Anna Friel’s incredible career has taken her from drama school in Rochdale to Hollywood via “Brookside”. She talks to Lydia Slater about life with David Thewlis, why she has to be a mother before the age of 30 and her new film, “The War Bride”

Anna Friel is late. Which is not , in itself, very surprising. Film stars love to keep people hanging about. But Friel isn’t like that. As you’re looking out of the window and wondering if it’s going to be a long wait, she suddenly flashes round the corner, jean-clad legs flying, scarlet coat flapping behind her as she runs towards the café and pants up the stairs.

”Sorry, sorry , sorry”, she cries, though she’s only five minutes behind schedule. “Have you been here for ages ?”

Her delicate features are pink with exertion, her long dark hair is all over the place, and she blows her nose on her napkin before she recover her composure. It’s charming, if rather surprising.

You can scarcely believe this coltish creature is Anna Friel, 26, a veteran of 12 films, the woman who wowed Broadway with her performance in Patrick Marber’s Closer, starred in the painfully hip Almeida theatre production of Lulu, and has just finished a multimillion dollar Hollywood movie, Timeline.

She comes across as about 12, with her slender figure, rosy cheeks and bright brown eyes – an impression enhanced when she orders a huge plate of sausage and mash and a Coca-Cola, and gets stuck in without further ado.

In fact you might almost think that she’s never quite grown up. And it’s probably the result of her abbreviated childhood.

Friel was brought up in middle-class comfort in the Lancashire town of Rochdale, which also produced singers Gracie Fields and Lisa Stansfield. (she still has a strong northern accent). Her parents, des and Julie, to whom she is extremely close were both teachers, and instilled in their daughter a rigorous work ethic.

But the desire to act was hers alone. From the age of 13 (after she’d done her homework) she attended a theatre workshop in Oldham three nights a week and all day Sunday, at the suggestion of her school drama teacher. “We had to stay in character for two or three hours, which I think is the best training you can have”. The rest of the time she tidied her room. “I’m a bit obsessed with tidiness”, she says. “Tidy place, tidy mind”.

Her first screen role was at the age of 12, as Michael Palin’s daughter in Alan Bleasdale’s drama GBH. And then Brookside came calling. Friel auditioned for the role of the lesbian patricide Beth Jordache and won it. She had a few qualms about abandoning her five A-levels. “I thought I’d be away from school for just four months, I was adamant I wouldn’t do it any longer than that”.

But she proved electric on the small screen. The ratings shot up and Friel stayed on the show for two full years, buried her screen father under the patio and participated in an eight second lesbian kiss that scandalised and titillated the nation. Finally, she decided she wanted to leave the soap, her character was killed off in a police cell, and she emerged, blinking into the limelight.

The offers flooded in, including a reported £1 million to make a pop song, which she turned down. Instead , she took the credible route, accepting the part of Bella Wilfer in the BBC’s adaptation of Our Mutual Friend – a decision slightly undermined, it must be said, by her decision to conduct a romance with the light entertainer Darren Day. He dumped her after two and a half years for a lesser soap star, Tracy Shaw from Coronation Street, and has been labelled a love rat ever since. (You mess with the nation’s favourite girl-next-door at your peril).

For a short time, Friel seemed to be going through the adolescence she missed while tidying her room in Rochdale. She metamorphosed into a notorious party girl, hanging out with Meg Matthews and Noel Gallagher, partying with Naomi Campbell and kissing Kate Moss in the Groucho Club. She also had a brief fling with Robbie Williams. “I think I was trying to catch up with my childhood, that’s why I went through a stage of going out a lot”, is all she will say on the subject. But though she may be friendly with superstars like Madonna, Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson, who famously said, after seeing her in Closer, that he wouldn’t rest until he’d slept with her – and consequently must have serious bags under the eyes – she remains a homebody at heart.

She speaks to her parents daily, and goes home whenever she can. She was, she says, distraught when they redecorated her childhood bedroom, and her brother Michael moved into it.

“Whenever I go back, I’m like, ‘Where’s my room?’ and I’d cry forever if they sold the house I grew up in”. Her father controls her finances and pays her mortgage, and they always visit her on set wherever she is in the world.

“I ought to put into my contract: the parents come too”, she jokes. They must be as devoted to their daughter as she is to them, because this is not always a glamorous excursion. Their last trip was to Edmonton (aka Deadmonton) in backwoods Canada. “There was nothing but this huge mall. I came back with six cowboy hats”. When her parents can’t be with her on set, she cocoons herself in the atmosphere of home, taking ‘literally five suitcases’ full of make-up, photos and her vegetable juicer.

Aside from her parents, her closest friends are Sting and Trudie Styler. They met when Styler played Friel’s mother in last year’s bittersweet buddy-buddy film me Without You; Styler appears to have been something of a second mum ever since.

