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The eyebrows have it
After the slapstick of Green Wing, how will Tamsin Greig play the Bard, asks Stephen Armstrong
It is surprisingly hard to arrange an interview with Tamsin Greig. During weeks of negotiation, it proved easier to speak to the infamously complicated Teri Hatcher than the woman who plays Debbie Aldridge in The Archers. For a while, it seemed as if sitcom success had created a diva who demanded examples of previous work and the right to screen the photographer. Hollywood habits can spread quickly as actors climb the ladder of fame.
When Greig finally bustles in on the day of the chat, however, she couldn’t be more charming. She cracks a series of self-deprecating jokes, orders cheese on toast and confesses that she finds the whole idea of interviews slightly peculiar. “I do find myself thinking — why would anyone want to do one? There’s a part of me that thinks I’ve got nothing of value to say at all and, really, there are a lot of pages out there that have to be filled. Still, we get some nice cheese on toast, so it’s a nice hour, and it’s not like working in a coal mine.”
And she laughs the first of her big, delightful Tamsin Greig laughs. She lets them roar out a lot during the hour, often at herself, and she has a nice line in kooky gags that makes it easy to confuse her with one of her ditsy, slightly mad singleton characters — Fran in Black Books, or Dr Caroline Todd in Green Wing. When she finally got her own starring role, in last year’s David Renwick romance Love Soup, she played a slightly bemused, offbeat shop girl called Alice. The typecasting seemed complete.
“Maybe its because I’ve got such heavy eyebrows,” she grins. “Close up on TV, my eyebrows have to do something, and they do work very well at looking surprised.”
Her next appearance in front of our eyes allows plenty of scope for eyebrow action. Green Wing returns to Channel 4 at the end of the month, and Greig is reprising her role as Dr Todd, the slightly lovesick but otherwise relatively normal physician at the strangest hospital in the world. She manages to play her attempts to re-woo fellow doctor Julian Rhind-Tutt — who has had his memory of their affair wiped by a coma — with a curious sensitivity in the middle of the show’s slapstick buffoonery. It therefore comes as something of a shock to learn that she was breastfeeding her three-month-old third child throughout filming.
“What was I thinking of? Why did I do that?” She shakes her head in astonishment. “It was terrible. I was filming Love Soup and Green Wing at the same time, going to Birmingham to do Debbie, and I went to Cardiff as well, to do a bit of Doctor Who. That was one of the most terrifying experiences. Trying to remember lines when you can’t remember to wash. And some of the lines have sci-fi words like ‘introspike’ in them.”
Then she suddenly cackles. “That’s why you’ll find, if you look quite closely, the three parts are actually all the same person. One has a lollop and a hair clip, one has her hair on the other side, and that’s about it.”
Post-Green Wing, however, she’s about to throw the kooky stuff away and get serious. From April, she joins Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Judi Dench in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works Festival, the company’s bold attempt to perform or host every one of Shakespeare’s plays. Greig plays Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing (“the Emma Thompson part, who I will be stealing every gag off”) and Constance in King John.
“That’s not a ditsy role,” she says. “She wants to be queen mother because she craves power herself. Her son is kidnapped and killed, so she loses not only her position but the only thing she has to live for. It’s quite heavy. I’m telling my kids to come to the one where I’m dancing and telling jokes, not the one where I’m tearing my hair and lying on the floor.”
It’s because of her three children with her husband, the actor Richard Leaf, that she almost didn’t take the job. “Ten years ago, I would have died to have had a year like this — Love Soup, Green Wing and the RSC,” she nods thoughtfully. “Now, to be honest, it’s a bit tricky. I think I’d rather do the school run. Because I’m going to have to go and live in Stratford, without my children full- time, for just over three months. I only get two weeks off in August and two weeks off at Easter, so I was reluctant to take the job.”
It’s hugely ironic that her relationship with her family should be thus affected by her success, as she only got into acting in the first place to get her father’s attention. “I was this terrible middle-child show-off — desperate for him to notice me,” she explains. “My dad was retired and my mum worked, so he brought us up. He was born in 1905, a down-the-line Edwardian, and he didn’t show his emotions. He was immensely practical, and if something had to be done, he just did it. But he had to cope with this girl who wanted something from him he didn’t know how to give. I don’t think he enjoyed it. I think it was humbling for him. Towards the end of his life, he would say he’d been a ‘bloody fool, just a bloody fool’.”
Recently, however, she was moved to find out how pleased her parents were with her and her sisters. Although her parents’ marriage was fiery, when her father died in 1998, her mother pined slowly away, ultimately dying of a brain tumour. After she’d gone, Greig received a letter, via the Archers fan club, from a woman who’d been in the same hospital, recognised Greig’s voice and spoke to her mum, saying that she must be very proud of her daughter. “And I didn’t know this — mum didn’t tell me — but the woman wrote in the letter, ‘And your mum said, yes, I am very proud. I’m very proud of all my daughters.’”
She mists up for a moment. “The whole thought that your parents are proud of you, especially to find that out when they aren’t there any more, does put one’s insignificant achievements into a cocked hat, and make you realise that what’s important is relationships, that we are loved, not that you manage to walk in a funny way on telly. It was a little bit like something from heaven.”
She talks easily about heaven, perhaps because it’s a relatively recent part of her world-view. She discovered Christianity aged 30, after a positively anti-religious upbringing. “I’d done it the world’s way — do what you want, look after yourself — and it got to the point where I’d caused more damage than I would care to mention, and it didn’t work,” she explains seriously, but without the alarming intensity of the typical born-again convert. “When I came to faith, I thought I would have to stop being an actor, because it’s all about artifice and manipulation. But we’re living in a world where God doesn’t really have an influence, unless it’s fundamentalists, so I’ll always be an outsider because of my faith. And when you think about it, faith and acting are all about stories, so the two are not mutually exclusive. I decided to try to use what I’d been given in a creative way.”
She pauses and thinks for a second. “It sounds like I’m saying, ‘If I can do the right thing, play the right parts and give a really wholesome interview, then it will be better’, but it probably isn’t. Someone will be reading this saying, ‘Who does she think she is? She hasn’t got anything of value to say, she isn’t going to change my life.’ And it’s probably true.”
So we’re back to the thorny subject of the interview again. Briefly, she turns the spotlight on me, asking how I can be sure I won’t get her completely wrong. “It’s quite a responsibility for you because you could do whatever you wanted.” Her eyes are piercing as she stares me down. “I’d love to meet the guy who wrote my first interview, 15 years ago — the headline was Topless Tamsin Joins The Archers. I’d love to meet that guy and say, does that bother you? Obviously not. It didn’t bother you. It came out on my birthday, when I was in my early twenties, and it really bothered me.” Then she shrugs — what can you do? “You’re going to write what you’re going to write, so I can only speak the truth as I know it.” She smiles. “So now how do you feel?”
Green Wing series 2 starts on Channel 4 at 9pm on March 31. Series 1 is available on DVD on April 3. The RSC’s Complete Works Festival starts in April in Stratford-upon-Avon