It’s a privilege to feel like the barriers are down.” It’s funny; these words may come from Anna Chancellor’s mouth, but I feel as though she’s plucked them directly from my brain. We’ve been talking for half an hour or so, in which time the Four Weddings and a Funeral actor has cried, shared the details of her late daughter’s sensational-sounding wake, and comforted me about my own deceased father. The barriers aren’t just down – they’re non-existent.
In an ironic twist, we’d kicked off our conversation discussing decidedly more guarded interview styles. “What do you think of actresses as a whole?” Chancellor fires at me with genuine curiosity – she keeps asking questions in return, more interested in opening a dialogue than performing a soliloquy – and I mutter that I’ve never met any of the shiny Hollywood kinds.
“They probably get trained in publicity,” she muses. “I wonder if they even practice? When you see somebody like J-Lo give an interview, she’s so slick, so perfect!” But authenticity, as Chancellor quickly proves, is far more interesting than perfection.
At 59, she is one of those actors blessed with an instantly recognisable face, anchored by an exquisite chin dimple and eyes that seem perpetually aglitter with mirth, as if someone’s just told her a really filthy joke. It’s a face that, along with an imposing 5ft 10in stature, has landed her countless comedically haughty roles. She’s played characters ranging from posh, arch Julia Piper in Kavanagh QC and snooty, scheming Caroline Bingley in the BBC’s iconic Pride and Prejudice in the Nineties to more recent turns as the deliciously awful Melanie Aickman in The Split and fabulously foul-mouthed Lady Frances Grey in My Lady Jane.
Yet it’s a face that is still, 30 years after the fact, best known for playing Henrietta – Hugh Grant’s odious ex – in Richard Curtis’s romcom Four Weddings. Does it get on her nerves that people continue to think of her as “Duckface”?
“No, I don’t mind at all! And, curiously, I really like ducks. I don’t care what people call me. I don’t care what people think about me,” she says. “The only person you really want to have respect for is yourself. You’ve got to be kind of into yourself – it’s important.” (For what it’s worth, Chancellor agrees that Grant shouldn’t have ended up with Andie MacDowell: “He should have married Kristin [Scott Thomas]. That was a tragedy!”)
Now, Chancellor is swapping screen for stage for the first time in nearly nine years, stepping into the role of grand dame Mrs Betterton in April De Angelis’s Playhouse Creatures. Set in the 1660s at the point when women were finally allowed to perform in public after King Charles II’s ascendance to the English throne, the play features an ensemble cast of five women. The narrative revolves around their dressing room camaraderie and bitter rivalry as Betterton gets pushed out to make way for a younger model – a theme that still resonates today, would Chancellor say?
“It’s maybe a tiny bit depressing, the way it is still relevant,” she says. “I play an older actress who’s basically fired because she’s too old. And she says the world wants to see the younger actresses.” Her character’s husband, also an actor, is set to be partnered with these younger models on stage instead, “which is what happens today, isn’t it? You get old boy actors playing opposite much younger ‘wives’. Same old thing…”
But Chancellor isn’t bitter about the realities of her industry. “Oh, I totally get the obsession with young, beautiful girls – of course I do. And I’ve got it too. You know, there are a couple of girls in our play and they are so… electric.”
And young women don’t necessarily have it easy either these days, she argues. “I don’t know if there’s been great strides forward with this Instagram thing of everyone taking mad selfies of themselves the whole time,” she ponders. “I don’t know how liberated young women are, or young women feel – you'd be able to tell me. How do you feel?”
I totally get the obsession with young, beautiful girls – of course I do
While I’m flattered at the notion of being considered “young”, I concede that this might be a question better directed at someone 10 years my junior. But I venture that the pressure to look good, to “improve” yourself through lotions and potions and surgeries, seems to have only increased thanks to social media.
“What we are really meant to be focusing on, ultimately, is our characters, our personalities – because that is what makes you attractive,” she says. “I find vanity a real turn-off. It kind of grosses me out.” Does it give her the “ick”, to borrow a bit of Gen Z parlance? “Ha, yes! It gives me the ick.”
The conversation around societal expectations for women to remain forever young seems to have ramped up in recent years, further fuelled by films like 2024’s body horror hit The Substance. But Chancellor doesn’t sound even vaguely threatened by the next generation of women coming up behind her. Is there any sense of jealousy? “Well…” Chancellor bites her lip; blinks back tears. “I mean, my daughter was ravishing. And I think one of the great gifts that we had in our relationship was that I was never jealous of her. I was always so proud of her.”
All roads lead, inevitably and inexorably, back to Poppy, Chancellor’s only child, who died in September 2023 from leukaemia at the age of 36. Chancellor fell pregnant by poet Jock Scot when she was just 21, still a student at drama school. She regales me with stories of her “brilliant” daughter: of how Poppy, aged four, strutted into a room, sporting a feather boa to perform a “really, properly good” dance; of the way she would sing to distract herself while getting blood taken; of the time she jumped out of a plane to raise money for charity.
