The Anna Chancellor Page

Anna Chancellor

Caroline Bingley

No matter how many roles Anna Chancellor plays in films, television, and theater, it may be her destiny to be forever remembered as “Duckface,” the luckless fiancée jilted by Hugh Grant in the hugely successful 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral. So firmly attached has the sobriquet become that she has been quacked at when entering pubs, and even friends make jokes about her nose. But the truth is that the character was never conceived to be duck-like; her original name in the script was ____face (rhymes with duck). It was changed, Chancellor has said, “because we couldn’t get away with that.”


	Tipping the Velvet

The unwanted woman is a role that Chancellor knows well. “I'm usually the girl the audience doesn't want the hero to end up with,” she told an interviewer in 2002. “In some form or other, I'm usually the ugly sister. I'm never the innocent Cinderella type.”

Maybe not, but she has also developed a specialty in glamorous femmes fatales (The Cazalets, Staggered, Jupiter Moon) and lesbians (Boston Marriage, Tipping the Velvet, Stanley). What these roles all have in common is strength. Casting directors realize that Anna Chancellor is a woman to be reckoned with.


The Real Jane Austen, with Gillian Kearney

This isn’t surprising when you consider Chancellor’s background. Her family tree includes many aristocrats, a prime minister (Herbert Asquith), eccentric men and indomitable women, and more than a few writers. Her uncle, Alexander Chancellor, is a journalist and former editor of the Spectator; her brother Edward is a writer on financial matters; one of her sisters was formerly married to the novelist Will Self; and her cousin Elizabeth is married to Alexander Waugh, son of Auberon and grandson of Evelyn. But the most illustrious writer in the family is one from the more distant past: Anna’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Edward Knight, was the older brother of Jane Austen.

Chancellor was the youngest of four children. Her parents divorced in 1967, when she was two, and thereafter her father was only a “peripheral” presence in her life. Her mother remarried and the family settled into a rambling country house in Somerset, but Anna was sent to boarding school when she was seven. When the headmistress had a nervous breakdown, the drama instructor took over and filled up the schedule with acting lessons and improv sessions. Chancellor took to it immediately. “I was always putting on shows in people's houses; it came naturally. I never thought of acting as something to be learnt, but as something inside you."


	King Lear, with Sian Thomas

Her next boarding school, a convent, was less hospitable to drama, and Chancellor was a poor student. After graduation she escaped to London to join her elder sisters, Isabel and Kate, and their antics caused people to refer to them as “those wicked Chancellor girls.” After a spell as an artist's model, Anna enrolled in the London Academy of Musical and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA), but never found favor with her teachers. She felt her upper-class background was held against her. By her third year she was very discouraged and when she became pregnant opted to drop out.

After her daughter, Poppy, was born, Chancellor found herself the sole breadwinner and was forced to take any acting (and modeling and waitressing) jobs she could get. A role in the long-running cult science-fiction soap opera Jupiter Moon paid some bills, but entailed long separations from Poppy. Then came Four Weddings and a Funeral.


The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Once you're associated with success you are much more of a commodity," she has said. "It was just incredible what happened to us all. I was unemployed up until then. Afterwards I got great jobs on stage. I was able to broaden my horizons, working on radio, stuff like that.” Most of the work was in character parts. "Sometimes I think if I had been born at a different time I would have been more of a leading girl," she told the Independent in 2002. "These days, the girls that get the guys are such babes, aren't they?" But, she added, “I like acting, and it seems to me that a lot of the gorgeous ones, often it's not exactly acting they're asked to do. Often they're just asked to be gorgeous."


	Boston Marriage, with Lyndsey Marshall and Zoe Wanamaker

Chancellor had a plum role as the first wife of painter Stanley Spencer in Pam Gems’s play Stanley, which ran in both London and New York. In the London Times, John Peter called her performance “shockingly perceptive . . . fierce, willowy and angularly beautiful like a killer heron, she exudes narcissistic selfishness, sexual maladjustment, snobbish gentility, and a cold, calculating meanness from every pore.” As a late nineteenth-century lesbian in David Mamet’s Boston Marriage, she was “a hilarious mix of straight-backed social refinement and predatory lust” (Michael Billington, the Guardian). But her enthusiasm for theater goes beyond commercial ventures. In the nineties she staged Christmas pantomimes in Notting Hill that had a distinctly modern sensibility: when the Sleeping Beauty was pricked, she cried, “Help, the needle,” and her father thought she had a drug problem. More recently, she formed a company of volunteers, including Sam West and Celia Imrie, to put on a shoestring production of Congreve’s The Way of the World at an East End music hall. “The work will be focusing on the text as the most important thing and will be a move away from star-led productions,” she told the Evening Standard. We are a very democratic troupe and take a vote on everything. A lot of theatre is too expensive, and actually robs the audience of using their imagination. This will look like we've raided a very good dressing-up box.”


Spooks/MI 5 (with Peter Firth)

After a brief marriage in the 1990s to a cameraman she met while filming a television commercial, Chancellor almost despaired of finding another partner. But during the run of The Real Inspector Hound/Black Comedy double bill in the West End, she met an Algerian cabdriver named Redhu, several years younger than she, whom she — by her own admission — pursued relentlessly until he gave in. They now live together, with Poppy, in her home in the Shepherd’s Bush section of west London, and he has become a cinematic sound technician.