Actor Anna Chancellor talks to Melissa Blease about her career, profound personal loss and the legacy of her late daughter, as she prepares to take to the Theatre Royal Bath stage as Mrs Betterton in Michael Oakley’s new production of April de Angelis’ Playhouse Creatures.
If Anna Chancellor was a cocktail, she’d be one of the all-time classics: a complex, beautifully-balanced Negroni, perhaps, or a crisp, uplifting Gin Martini.
This rather random imagination-bounce occurred to me around 30 seconds into our interview, when Anna immediately shook me out of my daunt about chatting to an award-winning actor who captured the imaginations of millions as Lady Anstruther in Downton Abbey, or Diana Lethaby in Tipping the Velvet, or Lix Storm in The Hours. She’s also Jane Austen’s great niece eight generations removed, great granddaughter of former Prime Minister H. H. Asquith… and known across the globe for being the neurotic but entirely lovable/relatable Henrietta (‘Duckface’) in Mike Newell/Richard Curtis’s best-ever British romcom Four Weddings and a Funeral – oh come on, a bit of daunt was understandable, wasn’t it?
“You were daunted about talking to me?” Anna laughs. “Oh, I don’t think I daunt anybody; I just blurt things out, whatever’s on my mind – and you can, too!” And the Chancellor Cocktail took immediate effect.
I’m talking to Anna ahead of her visit to the Theatre Royal Bath towards the end of this month, when she stars as UK theatre’s legendary grande dame Mrs Betterton (Google her! She was fabulous!) in director Michael Oakley’s new production of April de Angelis’ 1993 compelling, hilariously sharp and deeply poignant Playhouse Creatures, set in 17th-century London and featuring an all-female cast.
“It’s all about the first women on the stage after the English Civil War had ended and the UK had been under puritanical rule, basically like the Taliban”, Anna explains. “King Charles II came back from Versailles with a serious, serious thing for women – he had, like, 15 mistresses – and he decreed that women can perform in theatre for the very first time. So, what happens? On the one hand, there’s a sort of revolution around female empowerment going on, with women being paid for work that didn’t involve being a servant – or, perhaps, a prostitute. But then there are the things that happen within all that: on the one hand it’s liberation, on the other it’s sort of the downfall for many of the women. It’s a full-on feminist play in a way, but what’s so weird is that the play still has so much relevance today.”
Ah, relevance: it’s impossible not to look for clues as to contemporary connections and significance in any revival. But can the experience of women’s lives 400 years ago really resonate with women’s lives in 2025?
“Well, for a start, Mrs Betterton was a brilliant actress, but she gets fired by her own husband because he needs younger actresses to be his partner,” says Anna. “We still see that happen all the time today; those old actors with their dyed hair and much younger women – it’s kinda funny, but it’s also…weird. And right now, we’re living in a world where really blokey, macho, dominant men seem to be growing in power and status again, almost across the board – there are extreme misogynists everywhere we turn. But of course, not all men are the same. So we have this complicated situation where angry women are blaming and attacking men for their behaviour, and the men who aren’t responsible for that behaviour end up being in the firing line when they shouldn’t be – they’re the guys who need the support of women because men need support to be men; I totally believe that’s true. It’s tough! But when all is said and done, I love being a woman. Not every woman feels like that, I know. And I know I’m an incredibly lucky woman – even though I’ve recently lost Poppy.”
When you’re in grief, like I am, if you can express your feelings and reveal your deepest depths of sorrow … you find compassion
Poppy was Anna’s beloved daughter, who died from leukaemia in September 2023 at the age of 36. Is it okay to talk to Anna about her devastating loss? Oh, it’s more than okay; in fact, she makes our chat the perfect, beautiful time to do just that.
“I was incredibly lucky to have had Poppy as my child,” says Anna. “Our relationship was very unusual and we were always very, very close. I admired her even when she was very young; she was the naughtiest child, but she made me laugh – she was so funny, properly witty. I was like, ‘oh my God, I can see you’re a force of nature; I’d better up my game!’ ”
I remind Anna of the adage along the lines of what’s in the cat’s in the kitten. Did she not see herself in Poppy’s brave and brilliant personality?
“It sounds as though I’m putting myself down when I say this, but I’m not,” she says; “Poppy was an upgrade. I adored her and supported her in everything she wanted to do, but she wasn’t only my daughter – she was my guide. She was very hardworking and successful in her work as an illustrator, but she’d done a lot of work with grief, too; she’d looked into death plans, to dying – all of it. She was my teacher, and she reached out to a lot of people. When she died, all these people that I didn’t even know came out and said Poppy changed their lives, because she was so kind and compassionate. Now, I have to survive all this in the most open way possible, because that’s what Poppy advocated.”
How, though, does one go about ‘surviving’ when one of the biggest tragedies that can possibly be foisted on a mother has hit? “One of the things grief can do is give you a bigger purpose,” Anna says. “For example, I probably would have been much more nervous at this point of bringing a new production to the stage than I was before losing Poppy: am I going to be good enough, what will people think of me? But now, I just am what I am: people are going to like me or they don’t, they’ll like the play or they won’t – it’s all fine. I have to keep on going and, in my current circumstances, I’m in the best possible situation I could be in, surrounded by great women in fantastic play; I honestly, genuinely couldn’t be surrounded by kinder, more wonderful people.
“When you’re in grief, like I am, if you can express your feelings and reveal your deepest depths of sorrow – and I have to do that, because I can’t not do it – you find compassion. Grief can be very bonding; everyone has felt deep sadness, everyone has suffered, right? I’m learning too that we’re able to continue a relationship with somebody even though they’re physically not here. Being an actress, a large part of my career, my work, is my imagination, and I feel that’s probably put me in good stead because I’m open to be able to imagine another reality where my relationship with Poppy continues in a very different way to how it was when she was alive.”
And that relationship, alongside Poppy’s legacy of advocacy through grief, could well live on, through Anna. “I’m still in the early stages of this experience, but my hope is that one day I can set up a little grief centre to really help people who have been, or who are, going through what I’m going through. I haven’t quite worked out how or when I’m going to do it, but I believe it will become clear.” I wholeheartedly believe that too.
My Chancellor Cocktail is almost coming to an end; oh, how I’d love a refill, and more time to talk to a fascinating, humane, brave and spiritedly honest woman whose real-life story and experiences would make a compelling drama in its own right.
I ask Anna if she has ever considered writing a memoir? “No!” she says, emphatically; “I can hardly write a postcard!” But one of her relatives could. “Ah yes, Jane Austen!” Anna laughs. “She had a brother called Edward Knight and our family is directly descended from Edward Knight’s children. My grandmother remembered her great aunt talking about her great Aunt Jane – that’s quite amazing, isn’t it? Although I don’t think great aunt Jane liked being in Bath much…”
Something tells me that the new Mrs Betterton will have a very different opinion to her great aunt.
Playhouse Creatures is at Theatre Royal Bath from 28 April –3 May; theatreroyal.org.uk