A toast to Annis mirabilis

FRANCESCA ANNIS'S body is buzzing. It's the morning after the night

before -- a seventies' evening at a Sheffield nightclub -- and Annis has

been boogieing into the small hours. It is grossly unfair that a woman

who cheerfully tells you that the sixties and seventies were her era

should look so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed after bopping the night

away.

Not that it's something she makes a habit of, dancing 'til dawn. But

with her fellow actors from Philip Prowse's touring production of Lady

Windermere's Fan, in which it will be remembered characters are wont to

find they can resist everything except temptaion, she has fetched up in

Sheffield. They all thought it would be fun to go clubbing after the

show and take in an evening of seventies' music. Very boring stuff, they

played, too. Can you believe it, she asks, the kids actually love Abba?

There had been no Stones, no Beatles, no Neil Young . . . what a

let-down, but it was all hugely enjoyable anyway, she says, stretching

gracefully.

Annis, to borrow a Wodehousian phrase, is spinningly lovely. Small

wonder the camera adores her and that through her many television

appearances in everything from Madame Bovary to Lillie (Langtry), from A

Pin to See the Peepshow to the more recent Between the Lines (the woman

from MI5 who had the dishy Neil Pearson besotted), she should have

inscribed herself so indelibly on the male heart of the nation.

Men everywhere, it seems, are in love with her. Indeed, only days

before I interviewed her, her erstwhile Hamlet (she was Ophelia when the

show went to Broadway), Nicol Williamson, in discussing the parlous

state of British theatre, had been castigating the producer Duncan

Weldon for doing this pre-West End tour of ''Lady Fandermere's Win''.

The only thing you can say about this show, announced Williamson, is

that ''it has a wonderful actress in it. I think Francesca Annis knocks

Helen Mirren into a cocked hat. Francesca is the best lady around. She

is good. I tell you, she is good.''

When I relate this story to Annis, she turns pink with pleasure. ''Did

Nicol really say that? That's incredible! You have made my year,'' she

smiles.

In the glowing flesh, Francesca Annis looks at least a couple of

decades younger than her 48 years. She has always looked younger than

she is, she says. Which has meant that she has almost always played

younger parts. And she has had some stunners -- Juliet (twice),

Cressida, a famously nude Lady Macbeth in Roman Polanski's film of

Macbeth, Masha in Three Sisters, and Rebecca West in Rosmersholm. ''I

have been immensely fortunate that way because it means I have almost

always had more experience than the part I am playing, and obviously you

can bring all the weight of your experience to everything you do.''

What does amaze her is the fact that you just move on as an actress

with your age. Which is very comforting because she is glad she is

taking a walk on the Wilde side in Lady Windermere's Fan and playing Mrs

Erlynne, a woman with only her past in front of her, a woman

''absolutely inadmissible in society'', a woman ''who is 29 when there

are pink shades, and 30 when there are not''. Many a woman has a past,

says one of Oscar Wilde's more cynical characters, but Mrs Erlynne has

at least a dozen, and they all fit. As do Philip Prowse's fabulous

frocks -- the stage is awash in sumptuous silks and floor-swishing

taffetas -- into which Annis is corseted in this production. Her

playwright has of course set the designer/director Prowse quite a

challenge in dressing the infamous Mrs Erlynne -- she must look, we are

told, ''like an edition de luxe of a wicked French novel, meant

specially for the English market''.

Actually, she says, she didn't try her costume on until three days

before they opened, which is unheard of. But she didn't panic. ''I knew

it would look all right, more than all right. It was really a question

of identity because I don't look remotely like I thought I would in the

end. Usually, if you have your costume and make-up you can place your

character, so that was a bit difficult. But my costumes are so

beautiful. They are very extreme. I sometimes wonder whether I'm in Swan

Lake. Lady Windermere is in white; I'm in black. You feel it's sort of

goodies and baddies and somewhere in the middle are the Indians.''

So, another fallen woman in a corset? For Annis often appears to have

cornered the market in mistresses who have a whalebone of a sexy time

(Emma Bovary, Lillie Langtry) and women of affairs (Kitty O'Shea, Mrs

Wellington opposite Prince in Under the Cherry Moon), but women with a

hinterland who prove that the beautiful also bleed. ''I honestly don't

have any problems with wearing corsets, I have done so many period

things over the years and maybe because I was trained as a ballet

dancer, it doesn't bother me to stand up very straight, which Philip's

costumes force you to do. One of my costumes is incredibly heavy -- it's

absolutely covered in black jet beads -- you wouldn't believe how heavy

it is, but it's amazing, you can get used to anything. These costumes

also dictate a tone. I mean somebody who is dressed in jet beads and a

corset is hardly the girl next door.''

