‘What can I tell you without giving the whole plot away? That’s the problem,” smiles Anne Reid. We’re meeting to talk about Kaleidoscope, a knotty, taut and claustrophobic thriller starring Reid and Toby Jones, directed by his brother, Rupert Jones. It’s the kind of brilliantly insidious film that reveals its secrets slowly and cleverly. It’s far better to see it knowing absolutely nothing at all about it. Which, of course, makes it very difficult to talk about. “Well, let’s not tell people then,” Reid decides, firmly. “I play the mother of Toby Jones. It was a great part. She’s dreadful. Why do people keep casting me as dreadful mothers? I’m adorable! But I seem to be terribly good at playing dreadful mothers.”
At 82, Reid is a bona fide legend of stage and screen, though she still refers to herself as “a jobbing actress. I’ve accepted stuff even if it’s a few lines, because I think it’s better to be seen.” For the past few years, Reid has been performing her own cabaret show, telling stories from her life along with her favourite musical numbers, so it should come as no surprise that she is fabulously entertaining company – warm, charming, and always ready with an anecdote. “Have you seen the film?” she asks. I tell her I have. “Where did you get it from?” They sent me a stream. “A stream! I want to have a stream!” she says. There’s a perfect comic pause. “What’s a stream?”
Her family were all journalists; her father, Colin, covered the partition of India, and the young Reid travelled the world with him. “I went to Persia, or Iran as it is now. Tehran. Beirut. Jerusalem. Cyprus. Baghdad.” Her brothers became journalists, too, but she was never tempted to follow them. “I just thought it was really boring,” she shrugs. “But I’ve got notebooks, darling, with half-written books all over the flat. And I’ve got to get on with my biography. They commissioned me four years ago. I told them I didn’t want any money because I didn’t want them on my back, but I’ve really got to get on with it.”
Instead of being a journalist, Reid became an actor, and appeared in The Benny Hill Show and Hancock’s Half Hour in the late 1950s, but it was Coronation Street that made her a household name. She played Valerie Tatlock, who married Ken Barlow in 1962, and was bumped off by a rogue hairdryer in 1971 (more than 18 million viewers watched her funeral). She had a long break during the 70s and 80s, and got back to it in earnest in the 90s. She hasn’t really stopped working since she starred in Victoria Wood’s two-series sitcom wonder, Dinnerladies, in 1998, which is remarkably funny, even today. “That’s Vic, you see,” she says, fondly. “She was a wonderful writer. I still can’t believe she’s gone. And she was so strict! Dinnerladies was really hard work – if you speak to anybody, they’ll tell you the truth. We didn’t lie around screaming with laughter all day. We did have some laughs, but then, that’s comedy.” She says she would love to be a good physical comedian. “Well, it would be impossible for me now, because I would never get up,” she jokes. “Normally I like the witty lines, that’s what I like. There’s not many laughs in Kaleidoscope, darling.”
She thinks of two roles as pivotal to her revived career, and there aren’t many laughs in those, either. There was a play called The York Realist at London’s Royal Court, in 2002. “I nearly didn’t do it because I said to my agent, I’m sick of playing northern mothers, and this was a northern mother. I was a fool, actually.” It was directed by Peter Gill, and as a result, “The theatre elite were all in the audience that night. [Director] Roger Michell was there and I got The Mother from that. That really changed everything.”
In The Mother, which came out in 2003, Reid’s character has an affair with a much younger married handyman, played by Daniel Craig. “People said to me, what are you doing? I said, I’m doing this little film called The Mother, you’ll probably never hear of it again. Roger Michell said, oh, thank you very much for that.” And yet people still ask her about it today. “Yes, they do. And it caused quite a stir and in America as well.” The New York Times said she should have been up for an Oscar. “That was nice. They sent for me to go to Paris and take my photograph, and they put [my] full-page picture, it’s lovely, next to Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges, who I adore, saying ‘she should’ve been a contender’.” She won an award for her performance in Kaleidoscope in Edinburgh this summer – “I know!” she beams – but does all of that really matter? “Ooh, yes,” she says. “I want to win everything. Absolutely. I’ve been out in the cold for too long. What I really want is an Oscar.”
Reid has only seen Kaleidoscope once, when it first came out, and says that when she’s in something, it’s hard for her to tell if it’s good or not. “I don’t think I’m a very good judge. You look at yourself too much. In 10 years, after something’s been made and you can look at it objectively, I make myself look at it. Derek Jacobi [her co-star in TV comedy Last Tango in Halifax] doesn’t watch anything. He can’t bear it. I make myself. My first big disappointment is always, why don’t I look like Julie Christie? Then I realise I don’t look remotely like Julie Christie, and that’s always a great sadness to me. Because I used to think I might have done, at one time. And I’m too fat. And I’m too old. You always see your faults, you see.”
It surprises me that, even now, after all her success, she feels this way. “Well, do you like photographs of yourself? There you go. It’s the same thing, only worse. I remember the first time I ever saw the back of myself turn round and walk out of a room. I’d never seen my back and I thought, God almighty, I look dreadful! So you’ve got to be very tough and try not to be silly about it. I was talking to an actress the other day who was saying, ‘I look like this, I look bad,’ and I said, ‘Well, the thing is, the rest of us have always known you look like that, so it’s only you that doesn’t know you look like that. So we’re not shocked.” How did that go down? “She said, you’re right, actually. I won’t tell you her name because she wouldn’t like it.”
She doesn’t know if there will be more Last Tango In Halifax, but says its creator, Sally Wainwright, won’t write any more episodes. “I don’t think she has the foggiest idea how many people come up to me every week, every day, and say, when’s it coming back? They usually just say ‘it’, and I know what they mean – when’s it coming back? She hit something gold there, and I don’t think she realises it.” She will be appearing in a new BBC comedy series, though, called Hold the Sunset, with John Cleese and Alison Steadman. “They’re in their 70s, having a romance. I may be wrong, but I don’t remember seeing stuff about older people falling in love [before Last Tango]. And now people accept the fact, because of Derek and me, that you can fall in love at any age, and it’s not yucky, and it’s not ’orrible, and I’m proud of that.”
She is currently starring in the West End revival of A Woman of No Importance, and after that finishes its run at the end of the year, Reid will take her cabaret show to Australia. I urge her to finish those memoirs, and she tells me not to hold my breath, darling. Next year is already “stacking up”, and it sounds as if she’s going to be busy. “I should be in an old people’s home now, counting the roses in the wallpaper,” she says. “It’s a good life, isn’t it?”
• Kaleidoscope is released in the UK on 10 November.
