The heartache that helped Anna Friel take on her toughest role yet

By Tim Oglethorpe

Last updated at 2:40 AM on 25th November 2011

Friel-good factor: Anna's star is burning brightly

Rhys Ifans famously played Hugh Grant’s clumsy, idiotic housemate Spike in the movie Notting Hill — but he is a real smooth operator when it comes to impressing the woman he loves.

After an exhausted and emotionally drained Anna Friel filmed her final scene on the ITV thriller Without You in Ealing, West London, Rhys whisked her away for four days’ rest and relaxation — in a tepee in the middle of Wales!

‘He greeted me with the words: “I know this has been a hard job for you so let’s go and do something that’s fun,” and before I knew it, Rhys, my daughter Gracie and I were off the beaten track in Wales,’ says Anna.

‘The tepee was our home for four days. We built fires, traipsed around the wilderness and just got away from it all.’

The Welshman is clearly in tune with the needs of his girlfriend of six months.

The Rochdale-born actress, 35, was in urgent need of some recuperation after filming Without You. The three-part drama — based on the Nicci French novel What To Do When Someone Dies — required the former Brookside and Pushing Daisies star to spend six weeks in a state of emotional anxiety.

Her schoolteacher character Ellie Manning is engulfed by grief when her husband Greg (Marc Warren) is killed in a car crash — then tortured by the prospect that he’d been unfaithful to her.

Greg’s body is discovered in the driving seat of his car, with a beautiful, mystery woman beside him.

Anna admits filming took its toll on her and that it stirred up deep emotions.

‘Normally I’m really talkative and bubbly on set and saying: “All right, guys, come on, let’s go and have a drink after work.”

‘But I kept myself to myself and immersed myself in playing a woman who has lost the most important person in her life.

‘There were times when I was sick of being depressed, when I was sick of being so sad. I wanted to be able to cry, but the director didn’t want me to.

‘He wanted me — and my character — to be strong, to hold back the tears, at least until late in the story.’

Just a few months before she started filming Without You, Anna had suffered her own huge, emotional trauma, the break-up of her relationship with fellow actor David Thewlis, 48 (who played the werewolf Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter films), the father of her six-year-old daughter.

New love: Anna with her boyfriend of six months, Rhys Ifans (left), and with her former partner David Thewlis

Having divided their time between Anna’s house in Windsor, Berks, and David’s converted ballroom in Clerkenwell, central London, for nine years, they split last December amid (totally unfounded) rumours of an affair between Anna and Joseph Cross, 23, her co-star in the successful West End play Breakfast At Tiffany’s.

So didn’t Without You come along just a little bit too soon?

‘You draw on all sorts of emotions when you play a part like Ellie Manning,’ she says. ‘When I was rehearsing the role, I thought what my life would be like without Gracie, without my dad — without all the people who are really dear in my life — and that was pretty horrible.

‘But it wasn’t difficult to make this drama because of the relationship break-up with David.

‘I was dealing with that perfectly well and it’s not as if Without You was the first thing I did after the break-up anyway.

‘I played a pirate in Neverland, a prequel to Peter Pan, for Sky Movies and that cheered me up no end!

‘Two months in Ireland, then a month in Italy wearing fantastic costumes, jumping around on ships and waving a sword in the air!

‘It was great fun and it was only at the end that I thought: “OK, now it’s time to do something more serious.” That’s when I started filming Without You.’

Earth mother: Anna pregnant with her daughter Gracie, who is now aged six

And it was the thought of Gracie waiting for her at home that helped Anna cope with the emotional intensity of the role.

‘On the way home from filming I would wind down the car window, look at the sky, feel the wind in my face and thank God I wasn’t Ellie Manning — a woman desperate to have a child before the untimely death of her husband.

‘Gracie put the smile back on my face. At the end of each day’s filming, she made me snap out of my unhappiness.

‘I couldn’t go home to Windsor and to Gracie and be sad. It doesn’t matter how hard your day has been, you have to be happy for your child.

‘She would greet me with the words “Are you sure you’re happy, Mummy?” when I came through the door. Fortunately,  by then I was well on the road to being so. Playing Ellie Manning was tough, but it made me appreciate how lucky I was, and made me appreciate my joy at being a mum. It made me grateful for my life.’

And it’s a life that has taken a new, romantic turn during the past few months.

Welsh actor Rhys Ifans, 44, the former partner of actress Sienna Miller, met Anna while they were filming Neverland in Ireland. She calls him ‘My sanctuary, my safe haven’ and has talked about having children with him.

The couple will spend their first Christmas together at the Friel family home in Rochdale, Lancashire, along with an army of Anna’s relatives, including her mother, father, brother and various aunts and uncles.

She smiles when she mentions Rhys’s name and is clearly giddily in love with him. But she is also aware of the responsibilities in her life, beyond her relationship with the lanky actor.

Once as famous for dating Robbie Williams and Darren Day as she was for sharing TV’s first lesbian kiss in a soap opera (as Beth Jordache in the now defunct Channel 4 soap Brookside), the more mature Anna talks about the career compromises she needs to make as the mother of a young child from a broken relationship.

‘It’s difficult to juggle everything when you are in a situation like mine,’ she says. ‘You can’t just do what you want, when you want, you have to take people into consideration. You don’t want to be apart from your daughter. It’s difficult.’

Anna wants to take Breakfast At Tiffany’s to Broadway, ‘but it’s not yet certain to happen because it will require a lot of organising.

‘David’s been away working,  I’ve been filming Neverland, Without You and a BBC drama called Public Enemies and at all times  our priority has been Gracie’s happiness and the need for her to feel settled.’

However, the success of Anna’s career — surreal drama Pushing Daisies was a hit in the U.S., winning seven Emmys — makes you wonder why she so readily agrees to appear in gritty, small-budget TV dramas in Britain such as Without You.

It follows in the wake of her appearance in The Street, the BBC series in which she played Dee, a mother working as a prostitute in Preston to make ends meet. And she’s a distraught probation officer, suspended after one of her clients kills a woman, in the hard-hitting three-part Public Enemies, on BBC1 at the start of next year.

For an actress who has had her fair share of Hollywood glitz, isn’t it all a bit — well — grim and depressing?

‘I like gritty realism and I like the variety that an acting career can give you,’ she says.

‘I loved doing The Street so much, but I also liked going as far away as possible from myself by playing a character like Captain Elizabeth Bonny in Neverland, this wonderful Irish pirate who rules the seas!’

And she points out: ‘I’m a northerner so I’m going back to my roots by appearing in The Street and Without You, which are set fairly and squarely in the place I’m from.

‘They are raw and liberating — if at times a little uncomfortable, mentally and physically.

‘When I watched the screening of Without You I felt like getting out a big tub of Vaseline and covering the screen in it so I looked better in close-up! But a drama like this isn’t about being lit in a particular way or to make you look younger.

‘Without You is about grief  and suffering — experiences  we’ve all been through — and these emotions are ugly, not beautiful.

‘I wouldn’t have been serving the project properly by being lit in the most attractive way. I wouldn’t have been doing justice to the emotions I was trying to convey.’

 Without You, a three-parter, starts on ITV1 on Thursday, December 8; Neverland is on Sky Movies Premiere at 9pm on December 9; and Public Enemies will be on BBC1 early in 2012.