Putting on these gorgeous, glamorous clothes is also like putting on

armour because Philip Prowse has taken a very extreme, brittle view of

the play Wilde himself called ''one of those modern drawing-room plays

with pink lampshades''. He has also forbidden his cast to discuss in

interviews the determined concealments and deceptions buried in the

secret heart of the piece, preferring to surprise audiences with the

plot's twists and turns.

''Philip really wants to make a social comment. In his hands, it is

more than a classic English drawing-room melodrama. I feel he has given

it a real edge. And I like his hard-edged, witty attitude towards these

people. He hasn't got a lot of time for the upper classes and that makes

it very much a play for today.''

The day Annis and I met for lunch, the newspapers were full of talk of

cads and bounders, cuckolded husbands threatening horsewhippings, and

tales of the upper classes bedding below-stairs people. All of this

makes Mrs Erlynne's predicament deliciously timeous. It is timely,

agrees Annis, simply because Wilde was writing in his wonderfully

humane, loving way about social and sexual hypocrisy and about scandal

-- ''gossip made tedious by morality'' -- which are all so very much in

the public arena at the moment. And that means, she thinks, that for

audiences now the play is rooted in deep emotional truth. ''I mean I

just wept when I first read it. I know it's a comedy, but I read it

again and I cried again. I felt absolutely moved by it, and people who

have seen it have told me they have had a similar reaction when seeing

this production.''

Certainly Annis has had some terrific notices for her fine performance

as ''that woman'' -- ''marvellously elegant in voice and person''

(Financial Times) and ''she brings the world to a halt with every

provocative entrance, her face enigmatic, her beautifully modulated

voice equally able to wheedle or to wither'' (Guardian).

The third child -- she has two brothers -- of a Brazilian mother and a

one-time actor turned restaurateur and travel executive, Annis descibes

herself as throughly middle-class English. Her father carried spears in

the famous Olivier/Gielgud production when they alternated Romeo and

Mercutio, and later doubled for Olivier in a couple of films. Then he

decided to run a restaurant in Brazil. She had an eventful childhood,

living in South America and England with what she has called her ''crazy

family'', and set out to be a ballerina in that classic,

Catholic-schoolgirl way, training at the Corona school, where she was

spotted and given a part in a TV play, The Sun and the Wind. It was 1960

and she was 15. For a while she became an all-purpose television

starlet, desperate for publicity of any kind, forever getting herself

photographed in mini-skirts in howling gales.

She hated the resulting pictures and finally made a conscious decision

not to get publicised. Her first film was the Burton-Taylor Cleopatra in

1962, in which she played a handmaiden. Five years later she was

Polanski's Lady Macbeth, a role she would dearly love to play again,

having played the fiend-like queen so young. There have been several

seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company, most notably when she played

Juliet to Ian McKellen's 40-year-old Romeo and Cressida to Mike Gwilym's

Troilus.

Jealous of her private life, she has lived for many years with the

photographer Patrick Wiseman, with whom she has three children,

Charlotte, 15, Taran, 13, and Andreas, 9. ''I don't like to talk much

about my domestic affairs, but basically I manage because Patrick and I

have always shared care of the children in the real sense of the word.

For instance, I didn't work for eight months before this. Now I'm on

tour for 10 weeks, but I pay my dues. There are very few people,

mothers, who could be out of work for that length of time and then do

something important and interesting, so I am very lucky.''

As a freelance worker, she insists that she feels privileged. ''I have

lived a life apart from acting. Frankly, I have made enough money to

take time off and go off and live elsewhere. I lived in Rio for seven

months and then I lived in Mexico. I really have lived a very full life,

so I don't regret that I don't feel young any more because there is

nothing I wanted to do when I was young that I didn't do. Honestly, I

have just been so incredibly fortunate. I have three healthy children

and I have worked and I have spent a lot of time not working, just

travelling.''

Like Cleopatra (a role she should play one day soon), age shall not

wither her. ''I feel a little bit sad sometimes about getting older. I

just think 'I feel sad'. And of course I am aware of mortality coming

up, but I am very curious and sometimes very excited as to where the

journey will go now, it's all so unpredictable. But that's life. I have

had so very many friends in my life and I'm very, very happy that we are

going on this journey together; I don't feel lonely. I feel that my life

has been their life because such extraordinary things have happened to

them, so many ups and downs, good things and terrible things. So it's a

very broad canvas now, my life, and I feel the fabric is actually quite

rich. There is a lot of love and care. Not just the one relationship,

but many, well, several. I certainly don't feel it's all over yet.''

* Lady Windermere's Fan is at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, from July

4-9.