Anne-Marie Duff is used to playing intense characters, but her latest project involved a whole new challenge – portraying emotion through sign language. Emma Higginbotham meets her

With her delicate beauty and huge sorrowful eyes, no actor does ‘anguish’ quite like Anne-Marie Duff. Except when she’s belly laughing. Because as someone renowned for playing tragic roles – be it Joan of Arc in the West End, Lady Macbeth on Broadway, heroin addict Erin in Sex Education, or tormented Grace in Bad Sisters – the 54-year-old has a surprisingly beefy laugh, which echoes around the (admittedly echoey) room where we’ve met to chat about her latest project, BBC One drama Reunion.

A gripping revenge thriller set in and around Sheffield, Reunion sees Anne-Marie’s huge eyes in full sorrowful mode as Christine, who’s forced to come face-to-face with her husband’s killer – their former friend Daniel, played by Matthew Gurney – when he’s released from prison. So far, so thrillery. But what’s extraordinary about the four-part series is that the majority of the cast, including Matthew, are deaf.

“What drew me to Reunion was telling a story that involved a marginalised group of people, but that wasn't a patronising, tokenistic definition of that,” says Anne-Marie. “It wasn't a case of ‘So, hearing people, here is what the deaf experience is!’ It's a fabulous yarn, and it’s very engaging. Even just reading the screenplay, I had a real sense of wanting to find out. Any story that keeps the audience curious – that's the dream, isn't it?”

Deaf actress Rose Ayling-Ellis, who won the glitterball trophy and the viewers’ hearts on Strictly in 2021, plays her daughter Miri, much to Anne-Marie’s delight. “I'm mad about Rose. I think the whole nation is mad about Rose! She's a very special human being. She’s always doing something for this goal, whether it be writing a book, making a documentary, or acting, and she does it with such grace and humility. Also, she's funny as fuck.”

As Miri’s mum, it was crucial that Anne-Marie should appear fluent in British Sign Language. She had intensive sessions with a teacher called Duffy (“no relation”), building up from simple gestures to learning the script in sign, then adding in the emotion. “It was not as difficult as you’d think, because it's so fantastically intuitive. So if I do a sign and tell you what it means, you'd go, ‘Oh yeah, of course it does’. Like ‘I know’,” she says, doing a tiny twist of her finger at the side of her forehead. “It's like putting on clothes that fit you.

“Also, when you've worked in the theatre, you’re used to communicating physically for people sitting up in the back row, so you don't feel shy around it. And because I felt like I owed it to the cast and the crew, who mostly were deaf, it was important to get it right.”

Being on set was, she adds, “fantastic. Everyone was so thrilled to be there, because we all felt like this was an important project, so there was no cynicism. And you would see remarkable things happening, like hearing members of the crew – because it was about 50-50 – would start signing, just because they wanted to join in. Rose and I would sit there watching, and we loved it.

“That's one of the gifts of my job,” she continues. “You can find yourself in a year suddenly going, ‘Oh my god, I learned to play the banjo!’ Or ‘I learned to ballet dance!’ Or ‘I learned to sign!’ It keeps you curious, and you're always being forced to make a fool of yourself, because you're a beginner. And that's no bad thing.”

Born in October 1970, Anne-Marie grew up with her older brother Eddie on a council estate in Hayes, Middlesex. Her dad, a painter and decorator, and mum, who worked in a shoe shop, were both Irish immigrants who’d met as teenagers in London in the mid-1960s. Although storytelling was part of family life, a career in acting was not on the cards for little Anne-Marie. “I wasn't a tap-dancing four-year-old,” she says, and laughs. “When I was very young, I wanted to be a writer. I was very shy, and always had my nose buried in a book, or I was always writing a story.

“I didn't have a huge amount of friends – I had a bit of bullying,” she adds. “But a friend of mine was going to a local youth drama group, and asked me to go with her. It changed everything, because I went from seeing things on the page to seeing things on the stage, and I found the relief of being inside a character to be so powerful. It took a few years, though. I was in my mid-teens before I started to think that I might want to be an actor.”

Bitten by the performance bug, Anne-Marie found a singing teacher in the Yellow Pages, and paid for the lessons with money earned from a Saturday job. Next, she studied at the infamously tough Drama Centre in London. “It kind of celebrated its strictness, but it taught me to be incredibly resilient. And there’s no harm in that for a young person, for the universe to go, ‘You really want this? Come on then!’” I still feel that,” she adds. “That I still have to work very hard. But jeez, I've been super lucky.”

After spending much of the 90s on the London stage, Anne-Marie landed her breakthrough TV role as feisty Fiona Gallagher in Shameless – Paul Abbot’s groundbreaking Channel 4 comedy-drama about a chaotic family living on a deprived Manchester council estate. Which could be seen as lucky, given that she almost didn’t go to the audition.

“It's so mad,” she says, laughing at the memory. “I was in my 30s when I got sent the script, and Fiona is 21, so I just felt like, oh lads, there must be some 21-year-old Mancunian that they can give the job to! I said to my agent twice, ‘I don't know if I should’, and she said, ‘The scripts are amazing, you have to go’. Ultimately I did, and the audition went incredibly well,” she grins. “Sometimes life is… It's cheeky.”

Yet even when she was offered the part, Anne-Marie balked, not least because the subject matter was basically bedlam on the breadline. “It was so outrageous at that time. But I got my mum to read the first two episodes, and she went, ‘This is the working class experience, honey. If you have nothing, what is there but love and laughter?’ So I did it.”