“Trudie told me all sorts of horror stories about what goes into food. So I have juices every day, I eat lots of fresh chicken and fish, and I do yoga”, says Friel. “But I eat chocolate as well. I mean , I’m not Geri Halliwell.”

Mickey Sumner , 18, Sting and Trudie’s eldest daughter, is currently living with Friel and her boyfriend of two years, the edgy Northern actor David Thewlis, in the converted ballroom he owns in Clerkenwell. “Mickey and I have been swapping clothes a little bit”, says Friel, showing off a white T-shirt embroided appliqué white Union Jack that belongs to her guest. “She’s just finished university and she’s got an art studio round the corner. I’ve known her two years now and she’s an absolute sweetheart. We’re very, very good friends. I’m her honorary big sister.”

The ballroom bears ample testimony to Friel’s tidiness fetish. It’s a thoroughly trendy, open-plan space with gleaming parquet floors, accessorised with customised car seats in Mulberry leather (in addition to their acting careers, the couple were the faces of the clothing and accessories company this spring). A large golden Buddha that the couple bought after staying with Sting and Trudie in Tuscany stands in the sitting room, and Friel’s shoe collection is housed in boxes with Polaroids stuck to the front. They lead a rather grand existence, flitting together between this haven of urban chic and Windsor, where Friel has a period house, a three bedroom Georgian affair with a walled garden and open fireplaces, which she bought in order to be near her godparents.

Friel and Thewlis got together some three years ago, after a dinner party held by members of the British production company, Natural Nylon. “He never went home”, she says. Theirs seems to be a highly interdependent and intense relationship. “For the first year and a half, we didn’t spend time apart so we could have a really good grounding to our relationship”, she says matter-of-factly.

Thewlis, 39, who also hails from Lancashire, is everything Darren Day wasn’t – not in the least bit pretty, but an extremely credible actor, admired by such Hollywood greats as Marlon Brando. He’s starred in a host of well-received films including The Big Lebowski, Naked and Seven Years in Tibet, and is currently directing a film, Cheeky. Friel is clearly besotted, burbling on a bout Cheeky with far more enthusiasm than she does about her own projects: it turns out Trudie Styler is producing it. Hence, perhaps, the presence of Mickey.

Despite her enviable living arrangements, Friel has spent most of the year in Canada, where she’s been filming The War Bride near Edmonton, and Timeline, outside Montreal. The experiences were very different, she says. The War Bride, directed by Lyndon Chubbuck and out this month, is a charming, low-budget affair and reminiscent of her previous World War II escapade, The Land Girls.

Timeline, on the other hand, is a $65-million movie directed by Richard Lethal Weapon Donner, and offers Friel her first real chance of worldwide stardom.

In The War Bride, she plays a chirpy Cockney seamstress who marries a Canadian soldier after a whirlwind affair, and is shipped out to his farm to live with his dour mother (Brenda Fricker). There’s a nice scene early on when she discovers her new home is a dilapidated barn in the middle of nowhere: the look of shock on her face is very expressive. “Actually that was real”, she says, laughing. “I was thinking, oh my God, here I am, stuck in a barn, filming for four weeks. We stayed in some really crappy little motel where the walls were like paper. There wasn’t even a restaurant.”

Friel occupied herself with research. Another legacy of her abbreviated education – she wishes she hadn’t abandoned her A Levels – is her detailed investigation into the background of the characters she plays. So she read the diaries of real War Brides, researched the travelling time between England and Canada, listened to CDs of Forties songs as well as learned to sew, hypnotise chickens and drive an ancient car.

Once scene required her to give birth: the two-day-old infant playing her daughter was smeared with a revolting combination of Philadelphia cheese and strawberry jam. “It’s how you make them look new-born”, Friel explains. “The mother didn’t react so well, she started shouting, ‘Give me my baby!’. I think she had a weird reaction to it, which was totally understandable. I’d never have my children on a film set”.

The experience of working with children left her distinctly broody. “I love children”, she says passionately. She and Thewlis would like children themselves, and Friel is keen not to put it off too long as she suffers from ovarian cysts, on account of which she was admitted to hospital last year. She has been told by her doctor that she ought to conceive before she’s 30, in case of difficulties; she’s giving up smoking after Christmas to help things along. But she wants to get married first, being an old-fashioned girl. “Though I’ve done it so often in films, when the time actually comes for me to get married it’ll be like, “Hang on, haven’t I done this already?”.

The eternally youthful Friel now worries about growing old. “I can see I’m getting very dry around the eyes, and every director’s going, ‘Anna you’ve really got to give up smoking’”. She shouldn’t worry. It takes more than wrinkles to dim eternal youthfulness.

The War Bride opens nationwide on 29 November.