Interview: Anna Friel, actor

A nna Friel spends much of her life jetting round the world. She has one home under the Hollywood sign in LA and another in leafy Windsor. But there is only one place she wants to be this Christmas: back home in Rochdale.

“I’ve been in Rochdale every single Christmas of my life apart from one, when we all went skiing. So I'll be spending it at … Ha! I was about to give you my address," Friel shrieks with laughter.

Friel, who is mother to six-year-old Gracie (named after another Rochdale star, Gracie Fields), continues: “At my parents' home. I’ve got my own special place in front of the fire where I lie on the floor and cuddle up with my cat on my cushions.

“Christmas becomes a whole new thing when you’ve got a child. It’s all exciting again. You just see it through their eyes. And my wonderful mum and dad – I can’t wait to see them.”

Friel has every right to seek out home comforts after the emotional demands of making her latest drama, Without You. In this affecting new ITV1 three-parter based on the bestseller by Nicci French, the actress plays Ellie Manning. She is a young primary school teacher mired in grief after her husband Greg (played by Marc Warren) is killed in a car crash.

Her sense of loss is only exacerbated when she discovers that Greg was in the car with a mystery blonde woman. Ellie starts to be visited by apparitions of her late husband. She becomes obsessed with discovering the truth, but gets no closer to understanding the circumstances of his death. She feels she is being punished.

The theme tune to the series might as well be Cry Me a River. Without You is emotionally draining to watch – so how much more emotionally draining must it have been to play?

The actress, who parted from Gracie's father, the Harry Potter star David Thewlis, last year, is chatting to me in a so-hip-it-hurts hotel suite in central London. Possessing cheekbones to die for, she looks old-school Hollywood glam in a luxuriant, sweeping hairdo, a ruched, golden-brown silk shirt teamed with shiny black trousers and high-heeled, patent leather shoes.

It is quite easy to see why, three years ago, she was voted one of People magazine's 100 Most Beautiful People in the World. But her manner is by no means prima donna-ish. The 35-year-old is – as the Hollywood psychotherapists are wont to put it – in a good place right now.

The actress, who is soon to be seen in Public Enemies, a tough BBC1 drama in which she plays a disgraced probation officer who falls for the criminal in her charge (Daniel Mays), seems very happy with her new partner, the Notting Hill star Rhys Ifans. Also, thanks to the huge success of her Emmy Award- winning US drama series Pushing Daisies, for which she won a Golden Globe nomination, Friel can now have her pick of roles on both sides of the Atlantic.

She is as likely to star in a Woody Allen comedy (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger), a Hollywood dinosaur blockbuster (Land of the Lost), or a big-budget fantasy romp (Neverland) as a hit West End play (Breakfast at Tiffany’s), a noir-ish British gangster movie (London Boulevard) or a BBC1 Jimmy McGovern kitchen sink drama (The Street).

She has reached a level where she can easily hold her own opposite such Hollywood names as Robert De Niro (Limitless), Anthony Hopkins (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger) or Colin Farrell (London Boulevard).

The actress first burst into the public consciousness nearly 20 years ago when she and her Brookside co-star Nicola Stephenson had the first lesbian kiss on British television. After that iconic moment, Friel might never have broken out of the pigeonhole marked ‘Former Soap Star’. However, she has proved she can do gritty as well as glam. Friel is more than willing to ‘ugly up’ should the role require it.

For instance, she embraced the idea of wearing no make-up during Ellie's grieving scenes. “It’s kind of hard," the actress reflects. “High definition is a killer, isn’t it now? You’re just going, ‘My God’. You’re usually in hair and make-up constantly when you’re doing things – but to go from that to just saying, ‘No, I’m very raw,’ is liberating. I’m an actress after all, I’m not a model. I can look pretty and I could look ugly.

“Making Without You was raw – I might get the Vaseline out for the camera next time. But it was truthful. Grief is ugly. Grief isn’t beautiful. If I was there going, ‘No, I want my lights and I want it all to look stretched and perfect’, then I wouldn’t be doing justice to the emotions that I’m trying to convey.”

Now Friel asserts that she looks forward to the time when she has wrinkles and grey hair. Eager to have a long-lasting career, she says she wants to be still working when she is 70. She maintains: “You get more interesting as you get older.”

What is impressive is that Friel doesn't take her success for granted; she is driven by a constant desire to improve. She reckons: “You always judge yourself. I think the minute you stop judging yourself, you stop trying to get better. But that's good." That's not to say that she finds these full-on emotional roles a breeze. They certainly take their toll on her. Without You is a case in point. Friel admits that making the drama was an emotionally taxing experience.

However, she says Gracie helped her retain her perspective. “It’s a wonderful thing being a mother and an actress. It keeps you sane because you know at the end of the day you’ve got to get back and you’ve got to be a mum – no matter how hard your day’s been.