Anne-Marie adored playing Fiona, the surrogate head of the Gallagher clan in lieu of their alcoholic dad, Frank. “It's hard to imagine now, because a lot of very interesting female characters have been created over the last 10 years, but 20-odd years ago, that wasn't the case. Especially to have a young, working class woman represented who wasn't just the victim. She was sexy, she was naughty, but she was fiercely loyal – and up against it!

“The show [which ran from 2004-2013] went in all sorts of different directions as the years went by, but I do think those first two seasons, especially, were fabulous, because they were about poverty. Nobody tells those stories, you know? And,” she adds, “the cast were amazing.”

That amazing cast included Scottish actor James McAvoy – Fiona’s love interest on screen, and Anne-Marie’s when the cameras stopped rolling. Discussing her private life is strictly off-limits, so let’s just say that despite the age gap (Anne-Marie is eight years older) the pair married in 2006, had a son in 2010, and divorced in 2016.

They both left Shameless after two series, but Anne-Marie needn’t have worried about being typecast as a gutsy working class lass – her next major role was as Queen Elizabeth 1 in BBC drama The Virgin Queen. “It makes no sense!” she says, laughing again. “If you're talking about strategy, nobody would have thought that was a doorway to playing one of this country’s greatest monarchs. But life, especially our industry, is very unexpected.”

The juicy roles continued to roll in, from John Lennon’s wayward mother Julia in the 2009 film Nowhere Boy (for which she learned the aforementioned banjo) to Dame Margot Fonteyn in BBC drama Margot (ditto the ballet dancing), as well more queens, suffragettes and assorted matriarchs on both stage and screen. Yet she doesn’t see them as ‘strong’ women.

“I do get a wee bit frustrated when people go, ‘You always play strong women’. I think, no, I play women! What's brilliant is the situation that woman is in. It's about circumstance and story. That's the exciting thing – when the writer is smart enough, which they mostly are, to enable those characters to soar.”

Situations don’t get much stickier than the destructive marriage of her character Grace, who’s belittled and abused by her monstrous husband, JP, in Apple TV’s multi-award winning Bad Sisters. Sharon Horgan’s blackest of black comedies is a modern-day whodunnit: we know from the outset that JP dies, but we don’t know how or which of Grace’s four devoted sisters have bumped him off. Beware: spoilers lie ahead.

Did she expect it to be such a hit? “I had an inkling it would do well, A, because it was Sharon, and B, because it was such a great story,” says Anne-Marie. “I remember reading it during lockdown – we got the first couple of episodes, and then wee synopses of the rest of the show – and I had nary a clue that it would be Grace. I did not see that coming!”

It’s quite the gut-punch when Grace is killed off in series two, and that her second husband also turns out to be a wrong ‘un. Grace really picks them, doesn’t she? Anne-Marie bellows with laughter. “Oh my God, yes! But it was almost Greek. She had to die, because she would never escape this cycle that she was on.”

Anne-Marie won a Bafta for playing Grace after series one and, during an impassioned acceptance speech, urged anyone who might also be a victim of coercive control to speak up. “I became very aware, suddenly in the moment, that I've been given an award for telling the story of pain,” she recalls. “That there would be people watching the TV that night who would be living with it. That's why I said what I said. It felt like a responsibility.”

She feels a similar responsibility to families living with dementia. Tragically her brother Eddie developed young-onset Alzheimer’s in his early 40s, and she’s spoken candidly about their experience on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Society. Now 56, Eddie no longer remembers who Anne-Marie is, but, she says, he knows that she loves him. How is he doing? “He's not great, and we're struggling to find care,” she says. “It's just all of those things that every family experiences with dementia. We’re on the journey with it.”

It’s been quite the journey all round for Anne-Marie. Yet despite working constantly and bagging an OBE in the 2025 New Year’s Honours, she often mentions the word luck. Why does she say that? “Because I know lots of very talented actors who haven't been so lucky,” she shrugs. “Being an actor is a bit like being a gambler. It feels like you just throw the dice and hope for the best. If we all knew the formula, everyone would be Kate Winslet, but we don't. So all you can do is be as undeniably good as you can be, be a decent human being, and then beyond that, it's blowing dandelions into the wind.”

What would little bookworm Anne-Marie make of her grown-up self? “I think she’d be delighted, but she'd ask me when am I going to write a novel, and I don't know if I can! Who knows. But I think she'd be happy. I mean, there'd be some things she’d be annoyed about.” Such as? “I’m not telling you, you're a journalist!’ she says, and her big laugh echoes around the room again.

Reunion is available on BBC iPlayer

FOOD BITES

What was for breakfast? Boily eggs with oat cakes. I could never be vegan because of my adoration of eggs.

Are you a good cook? I think so. I cook everything from scratch, and when I’ve had a really busy day, I love the alchemy of making something. It grounds me.

What’s your speciality? I've got a very battered old copy of a Moro cookbook, and if I'm having pals over for dinner, I’ll make the paella.

Fanciest restaurant you’ve been to? Nobu in New York. Everybody in there was so beautiful and cool, and the food was so extraordinary. But I had the frustration of getting full – I wanted to just keep eating.

Most memorable meal? Some mean more than the food. I had lunch with my brother yesterday, which I’ve added to my library of memorable meals. So rather than going, “Well, I was at the Fat Duck”, I think those meals are the gemstones.

An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in April 2025 (c) Waitrose