Whatever you were expecting of a septuagenarian dame of classical theatre,
Eileen Atkins isn’t it. She begins as she means to go on, gamely leaping up
to demonstrate how a woman of advancing years, handcuffed, might pleasure
herself on the corner of a kitchen table, in order to explain why it isn’t a
good idea. (“Sickmaking. I won’t do it.”)
Atkins is to be handcuffed to a table that she won’t be grinding in Joanna
Murray-Smith’s new comedy The Female of the Species. Based on Germaine
Greer’s experience of being held hostage by a former student, the play
farcically explores the fractures of latter-day feminism. Everybody, from
Atkins’s towering English intellectual, Margot Mason, to her wearied
daughter Tess, to the damaged intruder Molly, has conflicting opinions on
the subject. As do the three men who belatedly arrive to subvert the day.
“Comedy is something of a departure for me,” Atkins says cheerfully.
“Generally, I play very depressed-looking people.” She and the director
Roger Michell last worked together on Murray-Smith’s Honour, which earned
Atkins an Olivier in 2004. Her most recent interpretation of “dour” came
courtesy of Cranford. The BBC’s bonnet fest, adapted from the novels of
Elizabeth Gaskell, won Atkins a Bafta in April for her forbidding turn as
the arch-protector of propriety, Deborah Jenkyns. Her flawless performance
pipped her onscreen sister, Judi Dench, to the title, and the suggestion
that there might have been rivalry between the dames infuriates Atkins, “Oh
for God’s sake! How ridiculous. Working with Judi is never anything less
than a delight.”
In jeans and baggy blue jumper, Atkins evinces a rumpled, intelligent charm,
her hair a choppy, deftly highlighted cut. It no longer seems deeply weird
that the Hollywood heart throb Colin Farrell would have propositioned her in
2004, despite being 40 years her junior. She let the episode slip to enliven
a daytime TV interview. “Poor boy,” she says. “He was enchanting. I’d never
have blabbed if I’d thought anybody could have found out who I meant.” By
way of apology, she left a lewd limerick on his answerphone that had him
hooting with laughter.
“I’m not too used to publicity,” she says. “For years, nobody knew who I was,
so I never had to do any. Now, at 74, I’m stuck with it.” She chuckles. “I
have been ‘discovered’, apparently. And no, that doesn’t annoy me. Notoriety
is not why I signed up.”
She signed up because she loved “the particular work” of rehearsing difficult
plays, and to escape her Tottenham council estate. “I’ve had too good a time
to complain, but it’s been hard work. My first husband had to beg them to
take me on at the RSC, and I crawled up from there.”
Her breakthrough season came in 1962, with two Shakespearean leads, and in
1965 she played Childie in The Killing of Sister George, which took her to
Broadway for the first time. A consistent diet of classics and heavyweight
new plays followed, on both sides of the Atlantic, and her astonishing
versatility was recognised with a damehood in 2001. Though she never courted
a film career, Hollywood has, of late, begun to recognise her, too. In 2001
she played the cook in Robert Altman’s elegant period who-dunnit Gosford
Park, and she joined a stellar cast in Anthony Minghella’s elegiac Cold
Mountain, in 2003.
But the defining role of her career, which led to a cameo appearance in the
screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours in 2002,
was Virginia Woolf.
Atkins was introduced to Woolf at 27, when she was cast as the writer in a
film that was never made. It sparked a literary love affair. She first
played Woolf in a TV documentary, toured readings of her letters and, in
1989, adapted A Room of One’s Own for the stage. Atkins’s
performance of Woolf’s lectures on women’s creativity opened in Hampstead,
triumphantly toured America and was revived in London in 2001. A West End
transfer was scuppered when the theatre owners decided to stage “those
f***ing Vagina Monologues” instead. “I was furious. They didn’t want
the real argument. They wanted a w**k.”
It is her enduring association with Woolf that makes her so apt for the part
of Margot Mason, and is also the reason she nearly turned it down. “I
worried people might interpret this play as saying that feminism failed
women,” Atkins says. “I do not believe that. People ask me, why did you
marry so young? The answer is, it was the only way to get away from home,
which is appalling.”
She and the actor Julian Glover married at 21, and divorced nine years later.
In her thirties she had “a lot of affairs and a great deal of fun” before,
at 43, marrying the commercials producer Bill Shepherd, with whom she lives
in West London. Like Woolf, she has no children, and no regrets. “My first
husband couldn’t have them. Everybody told us we had to adopt, so we went
through the first interview. I was in the flat one day and the bell rang and
there was a little baby in a cot on the doorstep. I thought my God, they’ve
delivered it. The blood ran out of every vein. I thought this is your life,
for the next 20 years, and I just did not want it.”
The baby belonged to a woman selling cloths door to door, but the experience
persuaded Atkins out of the obligation of adopting. “I know people look at
me and think ‘poor dear’. But I just don’t feel that something’s lacking in
my life or my femininity. At all.”
Atkins’s relationship with her own parents was fraught. “Nobody in Tottenham
knew about classical theatre, so I just continually failed my mother. Had I
been in EastEnders, she’d have been thrilled.
“I was very spoilt as a child,” she says. “Until the age of 7 I was terribly
pretty, in a working-class sort of way. I looked like Shirley Temple. There
was a lot of money spent sending me to dancing classes, because a gypsy had
told my mother I would be a great dancer when I was 3. I hated it.”
Throughout the war, Atkins high-kicked her way across the working men’s clubs
of London, as “Baby Eileen”. “I did all these sexy numbers, Carmen Miranda
and the like, showing my arse, it was pure paedophilia. Just horrible.”
At 12, she started doing panto instead, until someone derided her “vile
accent”. “Until then, my mother had no idea we were Cockneys,” Atkins
recalls. “She sent me to school with a note, asking if anyone could teach me
RP. My divinity teacher said yes. A wonderful, defrocked priest who
introduced me to Shakespeare and changed my life. The minute I tried acting
I thought this is what I want to do for ever. And I have. I am the most
astonishingly lucky person.”
Searching for things that she has hung on to from her working-class youth,
Atkins displays an uncharacteristic moment of disquiet. “One can sound
awfully snobbish,” she says, “but I desperately wanted to get away from all
of it. One thing I still can’t get over is when people say, ‘Love you’ all
the time. I was brought up not to mention it unless I was in extremis.
“And I still can’t bear people stroking my head when I’m ill.” A grin appears.
“Judi Dench and I were talking about this and I said ‘I can see it, I’ll be
lying there, paralysed, and my husband will be stroking my brow, and I
shan’t be able to protest at the last.’
“At the end of Cranford Judi had a silver disc made for me on a
chain, saying ‘Don’t stroke my head.’ Last week, for my birthday, she sent
me a cake with those words iced on it. I wrote her a limerick in thanks:
‘There once was a Dame name of Jude/ who thrilled the entire multitude/ she
was fond of a joke and often a poke/ but thought frottage was really quite
rude.’ It’s not terribly witty, but it’s got the word ‘frottage’ in it,
which I learnt last week and am extremely proud of. For frottage’s sake, I
share it.”
The Female of the Species, Vaudeville Theatre, London WC2 (www.vaudeville-theatre.co.uk
0844 4124663), previews from Thur and opens on July 16 2008
A national treasure !!!!
ian payne, walsall,