“After filming, I’d get in the car and pull the window down and look at the sky and feel the wind in my face, going, ‘Oh my God, I’m so glad I’m not Ellie right now.’ When I got home, Gracie would say, ‘Come on, Mummy, hug me. Are you happy?’ And I’d say, ‘I’m happy now I’ve seen you.’”

Gracie’s presence also meant Friel could not allow the trauma of playing Ellie to seep into the rest of her life. The actress stresses: “You have to be a mummy as well. We did a continuous day from five until five, so I’d get home early to be able to spend some time with Gracie. But I wouldn't like it if she could pick up on anything from the set. You have to leave these things at work."

What Friel left at work was a character drowning in grief. The actress readily concedes that being on the set of Without You was an all-consuming experience. “I stayed in it all day. So I wasn’t the most jolly, happy person."

So how did she get herself into such a dark place? She smiles wryly. “I know what you want to say: was it because of my relationship break-up? It was my first job after the break-up, and I was dealing with it perfectly well."

But, she adds: “You use everything you're going through if you're brave enough to be raw. I’ve been through loss and I’ve had love, and I can draw on both those things – I felt like I had a lot of raw emotion. You utilise whatever is around to make it the most natural and realistic it can be. You live it.”

However, the actress clearly did dig very deep. She continues: “I used Gracie quite a lot – thinking of not being with her. Or I thought of my father. I thought of the things that are closest to me and if I was to have those taken away, how would I be and how would I feel?"

Friel was also helped by meeting a grief counsellor as part of her research for the role. “I asked her to read the scripts to make sure they were truthful. The hardest thing for me was to make it a layered performance so that it wasn't all on one level.

“The counsellor told me there is not just one way to go about grieving. Some people are in shock for years and some people can't stop crying. They imagine the deceased person still being there."

Playing a character immersed in such profound grief inevitably affected Friel's mood. “Usually I'm bubbly and talkative on set and I’ll be the one going, ‘Alright guys, come on, let’s go and have a drink after work.’ On this, I didn’t. I just kept very much to myself, and in between each scene I’d find my own little corner.”

It was not easy. She adds: “Sometimes I thought, ‘I'm sick of being depressed and having to be this sad'. There was no release all day. It brings up lots and lots of things and stirs up emotions. I can tell you."

When Without You wrapped, Friel was finally able to let go. Ifans was a great support in this regard. “Rhys was like, ‘That was a hard job for you. Let’s go and do something fun.’ So he picked me up from work, and Gracie and I got in the car and we went and stayed in a teepee in Wales for four days, burned fires and jumped around the wilderness. That helped.”

Before making Without You, Friel demonstrated her versatility on an entirely different type of project. She plays Elizabeth Bonny, a dastardly pirate captain, in Neverland, a prequel to Peter Pan that starts on Sky Movies Premiere this Friday. This was the production on which she met Ifans, who takes the role of Captain Hook.

This vivacious children's adventure proved to be a real tonic for the actress. “It really cheered me up – having fantastic costumes and the biggest hats you’ve ever seen, jumping around on ships and using swords," she beams. “I've always loved Peter Pan and I love the idea of it being retold in a different way. Also, I think it's quite a brave thing as an actress to do something where you can actually be disliked.

“The whole idea of being a pirate I just absolutely adored. To be quite honest, putting that massive hat on and all the belts and chains and the tattoos, it really appealed to me.”

Friel believes the ideas underpinning Peter Pan strike a universal chord. “There's a reality and a darkness to all fairy tales, and it's true that we don't really ever want to get old. Everybody wants to live in Neverland where we stay young and beautiful and can have fun and play and be children all the time. The films are a way for us to watch it for an hour and a half and let that place exist."

So Friel's professional life is gliding along as smoothly as Captain Bonny's ship. She does acknowledge, though, that her personal life is rather more complicated. “It’s hard to juggle the time you have to be away, if you’ve got family. Particularly with the separation, you can’t just do what you want when you want. You’ve got to take a lot of things into consideration.

“For instance, Gracie is at school in England. Do we carry on with that or move back to LA where I still have a house? I love Britain, and I love working here. I'd certainly like Gracie to know about her heritage here. My granny in Belfast is getting on. She is 93 now, and I am very proud of her. Every time I see the lights on my hair and I notice that it's red, I say, ‘Look, I'm Irish.’"

The actress clearly feels torn between the two sides of the Atlantic. She explains: “It’s really odd. When I’m in LA, I feel completely and utterly at home and get on with my life and England seems very far away. And then when I’m here, the exact same thing happens. I think it’s very animalistic. You just have to adapt to your surroundings. I take six suitcases, literally. It’s an hour getting things off the conveyor belt because I’m like, ‘I need to feel at home’.”

However, taking on the role in Without You has had one immense benefit. She concludes: “Experiencing grief every day made me really, really, really appreciate my life."

• Without You starts on ITV1, Thursday, 9pm. Neverland starts on Sky Movies Premiere, Friday, 6.30pm