Interviews QFN-20
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'DAILY EXPRESS' MAGAZINE, 9TH SEPTEMBER '95
INTERVIEW WITH ANITA DOBSON ENTITLED -

'NEXT STOP CHEKHOV FOR ANITA DOBSON'

(Her role is far from glamorous, but she loves to prove that
there's more to her than Angie).

What's this then? Angie from Eastenders doing Chekhov?
Scraping that famous bouffant hair back and wearing a drab
schoolteacher's dress? Working with Max Stafford-Clark,
associate director at the Royal Court?

Anita Dobson was so convincing as Angie Watts that people
assumed she was typecast. She suffered, sobbed and drowned
her sorrows in Eastenders for only three and a quarter
years, although her towering performance made it seem
longer. While Angie was someone life happened to,
dramatically and catastrophically, Anita does her best to
make life happen the way she wants, ever since she got
herself from the East End drama college.

Her work since she left Albert Square in 1988 has proved
that there is more than Angie to Anita Dobson. The turning
point for critics was her powerful performance in 1991 in
'My Lovely Shayna Maidel' as a concentration camp survivor
(more drab hair and half a stone lost in weight). Then there
was Stephen Berkoff's 'Kvetch' at London's King's Head,
which moved to the West End from a fringe theatre behind a
pub. And she has continued to do lucrative pantomimes to
subsidise more challenging work. Now she's playing Olga, the
teacher, in 'Three Sisters'.

"I'm very thrilled, I haven't done Chekhov since drama
school days" she says, starting to sound like a proper
luvvie."

The whole job of being an actor is that you get the chance
to do lots of different things. You can go from doing a
guest spot on the TV series 'Dangerfield' (shown last
Autumn) where I play a very wealthy woman with lots of
jewellery and hair and make-up, to Olga. There's a bizarre
joy in being that unglamorous. Although she had dreamed of
fame, it was a huge shock when it actually happened.

"I went from being little me, who loved the theatre and
funny clothes from antique shops, to being this person who
made the front page of newspapers and magazines. In three
and a quarter years I never came to grips with it. It was a
shock when I left and it was on the six o'clock news."

After Eastenders, she set up home with Queen's Brian May,
which inevitably fuelled media attention, whatever work she
was doing. It has left her wary and more suspicious than
most about publicity. Doesn't she sometimes wish May was a
dentist or something other than a rock star, so they could
get on with their relationship in peace?

"A dentist?" she shrieks.

"I can't imagine Brian as a dentist. No, what he does makes
him him."

She's tiny, bright-smiled, bright-eyed and full of nervous
energy. There's an ongoing battle between her natural
openness and a protective wariness. Anita grew up in the
Mile End Road, the older of two daughters of a dress cutter
and a seamstress.

"We didn't have a lot of money, but Dad could always get
material and my mother made lovely clothes so we always
looked fantastic".

Early signs of her flair for panto were obvious from the age
of three. She did all the plays she could at primary school,
then hated girls' grammar school.

"It was very academic, with nothing on offer artistically
and no boys around, which I found a real strain. When you're
in those important adolescent years, you should mix with
boys if only to find out how you feel about them. As a
result, I wasn't very comfortable around boys. If they
followed me home from the local school, I found them very
threatening. I was very shy".

She left school at 16 and worked at the Prudential, where
she spent all her money on clothes, then at C & A, where she
was a juvenile coat model for buyers.

"I refused to model swimwear because I found it so
embarrassing, but I did do slacks once, which I found
totally nerve-wracking" she says, jumping up to demonstrate.

Anita won Rear Of The Year in 1987 and. depressingly for
dieters everywhere, she doesn't exercise, loves cooking and
doesn't watch what she eats - apart from sticking to
vegetarian food.

"I was quite plump as a child, but now I burn it off with
nervous energy". She finally found her feet at 21 when she
got into the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. She was
there with Rula Lenska and Antony Sher.

"I was just so thrilled when I got in, then I had to
audition for the grant. My father had just been made
redundant and my mother said, "Look darling, if you don't
get the grant we can't afford to send you". It must have
been the most desperate audition ever". It was here she
selectively lost her accent.

"At first, I felt completely out of place because I was a
real cockney sparrow and a lot of people there were
well-to-do and well-spoken. For a year I went round with
this deep voice, which was fun, but my voice coach said
never lose your roots or your own voice, or you won't be
able to tap back into what you are. I still have two voices.
When I was in The Soap (as she describes Eastenders) I
wouldn't talk in cockney in television interviews. I knew
people would think I was typecast and I would never play
anything else." She earned her spurs at Glasgow Citizens
Theatre. "My first job was at Billingham Forum and I was so
unhappy and homesick. I rang up my Dad and he said "This
will be the worse it gets". And he was right. After that,
Glasgow was a real training ground, I could experiment and
make a fool of myself". Before The Soap, Anita was on a tour
of the Caucasian Chalk Circle and Henry 1V with the Oxford
Theatre Company ("I love saying that" she says), when she
was called to audition by the BBC for a drama series about
the East End.

