Unlike some actors, who carry with them at all times a secret (and occasionally not so secret) little list of the big roles they hope one day to make their own, Imelda Staunton is not in the business of chasing parts. Should they chase her, moreover, her first impulse is to duck. When, for instance, it seemed that she would not, after all, be playing Martha in a new West End production of Edward Albee’s classic of marital strife, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – there was a temporary hitch with the rights – she was far from disappointed. “No,” she says. “I was v-e-r-y relieved. I thought: great. I’d said yes, because when someone [Sonia Friedman, the play’s hotshot producer] asks you to do something like that, you have to say yes, even if you think: oh God, oh God, oh God. But that didn’t mean my heart didn’t sink as I did.”
Three weeks later, though, and the problem was fixed. Her reprieve was at an end; cue more angst. “I like new writing, mostly,” she says. “Maybe it’s that I’m slightly intimidated by having to follow in very, very big shoes [I think she means, though she can’t bear to say her name, those of Elizabeth Taylor, who played Martha in the film of the play, opposite Richard Burton]. I will get into them. I bloody well will. But to be compared with… Of course, that’s nothing to do with anything, really. The piece is the thing, and the struggle, the challenge.”
Fear is, she believes, highly creative. Does each time still feel, as rehearsals begin, like the first time? “Oh, yes. Totally. Well, I find that. All the misery for me is at home, before we start. I just think: I can’t see this happening at all.”
Staunton is smack in the middle of precisely this misery right now. When we meet in the basement of an east London restaurant, there is less than a month until the play opens, and while she is generous and warm and ever the pro, she is also taut, distracted: most of her is still in the rehearsal room to which she’ll return after this, her lunch break (she is trying, and largely failing thanks to me, to demolish a caesar salad). She and the rest of the cast – Martha’s husband, George, will be played by Conleth Hill, and the younger couple, Honey and Nick, by Imogen Poots and Luke Treadaway – are just beginning to run the whole thing together. It is, she thinks, quite an “orchestral piece… the writing is terribly precise, and we are trying to adhere to all his [Albee’s] capital letters and dots.”
It’s also undeniably bleak: “As we’re still discovering, it’s about the hell of this woman’s life, even before we get to her marriage. It’s about self-hatred and lack of love and that sort of stuff, all of which is a pretty good basis for drama, isn’t it? But if you’re playing a person who is damaged and depressed and alcoholic every day… yes, it’s your job, but it also never leaves you. My face [with one hand, she pulls down the corners of her mouth] is like that when I get home. My husband [the actor Jim Carter] will say: ‘Here she comes, Chirpy!’ I have to go and have a bath and wash it away a bit.”
The common wisdom, one with which she does not disagree, is that female actors of a certain age – Staunton is 61 – often find it hard to get work. Yet Martha is, for her, only the latest in a series of end-to-end, once-in-a-lifetime roles. In 2011 she starred as Mrs Lovett in the Chichester Festival theatre’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, for which she won, after its West End transfer, an Olivier award for best actress in a musical. It was Sondheim who suggested she should play Momma Rose in his earlier show, Gypsy, and so, in 2014, she did. (How can you say no to Stephen Sondheim? The answer is that you can’t.) It, too, transferred from Chichester to the West End, playing to ecstatic audiences for eight months. This is no exaggeration: as she tells me almost nonchalantly, the cast received a standing ovation pretty much every night; and again, she won an Olivier award. In between, she was Margie, a single mother from south Boston, in David Lindsay-Abaire’s play Good People, for which another Olivier nomination duly followed.
Needing to rest, she took most of 2016 off. She and Carter went to New Zealand and Tasmania, did their garden, and helped their daughter, Bessie, who is also an actor, move into a flat. But now things are full-on again. When Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? finishes its run in May, she will have only a month before beginning rehearsals for Sondheim’s 1971 musical, Follies, at the National (she will play Sally Durant Plummer). Follies! I practically clap. Did she jump at the chance to do it? “No!” she yelps, looking at me as if to say: have you learned nothing? “I thought: I’m too old. But it’s Dominic Cooke [the director]. I can’t say no to him.” With her hands she makes an oblong, a frame for her face – without makeup, it seems almost to glow, as if she has lightbulbs where others have only cheekbones – which she then tilts. “It’s like this, Follies: it’s at an angle, and we’ve got to keep it like that.” She’s already learned the songs (and my God, what songs they are: among those she gets to belt out is Losing My Mind).
