WHY ANNE REID NEEDS SOME SCANDALOUS SEX
ANNE REID has written a couple of chapters of her memoirs, but she’s already alarmed by the lack of scandal.
The actress, who stars with Derek Jacobi in the BBC’s Last Tango In Halifax (a gem of a show from the pen of Sally Wainwright), told me: ‘The thing that puts me off is that I haven’t had enough scandalous sex to spice up a memoir!
‘Somebody said to me: “Make it up, and write about My Six Years Of Heaven With Jeff Bridges.” But I don’t think he’d like that, do you? I never talk about my private life anyway,’ she added.
She did reveal, tantalisingly, that a bit of spice had been detected in her family background by researchers working on the TV show Who Do You Think You Are?
But she can’t discuss the nature of that spice until the programme goes out in the summer.
The third series of Last Tango In Halifax, about would-be teenage lovers who meet again and marry 60 years later, has a stellar cast that also includes Sarah Lancashire, Nicola Walker and
Tony Gardner. Anne’s character Celia is, as the actress puts it, ‘racist and homophobic’ and ‘a bit of a nightmare’. But she conceals her prejudices under a cloak of charm.
Anne begged writer Wainwright not to make Celia all ‘sweetness and light’, and she obliged.
In person, the actress is the antithesis of Celia. We met in Cannes several years ago when she was in The Mother, opposite Daniel Craig.
‘It wasn’t a huge stretch. It was about a woman of my age fancying Daniel Craig.
‘I mean, that wasn’t too hard,’ she laughed, as we had tea and biscuits at The Union Club in Soho. Anne enjoys acting — but music is her true passion.
On Monday, January 26, she will play the courtesan Madame Armfeldt opposite Janie Dee, Joanne Riding and Jamie Parker in a special, one night only, concert version of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music at the Palace Theatre.
‘Nightmare to learn the song,’ she said, launching into the first couple of lines of her big number, Liaisons.
‘This woman — she’s a high class whore, isn’t she? She slept with dukes and kings.
‘You can’t get away from the fact that that’s how she made her money,’ she said.
‘She’s very elegant, though. I think I should be more common than that.’
Anne’s musical interlude continues with a limited run in cabaret at the Crazy Coqs room at Brasserie Zedel in London’s Piccadilly.
She and pianist Stefan Bednarczyk will play the club for five nights from February 17, celebrating the music associated with songwriting duo Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who wrote New York, New York, Some Other Time, and countless other classic standards.
It’s sure to be a scandalous show!