horrible from that time. You’d think you’d like pictures of yourself when young, and I do like some of them, but some you think ‘oh my God’...”

So you don’t collect them? I suggest. “If they’re good I do, but I look such an old dog in this one.”

The picture showing Val clasping the hairdryer that killed her – she left the Street after death by electrocution – wins her approval.

“Oh that’s all right, but this other one was the first publicity photograph they took. I have these huge cheeks and look horrible.”

If she gets grumpy about the Northern thing and bad photos, she has nothing but good things to say about Marchlands in which she plays Jodie Whittaker’s Sixties character 40 years on.

“You know, I think this was the happiest job I’ve ever been on. It doesn’t affect the production, but it was just so happy – the director was adorable. Chrissie Skins, the producer, is heaven and it’s very rare to get a makeup woman as lovely. Usually there’s somebody, usually the makeup with me, when you think, ‘oh God, what’s she going to do with me today?’ But this was just calm. Every morning I went in and felt ‘this is lovely’.”

Whittaker was already filming when the time came to discuss how Reid would play her as an older woman. She wore contacts so their eyes matched. “I am glad I did it because I think it does make me look different. They could be the same woman, although I won’t be around to see what she’s like when she’s in her Sixties or Seventies.”

Reid was also filming the BBC revival of Upstairs Downstairs, playing the cook Mrs Thackeray, while making Marchlands. “There was one week where on Monday, Wednesday and Friday I was Ruth Bowen, and Tuesday and Thursday I was Mrs Thackeray. They were ferrying me backward and forward between Cardiff and Surrey.

“We were very lucky to make the dates work because I lost a film last year because the dates of when we were doing Ladies of Letters. The dates shifted by one day and when that happens there’s nothing you can do about it because they’re tied in to locations.”

It seems as though she never stops working.

“I’ve had such a busy year and turned work down,” she says.

“Before Christmas I turned down three jobs because, frankly, I was tired and wanted to have Christmas, just have Christmas. Now I’m doing a radio play tomorrow and Saturday and another on February 1, but apart from that, nothing else is planned.”

That suits her because she’s trying to get her own show together with a friend, a musical director and pianist. The aim is for an evening of songs with little stories. “I don’t know whether it will work, but I’ve always wanted to do it. Everybody’s got their own show, haven’t they? I don’t know whether it will come off, but I feel I should give it a go.”

She has come relatively late to musicals.

After The Mother, she did one at Chichester and more recently Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods at the Royal Opera House (“that was quite special”) and last year a “lost” musical Paris, at Sadlers Wells.

You won’t find her playing too many “grannies in hospital with tubes up their nose”

as you might expect from an actress her age.

“I’ve had a very good variety of parts. I tend to run away from anything that’s boring old woman. I don’t mind doing it on the radio, but not on the television. It depresses me. It’s bad enough getting old without playing depressing old women because people I know aren’t like that. They are very feisty and full of life.”

Born in Newcastle, she says she’s a real Geordie, although people often think she’s from the North-West. She’s played a few Geordies, inevitably in one of the Catherine Cookson TV dramas. When she did a film, Liam, for director Stephen Frears a few years back she asked him, “I can’t do Liverpool, can I make her Geordie?”

The first theatre she went to was Jesmond Playhouse and she recalls going to the Theatre Royal in Newcastle to see Jewell and Warris in pantomime. Dancing, not acting, was her first passion. “I wanted to be Margot Fonteyn. I was obsessed with dancing as a little girl and then I went away to boarding school because my dad got an assignment in Delhi and my mother went with him. I went off not realising that the dancing was going to stop. No one said to me ‘you won’t be able to dance again’.

“It gradually dawned on me and my dad put me in elocution lessons because I had a very broad North-Eastern accent and he thought it would be nice for me to iron it out. I started learning bits of plays and my teacher suddenly wrote to my parents and said ‘Anne has real talent and I think she should be an actress’.

“And my dad was very happy to go along with it because my grandma had been an entertainer.

She used to play the piano and sing, and was also in pantomime choruses very briefly. So I think he was quite thrilled with that.”

As Marchlands contains elements of the supernatural, her thoughts on the subject are invited.

She doesn’t hesitate to say that “I absolutely believe in it. I’ve had a lot of people die on me – I don’t want to be gloomy, but my mother and father and my brothers and my husband. And I never feel they have gone anywhere at all. I feel constantly surrounded. I went to see someone once who said two people came in with me.

“I don’t even think about it and I pick up things. I can’t say I’m really psychic, but I’m not surprised when things happen. I just think about things and they just happen. It’s very strange. So yes, I believe in everything.”

ITV’s new spooky drama is the story of three different families living in the same house – in the Sixties, Eighties and the present day – all linked by the spirit of a young girl who died in mysterious circumstances.