Is she surprised things have turned out like this? “Well, from my point of view these are great parts that have come at the right time. I couldn’t play them if I was younger. But I’m a character actress. Maybe it is more difficult for actors who’ve always played lead roles. But I will turn up and do a small part. I can duck and dive. I can keep working. I always thought to myself: there’ll be a little job. I’ve never been the kind of person who would say [she makes her voice grand]: ‘I think I should be playing X or Y.’ It’s more a case of: this is what is being offered, so do you stay at home, or do you work? Realistically, I’ve never thought about status, because what could I do about it? Absolutely nothing.”
If she is competitive, it’s only with herself. “I respect the job enormously. I don’t just turn up. I work really, really hard. I wake up every morning at 4.30, thinking about it all. But wherever you are on the ladder, there’s always someone above you, and there’s always someone below you. You can either get off the ladder completely, or you can accept that you go up and down. Work: it’s what you are.”
Doesn’t she worry about that, though? The feeling that I seem not to know who I am if I’m not working also makes me anxious. Staunton narrows her eyes, which are shaped like a cat’s and sapphire blue. “If you are in your element when you work, that’s a good place to be. If you’re then taken out of your element, it doesn’t feel good. Why would it?”
What work definitely isn’t about is fame, at least not for her. “I was thinking about this interview. I was thinking: oh, no, not another bloody actor, talking about her life. There’s nothing more boring. I just want to do it, and go home.”
Staunton grew up in Archway, north London, the only child of Irish immigrants. Her mother was a hairdresser; the family lived in a flat above the salon. “I never said I wanted to be an actress, because I didn’t know what that meant,” she says. “But I do remember being taken to the theatre when I was 17. I was sitting in the back of the Old Vic, boiling hot, watching Long Day’s Journey Into Night with Laurence Olivier and Constance Cummings. I remember looking at her and thinking [her voice drops to an urgent whisper]: oh my God… could I do something like that? I’d done my drama festivals. I’d done my monologues and my duologues. Drama was my subject, my thing. But it was there, in that moment, that I saw real passion and commitment and… a world. I thought: how can I get into that world?”
And so she applied (successfully) to Rada. Wasn’t she shy? Didn’t it feel preposterous? “I think I had a quiet confidence. But, also, I was an only child. I spent a lot of time on my own. I probably used that. My mum played the accordion and the fiddle, and there was the craic. I think I had a performer in me, though my characteristic even now is that I tend towards stillness rather than, you know, gaaaah!”
Her parents got to see her Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Leigh’s film Vera Drake, the role she still regards as the “big gear change… I think they were proud. These are not theatrical people. It was never: oh, darling! But I didn’t need much. You know yourself if you’re good enough. If you disappoint yourself, you disappoint others.”
She and Carter, who married in 1983, met when they were both in Guys and Dolls at the National. Does it help, having two actors in the house, or does it mean that things – anxiety levels, say – escalate quickly? “We’re very different animals. The phrase we both use is: I have to act, and Jim has to work. He would no more do this play than cut off his arm; he doesn’t like theatre. He loves to be in the makeup caravan, to make sure everyone is having a good time. He will say: a film, on location, with no lines? Heaven! We’re still incredibly supportive, but I don’t do a lot of asking him to test me on my lines. I just go up to my room and do it myself. And if he’s doing something – he’s doing these Q&As at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn at the moment, to fundraise [for the theatre’s renovations] – I’ll know that he’s in the zone, he’s got to concentrate. He might be up all night, and so he’ll go and sleep in the other room.”
Getting ready for a play is, she says, a question of being match fit. Everyone has to peak at the right time. Gypsy, during which she was on stage virtually all night – a tiny figure and yet a giant one, too, from whom it was impossible to tear one’s eyes – was incredibly tough. She had a massage every week, and did vocal exercises every afternoon, in the interval, and in the car on her way home. But she also had the music to drive her on.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is going to be very different: “With this, you are the driving force. The whole evening is very claustrophobic, very shouty. That said, it’s important not to mistake speed for energy. There’s no point thinking: I’ll say this as quickly as I can, otherwise people will get bored.”
She’s pulling on her coat now, in a rush to get back to her rehearsal. “Now, you will come round, won’t you?” she asks, meaning that, when I see the play, I am to turn up at the stage door afterwards. I shake my head. I’m not about to embarrass either one of us by doing that. “Well, send money then instead!” she calls, laughingly. “Send money!” And with that, she is gone.
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is at London’s Harold Pinter theatre from Wednesday to 27 May; whosafraidofvirginiawoolf.co.uk
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