There’s an air of Gilmore Girls to these anecdotes: a thick-as-thieves closeness, humour and intimacy that recall the mother-daughter duo at the heart of the series. Poppy is partly the reason why Chancellor has never had “a weird thing” about getting old; when she was alive, she begged her mother to promise never to touch her face. “She loved me how I am, you know?” Chancellor says, voice breaking just a little.
Playhouse Creatures is only Chancellor’s second acting job since Poppy’s death, and she’s still in that tender stage where everything is exposed and visceral – as if your ribs have been cracked open, your heart quivering and steaming in the open air. “I spend my life crying!” she tells me, half-laughing as she wipes away more tears. “The truth is, I can’t not do it. Luckily, I’m not so self-conscious that I mind. It is, presumably, what processing grief is.”
This propensity to break down in public comes with unexpected benefits – that lowering of barriers mentioned previously, for one. Though she worried she might be “too emotional” for her latest theatrical turn, “it’s been really, genuinely fantastic”, she says. “And because I’m in this extra raw stage, it’s given me this very close connection with everybody in the room. It allows for a more intimate relationship with people.”
From everything that I’ve read, it sounds, I proffer tentatively, like Poppy had a “good” death: that she had settled her affairs, made amends, accepted that the end was coming. Chancellor nods thoughtfully. “Poppy had written a very coherent death plan, even before she was diagnosed. The consensus is that you need to plan for what you want because it makes it easier for everybody, it makes it less horrendous. And you know what is actually very nice? Once they’ve died, you can follow their wishes, so you still feel connected.”
That will be my life now: ceremonies and making things and talking to people about grief
Poppy’s was no run-of-the-mill death plan. It included meticulous details for an elaborate wake, complete with glittering gold tinsel curtains, pyrotechnics and a theme inspired by Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet. There was also an open casket. “The dog sat on her body for a bit, the Jack Russell,” Chancellor recalls. “Everyone was like, ‘Take her off!’ I’m like, she’s fine. Death is very funny and very beautiful.” A First Nation Canadian Indian friend was persuaded to perform a ceremony with drums and sage. “Although she’s not really a shaman,” smiles Chancellor.
“Poppy and I were very strong believers in just making up things – making up a ceremony, doing what you feel is right, making it fun” she adds, conjuring up an image of the rites and rituals invented by sisters Cassandra and Rose in Dodie Smith’s coming-of-age classic I Capture the Castle. “That will be my life now: ceremonies and making things and talking to people about grief. That will be part of the commitment to keeping the relationship going because I believe that it’s not a relationship that ends just because they die. This is an ever-evolving, ever-deepening relationship.”
At that, Chancellor asks if I personally have “known grief”, and I find myself telling her about my father who died of cancer when I was 11. “It’s made me really think about kids because kids don’t have the ability to do what I can do,” she says thoughtfully. “I’m a grown-up. I’ve lived life. I know some things. I’m on a sort of spiritual journey anyway. But when you’re a kid, you don't really have…” An outlet? “No. And it’s not got any better. They talk about mental health but actually, there is no support. Unless you’ve got f***ing money, there is nothing.”
It’s the only time in our conversation that Chancellor has sounded really, genuinely angry – otherwise, the experience of losing Poppy seems to have made her only more zen-like. Yes, things could go wrong at any time; no, she’s not going to expend energy worrying about it. “I’m not obsessed with my own survival any more – I don't mind dying,” she says. In the meantime, Chancellor is focusing on the things she can control. “I would like to be helpful to people,” she says. “I just want to be a good vibe. Why not?”
Which is not the same as trying to be “good” all the time, she hastens to add, noting how often in her career she has been cast as “the bitch”. “Let’s face it, we’re all bitches. I mean, do you know anyone who isn’t, really?” Chancellor cites research from Gabor Maté, a Canadian physician who posited that women suffer from autoimmune disorders and get ill because they’re constantly attempting to be “too good”. “You’re denying your shadow parts, and you’re twisting yourself into a shape,” she says. “It just creates a lot of problems if you’re too good – so don’t be good. Be more bitch.”
It’s amusing to hear this from a woman who seems anything but. Being knocked sideways by death has, if anything, forged Chancellor into a person who is kinder and gentler than most. “I saw the best of people,” she says simply. “There was so much love – deep, deep levels of humanity. I feel like that has been changing my consciousness, to have witnessed love at that level. And to love your own child that much… Of course it’s tragic to lose them, but it’s a privilege to love. It just is.”
I don’t know about being “more bitch”, but I do feel we could all stand to be a bit more Anna.
‘Playhouse Creatures’ opens on 21 March and runs until 12 April at the Orange Tree Theatre before touring to Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, from 22-26 April and Theatre Royal Bath from 28 April-3 May 2025
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