SINGING? I’M WILDE ABOUT IT, SAYS ANNE
Anne ReID said that director Dominic Dromgoole ‘had’ her with ‘tra-la-la’.
The actress was meeting the artistic chief of the Classic Spring Theatre Company to discuss whether she was interested in playing the wealthy hostess Lady Hunstanton, under whose roof much of the action takes place in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman Of no Importance.
Reid, who loves singing and whose life is indeed a cabaret, told me that in the first 30 seconds Dromgoole asked her how she felt about singing.
‘As the movie said, he had me at singing!’ she said, explaining that she will perform some Victorian parlour songs in between scene changes and the interval.
It’s not without pitfalls. ‘I hope people don’t throw cauliflowers, tomatoes and stuff,’ she said. ‘They used to hurl things at the performer in Victorian times, didn’t they?’
Ms Reid will join eve Best, eleanor Bron and William Gaunt in Wilde’s play, which will run at the Vaudeville in the West end from October 6.
She’s thrilled to be in A Woman Of no Importance because, she said, she never gets offers to do plays from the classical repertoire.
‘never been asked to do Chekhov or Shakespeare, so I’m delighted,’ she said speaking to me on the phone from Cap d’Antibes, where she and a friend were holidaying .
Reid said that snobbery was the reason. ‘If I’d spent nine years at the Royal Shakespeare Company instead of nine years in Coronation Street [where she played Valerie Barlow until she left in 1971], it could have been very different.’
But she believes things have changed now and actors who do soaps are respected.
‘In my era, you were a bit sort of common if you’d done a soap. But if you’d been at the RSC or in the Old Vic company, you were considered much classier. It’s a terrible snobbishness — acting is acting,’ she declared.
She has long been in high demand. I’ve always followed Reid’s career, but we first met when we danced on the beach at Cannes following the gala screening of the film The Mother, an acclaimed movie that she did with Daniel Craig in his pre-007 days.
Later, she and Derek Jacobi opened the TV show door for romances between older people in Sally Wainwright’s award-winning Last Tango In Halifax.
Reid has complemented that with the part of Queenie Gale, a charlady, in Hold The Sunset, a new BBC comedy series in which she co-stars, with John Cleese and Alison Steadman as older lovers.
But the most exciting time was when she shot a tiny role in the dark thriller The Snowman for director Tomas Alfredson.
‘I was flown to Oslo and had dinner with Michael Fassbender every night for a week. That was all right! never mind the part,’ Reid said, gleefully.