"They called it a drama series at first, not a soap. They
were running trailers and still hadn't found Angie. I'd just
got back from Italy where I'd done the Rocky Horror Show and
discovered hair gel so my hair was all curly and I was in
one of those little Forties waisted suits I used to get from
antique shops".

After the audition, Anita remembers that the producer Julia
Smith just pointed and said "That is how I want her to
look".

"Angie was a fab role to play. I fell on it like a Christmas
present. People loved her because even if her life fell
around her in pieces, she'd still get up the next morning
and put that make-up on and get out there".

And life threw just about everything at Angie; Dirty Den's
illegitimate child, divorce, attempted suicide and that
relentless make-up. No wonder 23 million people tuned in
every week at it's peak. Anita agrees that they don't make
them like that anymore. The parting was amicable.

"I told them nine months before I left; I wanted there to be
goodwill. I left because it was losing freshness. I'd played
drunk in so many different ways and it took me over. I ate,
drank and slept it. I was in my late thirties and wanted to
do different things."

It was a brave move because she had nothing to go to.

"I'd had a good career before and thought there's no reason
I shouldn't go back," she says, typically positive. "But
it's funny. You do years of theatre, then you do The Soap
and afterwards you have to work really hard to remind people
of what you were doing in the first place."

Her next couple of projects were not a success. Budgie, a
West End musical with Adam Faith, floundered after 13 weeks
and a comedy vehicle for her set in a hairdressers, Split
Ends, sank without trace.

"Budgie seemed like a fun thing. And the television was just
a mistake. They offered a lot of money to do it, but they
just set it around what I'd become. I could tell I wasn't
going to move on so I changed agents and started again."

In the last couple of years, she says she has done the sort
of work she really wants to do, with good parts at the
National Theatre and Royal Court; and on television, one-off
dramas and guest slots on series such as 'I'll Be Watching
You' and 'Go Back Out', an award-winning drama about
schizophrenia.

Her private life blossomed as she became involved with Brian
May, Queen's guitarist.

"I met Brian in the last year of doing Eastenders and I've
been with him ever since. We met at a function and I do
believe if I hadn't done Eastenders, I wouldn't have been
invited so I'm grateful to it for introducing us."

People may scoff about their hairdos and palatial houses -
"My fella cuts my hair," she tells the hairstylist on the
shoot - but they have lasted the course and seem happy and
content with each other.

They are a curious combination, coming from different worlds
of pop music and theatre.

"But I'd always sung in the choir at school and in musicals
and panto and so it was natural to make records too," she
says, referring to her three albums and the single 'Anyone
Can Fall In Love'.

"And Queen have always been a very theatrical band. So we do
cross over." Although she wears a large diamond ring on her
engagement finger, they have never married, and at 45, she
has never had children. Children, the having and not having
of them, is pertinent. Alongside Three Sisters, Anita is
also performing in The Break Of Day, a new play about three
women and their reactions to children and childlessness.
Anita plays a childless academic. Of herself, she says: "I
was so busy living my life and pursuing my career that
children never really crossed my mind. I always thought that
when I met the right man I'd think about it, but I didn't
really meet the right man till late in my life. There was a
point before Eastenders where I'd been jobbing around as an
actress for quite a while and I remember thinking if I do
want to get married and settle down to have a family I
should think about it now. But as soon as I got offered a
job, I was off again. It hasn't bothered me really. It would
have posed other problems in that I wouldn't have been able
to do as much work as I've done. You're going to have to
give up something."

What has made her so driven that children have been left by
the wayside?

"I suppose it's because I had a long way to travel. I came
from the East End and had to apply for a grant to get to
drama school and worked during the course in pubs and
restaurants. So financially it was difficult. Once I'd got
to drama school, it was like a window to the world, I met
other people who wanted to do the same thing."

She is now more settled than she has ever been and going on
tour with Three Sisters was the one drawback. She and Brian
have just bought a large listed house in South London, but
moving in has been put on hold as a result of the play. She
admits she is absorbed in her profession.

"When Brian's away working, I sit up until four in the
morning watching old movies. And I like nothing more than
sitting talking about it, as you'll have gathered," she
says. "But now I'm older and have a relationship, I'm
looking around and thinking there are other things I'm
interested in.

I love clothes and jewellery and costumes and going to the V
& A or reading about them. I love old houses and antiques.
And I do like to be home more."

She has come a long way, via Queen of the Vic, to be Lady of
the Manor. But with her cheerful openness, not to mention
penchant for glitzy clothes and high heels, she's still a
gutsy East Ender at heart.

V & A = Victoria and Albert museum
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