Events Info;Anna Chancellor on why she's DEFINITELY a feminist and what she really thinks about Hugh Grant

Ould - Chancellor mounts the tarmac on her bicycle, directly avoiding an elderly women's foot. She dismounts, drops her padlock, picks it up, drops it again, locks her bike, strolls onto the caf? patio, sits down, knocks over a jug and splatters the milk.
'Don't be sad! ' she barks before I can speak. Really some entrance, but it could be foolish to mistake Chancellor for a ditzy presenter. She is a very talented performer with a set of triumphs at the rear of her, not least her Olivier-nominated 2012 turn as Amanda opposite Toby Stephens in No? l Coward's Private Lives.
Now the lady is about to take the leading role as Arkadina in Chekhov's classic The Seagull, as part of a three set of the Russian masters early work at the National Theatre.
'It's an element that all actors want, ' Chancellor says of the self-obsessed mother and fading middle-aged actress.
A youthful 51, Chancellor shows up not fading today. She is caught the west Greater london sun and her freckles have joined up, but any wrinkles are covering. 'I kind of look perfectly, ' she confesses.
She doesn't have a fierce beauty regime. 'I do a yoga school at The Buddhist Middle, ' she says. 'My teacher is an or just. States, "If you like letting off wind, which fine. " I'm not joking! '
Although your woman has, in her time, 'been very unhappy', Chancellor doesn't take herself totally seriously.
If she would, she might have get a bigger star after participating in a jilted bride in Four Weddings And A Funeral, the 1994 British isles romcom that made Hugh Grant a global name. Does she regret not making more of it? Slightly. If only We could have some of the parts I overlooked out on. I possibly could have been a Rosalind in As You Like This. I'm too old for the top female Shakespearean tasks now. '
She does not begrudge Grant; she seems to think stardom was his destiny.
'I may think Hugh is a typical actor, ' claims. 'In England we are sort of body of stars and almost all of us never reach the level of fame or success that Hugh reaches.
'He's a very unusual person. I actually don't even know how much he likes operating - he's said this individual sees it a stress. He's unusually charismatic, abnormally attractive, and probably abnormally ambitious. Most English celebrities are compliant. Hugh's not exactly compliant. '
Was the young Chancellor a little too compliant? '
I felt a little like [her 4 Weddings character] Duckface did, left out, ' she says. 'They were a gang and your woman was on the outside the house, and I thought I had been as well. But My spouse and i don't know how secure I had been, probably just making it through. I had formed my daughter Poppy and i also was splitting up with her dad. I wasn't in a place where We thought, "how should I actually capitalise on this? "'
Her daughter Poppy has become 28 and a successful illustrator. Poppy's father, the poet Jock Scot, perished of cancer aged 63 in April. Clearly, Chancellor has lived a full life since 1994, yet people still call her Duckface.
'Oh that does not bother me whatsoever, ' she says. 'Do you really know what my real play name was when I was young? Nooky. '
Nooky? 'We didn't know it was everything to do with sex. Anna in Russian was Anoushka, so I was always called Nooky or Nook, until my wicked stepbrother informed us it meant hanky-panky. Then he called myself Hank. '