It's a coming of age

More noted for her classical roles, two years ago Phillips finally got to play Juliet in Tom Morris's radical take on Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers tragedy. She's also recently shared a stage with singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright after appearing on his 2007 album, Release The Stars. Sian Phillips is 78 years old.

Sat in her car outside the BBC in London where she's just done an interview to tie in with Lovesong's sell-out run at the Lyric Hammersmith, Phillips comes across as someone far younger. This might have something to do with Lovesong itself.

"It's about a long-term relationship and what it's like when it comes to an end," says the thrice-married Phillips of Lovesong, which has older and younger actors playing the same couple at different stages of their lives. "They're all onstage at the same time, doing different things. The younger couple go through four decades, while the older pair go through the final four days together. It's very sad in a way, but there's so much going on. There's music and video, and because it's physical theatre, in between each scene we have to do what they call an event."

Such narrative fits in perfectly with Frantic Assembly's back catalogue, which has attracted young audiences to the company's work ever since it was formed by Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett in 1994 to combine choreographed movement with text to make a relentless but still attractive form of total theatre. Given she trained at Rada alongside Glenda Jackson and Diana Rigg, this doesn't sound an entirely natural fit for Phillips. But, then, neither did her move into musicals when she starred in Pal Joey at the relatively late age of 40.

"I've never been in a show like this," Phillips admits, her Welsh burr coming more to the fore the more enthusiastic she gets. "Musicals are different again, because I'm not a dancer, but this is very different.

It's more athletic, and I have to work really hard. When Scott and Steven asked me to do Lovesong, I asked if I could go and work with them for a couple of weeks, just to make sure I was up to it. I was exhausted, but I'm always up for doing something different. I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

Phillips first became aware of Frantic Assembly when she went to see Tiny Dynamite a decade ago. A co-production with Paines Plough, then being run by future National Theatre of Scotland artistic director Vicky Featherstone, Tiny Dynamite was also scripted by Abi Morgan, and looked at the electricity between people in a very different kind of love affair.

"I was knocked out," Phillips gushes. "I didn't understand any of it, but I loved every minute of it."

Such a willingness to embrace the unknown has been with Phillips since a frighteningly young age, ever since her mother taught her to recite and put her on the stage for the first time aged four. While Welsh was her first language, Phillips picked up English off the radio, and was picked up by the BBC aged 11 to play a ginger cat for Radio Wales.

The same year, Phillips won the National Eisteddfod competition, having realised aged six this what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. She made her first British television appearance aged 17, and became a TV newsreader for BBC Wales while still a student in Cardiff. She later received a great deal of attention from Hollywood studios while at Rada, but declined all offers for the immediate allure of the stage.

With her sonorous vocal tones a major asset, Phillips joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, a company she returned to in 2005 when she appeared in Dickens's Great Expectations in Stratford. Inbetween have been Bafta-winning turns in the BBC production of I Claudius, a role in the film version of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood with Richard Burton, and 20 years in her second marriage to Peter O'Toole before marrying actor Robin Sachs, 17 years her junior. Musical theatre opened up a whole new world for Phillips, and she looks on Pal Joey as one of her proudest moments.

All of this and a whole lot more besides is in Phillips's two volumes of autobiography, Private Places and Public Faces, published in 1999 and 2001. A third volume, however, is unlikely, and she is coy about her changing fortunes, when "life changed, circumstances changed.

"Things became very hard, but I struggled through. I never thought for a minute that they wouldn't get better, and they did. But I don't look back. I can hardly remember most things I've done, and I can't be bothered looking through old diaries to remind me any more."

One thing Phillips is happy to remember is her recent performance as Juliet, in a version Morris somewhat audaciously set in a care home. "I never thought I'd get to play Juliet at my age," Phillips beams.

"Shakespeare's what I like the most, and I've had a wonderful couple of years. I would've happily stayed at the RSC, but things changed, and I moved into the commercial sector."

If there are any roles Phillips would kill to play, whatever the company, she isn't saying.

"I'm not a great picker," she opines. "Whenever I've been given the choice I've usually picked bad. I'd rather let other people choose."

For the immediate future beyond Lovesong, Phillips is to visit Russia to film a documentary about her beloved Shakespeare. Then there's her own cabaret show, which she'll perform in London, while she's also set to appear in concert alongside Wainwright some more.

"I think I might do something else with Frantic as well," says Phillips. "Something quick."

Such loyalty to Frantic Assembly has come from being so bowled over by the response to Lovesong, and seems to have spurred her on in her quest for adventure. "The thing that amazes me the most about Lovesong is young people's responses to it. I can understand older people responding to a play about loss and death, but for young people it's an absolute marvel."

Given what seems like her own extended youth, what advice, one wonders, would Phillips give to actors just starting out on their own adventure?

Oh, I don't know," she chuckles, praising her young co-stars in Lovesong, Sam Cox and Leanne Rowe. "I find young actors so marvellous.

The last thing they need off me is advice."

Lovesong, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, February 7-11 www.franticassembly.co.uk www.citz.co.uk