very-warm — 16 years ago(May 02, 2009 08:09 PM)

Imogen Stubbs: 'I'm well cast as chaos'
Imogen Stubbs is a star actress, writer, mother, and the wife of Sir Trevor Nunn. Yet she still doesn't seem to have grown up
The Interview by Alice Jones
Friday, 10 April 2009, The Independent [UK]
It is tempting to read too much into the answer Imogen Stubbs, aka Lady Trevor Nunn, gives when I ask if her husband has ever refused her a part she desperately wanted. "I sooo wanted to play Wendy in Peter Pan because they had this incredible flying bit", she says wistfully of the 1997 revival at the National Theatre, rolling her big blue eyes and shyly flipping her fringe. "I thought it would be such a laugh. And I arrogantly thought I was good casting, a shoo-in but apparently not. I was devastated. It went to Claudie Blakley who was infinitely better than I would have been."
Meet Imogen Stubbs, the actress who never seems to grow up. Today, aged 48, she looks so girlish all messy, long blonde hair, smudged eyeliner and an eclectic drama-student ensemble of tunic over trousers, ethnic bangles, pink and yellow canvas pumps and a small red rucksack that I walk straight past her in the theatre foyer without recognising her.
Dig a little deeper beneath the "ageing girly" looks (her words, not mine) and there's much in her biography to support the pop-psychology thesis that she might never have quite fully embraced adulthood. Having enjoyed a wild (in a upper-middle-class sort of way) upbringing on a rotting 100ft barge in Chiswick, West London with summers spent grubbing about in the woods of her grandparents' estate in Northumberland, her idyllic childhood was shattered by the sudden death of her father when she was just 13 years old. "I think", she says, "that my personality was arrested then". Twelve years later, her mother died, also of cancer. Just three years after that, as the latest ingnue addition to the RSC ensemble, she met Nunn, 20 years her senior and already a multimillionaire man of the theatre (thanks to Cats and Les Mis). He cast her as Desdemona and the pair fell in love.
She could, I think, still get away with playing Desdemona today, with her unlined English-rose complexion and bright eyes shining beneath those naive, faintly clownish eyebrows. For male critics of a certain age, she will always be that same twenty-something who first cartwheeled on to the stage as an athletically bewitching jailer's daughter in Two Noble Kinsmen at the RSC in 1984. Even when, some 20 years later, she played ber-matriarch Gertrude in Nunn's celebrated Old Vic Hamlet, she was, by general consensus, more yummy than mummy. Today, as she talks in an impetuous flow, dropping in the odd "ghastly" or "bonkers" to add to the public-schoolgirl effect, she fiddles constantly with her bangles and tugs at her hair. You can't imagine her adopting the husky grande-dame-erie of Helen Mirren or the spry sternness of Judi Dench in the decades to come.
"Because I'm girly looking still, I don't look very heavyweight", she admits. "But more and more I'm drawn to the heavyweight parts. I did The Duchess of Malfi [at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2006] and thought, 'Cor, yes! This is difficult'. I really like classical theatre whereas I never did when I was younger. The thing about the RSC then was that you had to live in Stratford-upon-Avon and I had a French boyfriend. You're stuck there. I always wanted to be in a cool play where I got to swear."
She's currently rehearsing the role of Lucy, scatty custodian of the cuttings library at an ailing regional newspaper in Michael Frayn's Alphabetical Order. Played in the original 1975 production by Billie Whitelaw, Lucy is, according to the notes, "an easy-going, good-humoured woman whom everyone likes" or "not really a heavy Medea-type part" in Stubbs' assessment. Lucy's messily cosy world of newspaper clippings and love affairs is thrown into even further disarray by the arrival of a new assistant librarian, thrusting, organised young Lesley. "Lesley and Lucy are order and chaos", explains Stubbs. "I'm well cast as chaos, I think. Lucy is eclectic: nice and nasty, funnyish and sad, mean and kind. She's quite hard to play."
Stubbs took the role partly as a welcome change from her last "harrowing" run in Scenes from a Marriage. "You can't do too many of those in a year without feeling a bit, well, harrowed", Stubbs drops her voice, vaguely embarrassed. "I'm privileged enough not to have to act all the time. When you're young, you panic if you're not going from one thing to another. I can't do that with my children. Plus, I love holidays and I'm lazy."
Laziness notwithstanding, Stubbs has appeared in everything from Shakespeare t1908o Shaw (playing Joan of Arc as a Geordie), via more modern heroines in Harold Pinter's Betrayal and Patrick Marber's Closer.
Her glittering performance in Scenes from a Marriage drew some of the best notices of her career when it opened at Coventry's Belgrade Theatre last year, and is due for a West End transfer lat