Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic “You look like you’re about to do a card trick,” says Anne-Marie Duff cheerfully as she strides into a room in London’s Young Vic theatre, where I’m sitting at a table swathed in thick black cloth. “Or a seance,” she adds, as she takes a seat.She laughs and places her hands flat on the cloth as if trying to summon up the departed. It’s a move that seems typical of this instantly approachable actress — and quite the surprise if your immediate image of her is as Grace, the fragile, bullied wife of Apple TV+’s Bad Sisters. But then Duff is, like many great artists, a chameleon. Over time she has found a way to inhabit and illuminate characters as diverse as Joan of Arc at the National Theatre (2007), Elizabeth I in the BBC’s Virgin Queen (2005) and Fiona in Channel 4’s hit television series Shameless, set in working-class Manchester. She talks of them all with affection, as if they were childhood friends.“I just fell madly in love with some of them,” she says. “Like Fiona — I loved the fact that she was not a drudge, she was a shiny little jewel. Or Julia Lennon [John Lennon’s mother in the film Nowhere Boy]. And being Elizabeth I for a few months. I mean — jeepers!”Joan, in George Bernard Shaw’s St Joan, was a particular favourite: a part she played with great charisma — and bare feet. That came at a price. “I broke two toes on opening night. So I had to go to hospital for an X-ray. But my toenails — I just couldn’t get them clean! Because I had to rub them with real soil every night to have pilgrim’s feet. And you could just see [the medics] looking aghast as they took out my hobbit foot . . .” Her latest stage character is likely better shod — and rather less easy to love. Regina, the lead in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, is a nouveau-riche woman in patriarchal 1900s Alabama, who shrewdly — and ruthlessly — outmanoeuvres her grasping brothers to get hold of her ailing husband’s capital. Reviewing the original 1939 production, the New York Times described Regina as “odious”, “calculating” and “avaricious”. Duff, deep in rehearsals at the Young Vic, takes a more rounded view.“My job is to try and make her full of all the reasons why,” she says. “That’s the quest. You don’t play Richard III and just be an arsehole. Regina’s a woman who is stuck. She’s desperate to be somewhere else, where she imagines she will be more fully realised and, by fair means or foul, she wants to get there.“I once heard someone talk brilliantly about emotionally immature people,” she adds. “How they would stand on anyone to get their heads out of the water, to get a gasp of air. And that’s her I think. She’s just gasping for air.”Hellman, like her character, was uncompromising. She could match the men of her era for hell-raising, conducted a tempestuous, on-off affair for 30 years with the author Dashiell Hammett and gave inconsistent accounts of her own life. Her first play, The Children’s Hour (1934), in which a schoolgirl spreads malicious rumours about two female teachers having an affair, discussed prejudice and persecution. Too scandalous for London, Boston and Chicago, it was a hit in New York.The Little Foxes, written five years later, is likewise frank and forthright. For Duff, working on it during the current turbulence in America, the questions it raises feel startlingly fresh.“It’s a very political play about America,” she says. “It’s about capitalism and the notion of an American identity: where did it come from, how did it form itself? And do we keep recycling and repeating behaviours? . . . She’s such an underrated writer.”Duff, now 54, has an instinct for work with heft. As a child, she was a serious bookworm and dreamt — still does — of writing a novel. She was also profoundly shy. Paradoxically, that shyness led her to a career in the limelight. Encouraged by her parents to join a youth theatre, she suddenly found her feet.“There is something really comfortable about slipping inside another human being’s skin,” she explains. “No responsibility. All you have to do is yield to the moment that you’re in. And you can be anything without judgment. It’s a very safe place to be.”At 19, she got a place at the Drama Centre — known colloquially as “the trauma centre” for the rigour of its training. Was it really that tough? “It was hellish,” says Duff, grinning. “I was always being told off . . . But it made me take my work seriously and see theatre as a movement for change. I think you have to believe that culture has an important role. Otherwise what’s the point of living really?”That principle underpins much of what she does. Since graduating she’s rarely been out of work. She had her breakthrough in Shameless — where she met her ex-husband, actor James McAvoy, with whom she has a teenage son — and she seems at home on both screen and stage. But often, she’ll be found playing women under pressure.“I think all great stories surround a trial of some sort, don’t they?” she says. “Whether it’s physical, psychological or emotional. Drama is about a point of crisis. So the characters are in that space usually.”Even so, she found Grace in Bad Sisters tough. Sharon Horgan’s deliciously black comedy, released in 2022 and now back for a second season, followed the increasingly desperate attempts of the close-knit Garvey women to free their sister from an abusive husband. For all the show’s macabre wit, its depiction of coercive control was very hard to watch. It was harder still to play, says Duff. “We thought it was very important that we committed to that side of the story truthfully,” she says. “Although it was a dark comedy, the abuse had to be 100 per cent real. I was playing a woman who was profoundly denying the truth — this kind of translucent version of a woman. You feel like you’re half rubbed out. It was a real eye-opener. Even just pretending it for a while was awful.”The show has had an impact. She’s been stopped by passers-by and contacted by people concerned about friends or relatives. Duff, who has worked on projects about domestic abuse before and had a connection with the charity Women’s Aid, suggests that it is in telling stories truthfully that art can make a difference: “It’s a space where we can educate and create empathy.”Her task, she adds, is to “tend” to her characters — to try to get to the truth of them and inhabit them fully. That process can often involve rigorous research and challenging rehearsals. But Duff also has a more personal and sensory route. She seeks out a perfume to fit each role. It’s to do with the intimacy of smell, she explains: its ability to transport you to another time and place. For Constance, in Beth Steel’s 2022 play The House of Shades, she chose a vintage 1960s scent; for the vibrant Fiona, a high-street chemist’s perfume.And Regina? “I’m in the process of finding her,” she says. “She’s tricky. Because she’s kind of sexy, you know, and yet at the same time . . . So it will be something earthy. I’m still on the hunt.” She laughs. “I’m literally sniffing her out!”‘The Little Foxes’, December 2 to February 8, youngvic.org; ‘Bad Sisters’ seasons 1 and 2, Apple TV+Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