Yorkshire actress Jodie Whittaker and Newcastle-born Anne Reid play the same character, Ruth Bowen, at different ages. Steve Pratt talks to them about their characters, the North-South divide and the supernatural The Saturday interview ‘IAM Northern and I am an actress so I suppose it goes hand in hand,” says Jodie Whittaker who, in the course of just five years has established herself as one of the country’s brightest rising stars.

“But I hope through the work I’ve proved that’s not where the buck stops, that Northern is not the only performance you’re only going to get out of me. I’ve done enough stuff to show I can do something different.”

She’s certainly done that and is as friendly, enthusiastic and, well, Northern, since I first encountered her sandwiched between veteran actors Peter O’Toole and Leslie Phillips at the press launch of the film Venus.

“We started filming Venus in 2005 and wrapped in 2006. It feels like a long time ago because it was the moment of leaving drama school until now. I suppose you go through a lot. Working changes you and unemployment changes you. It’s great – you become a better person on all sides.”

In ITV1 series Marchlands she plays Ruth Bowen, grieving mother of a dead eight-yearold girl in a story following three families living in the same house at different times – 1968, 1987 and the present day – and linked by the spirit of the young girl who died in mysterious circumstances.

Whittaker watched the series at the press launch, surrounded by scribbling scribes taking notes. She found the experience “strange”, not just because of that but on account of not having seen the other parts of the story outside the Sixties, as each bit was filmed separately.

“You’re seeing it for the first time and it’s interesting to see the Eighties and the modern piece have a lot of supernatural elements, whereas ours is just a story about grief,” she says.

Her research was limited, not least because the Swinging Sixties footage available isn’t relevant.

“That isn’t very helpful because most of it is London and that was in a very different place at that time,” says Whittaker.

“Yorkshire in 1968 wasn’t the same as London in 1968. Most of the stuff, like the fashion and the music, documented was in London. But those things that defined the Sixties aren’t part of village life in the story.”

Although set in Yorkshire – not specifically but hinted that we’re somewhere outside Leeds – filming took place “somewhere off the M40 – I don’t even know where, I was asleep in the morning in the car”.

She was filming Marchlands at the same time as the comedy One Day, switching from grieving mother to red-haired crazy kind of character from day to day.

“Doing two jobs at once is down to my wonderful agent because she made sure they all worked round each other. That’s not always the case because if a location is needed on a certain day and you can’t be there that dictates whether you play the part or not. That’s nobody’s fault, just the way it goes. I was lucky – and started Marchlands a week after finishing the BBC’s Accused up North.”

Which is where being a Northern actress comes in. Do people categorise her as that? “I don’t know. I don’t really don’t,” she says.

“I do a lot of stuff in my own accent, but it’s not like it’s Northern drama. I did my own accent on Venus, but that’s not about the North, just about someone who’s not from London. I think a lot of times when I use my accent it’s because they want that character to be not from the world they’re living in rather than this is a Yorkshire character.”

Venus, as track-suited ugly duckling turned swan Jessie, got Whittaker noticed and directors were impressed enough to put her in a succession of film and TV roles, from Cranford to St Trinians.

Nothing could prepare her for the speed of that success. “You don’t really have time to think about it because you want to be enjoying it in case it goes away. Then you think ‘oh my God it’s all going to go away’ – and so you’re not focused and doing your job properly because you’re so distracted by the fact that it might all disappear. But that’s the highs and lows of the job.

“I had my eyes opened when I went to drama school. Believe me, there’s absolutely no sugar coating that goes on at drama school. You are aware that only a minority of people are going to work for the rest of their lives.

“Have a reunion in ten years and half your year wouldn’t be working. But that’s why it’s brilliant because all 26 people are in that room against all those odds, still there, still putting themselves through that training despite the honesty – and they’ve got to be honest with you because it’s not an industry to go in in any way blinkered.”

Yorkshire accent or not, she feels she’s avoided typecasting listing a recent job to prove it – a knife-wielding Elephant and Castle nurse being chased by aliens to new TV drama The Night Watch about women during and after the war.

“I’ve had an amazing year and don’t think for a second in any way has it been a typecast year.

So I’ve been very lucky they’ve given me opportunities to bring something a bit different to what I usually do.”

Along with all the work, she’s found time to marry Mexican-American writer-actor Christian Contreras. But she’s yet to explore work on the other side of the Atlantic. “I’ve never been there to work, but I’ve been over because a lot of my family are from America. Socially, I spend a lot of time there and dearly love it. I couldn’t be more of a fan. I love America, I think it’s great, and workwise, of course, you’d want to work there, you want to work everywhere.

“I’ve worked in Jordan, South Africa, Dublin and Leeds. So the next obvious one is LA.”

* Marchlands begins on ITV on Thursday at 9pm.