She shot to fame as Brookside’s teenage lesbian, before wowing Broadway as the stripper with a heart in Closer. In real life, she’s been playing happy families with fellow actor David Thewlis. But now Anna Friel is back in the limelight as the star of Pushing Daisies, one of the year’s hottest new TV shows.
It was when she was driving along Hollywood Boulevard recently that Anna Friel realised that she had made it.
“I looked up and I saw a huge billboard by the road. There was my face, several metres high. It made me feel very proud. Especially,” she adds with a chuckle, “as they hadn’t had to give me any Botox!”
Aged 31, she could easily pass for 10 years younger. Friel, who has lived with Thewlis for the past seven years, laughs off her sex-symbol tag. “David knows just what I look like first thing in the morning,” she grins.
She’s even held on to her strong Rochdale vowels. Friel has reportedly employed a nanny from her home town so that while she is in Hollywood, her two-year-old daughter Gracie — named after Rochdale’s other famous native, Gracie Fields — does not lose touch with the accent, either.
It’s certainly a long way from Brookside Close to Hollywood Boulevard, and sometimes it’s been a bumpy road. There have been occasions along the way, she admits, when she thought she would never escape the shadow of the Liverpudlian soap. Brookside catapulted Friel to fame while she was still in her teens, and the tabloids became fixated on her portrayal of the ‘lipstick lesbian’ Beth Jordache.
“To them, I’m still ‘Brookside’s Anna Friel’,” she says. “When I’m 90 and have done 97 movies and 22 plays, they’ll still call me ‘Brookside’s Anna Friel’! Can I just be plain Anna Friel now, please?”
Away from the red tops, however, Brookside seems several lifetimes away. Friel is now starring in Pushing Daisies, which is starting on ITV1 tomorrow.
Friel made her screen debut as a 12-year-old playing Michael Palin’s daughter in Alan Bleasdale’s GBH. After Brookside, Friel courted controversy when she appeared in the television film The Tribe in 1996, which included nudity and a much discussed menage-a-trois sex scene between characters played by Friel, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Jeremy Northam. In 1999, she took to the stage, starring as Alice the stripper in the Broadway production of Patrick Marber’s Closer. The show was a smash hit and attracted such celebrity stage-door johnnies as Madonna and Al Pacino.
Pushing Daisies centres on Ned (played by Lee Pace), a pie-shop owner who has the power to bring people back from the dead and who rescues his childhood sweetheart Chuck (Friel) from an early grave after she has been murdered. What develops is a sweet “will-they-won’t-they?” romance given added piquancy by the conceit that the couple can never touch — the slightest physical contact from Ned will condemn Chuck to death, for good this time.
Friel believes the series has struck a chord because it is so good-natured.
“There is so much cynicism these days,” she says. “There is a lack of things that are just sweet and light-hearted like Pushing Daisies. It’s so romantic. When was the last time you cared so much about a couple and wanted them to be together this much? You’re rooting for these two.”
She is about to star opposite Will Ferrell in the dinosaur flick Land of the Lost. “I’ve always had perseverance, and I’m proud that I’m holding on and still here.
“Anyway,” she adds with a smile, “what else would I do? Open a juice bar? I don’t think that would satisfy my creative instincts. I don’t think I want to press apples every day.”
Pushing Daisies starts on ITV1 tomorrow night
