Frances Barber: ‘The night I fought off a train rapist’

Frances Barber is telling me that the only good thing about getting older – in her case, a beautifully preserved 61 – is not having to apologise or explain.

“The acting industry can be very tough and unforgiving, but I’m quite confident now,” she says in her husky purr that takes no prisoners.

An Uber driver certainly got that message back in 2015. When he told Barber that her outfit (for a theatre awards event) was “disgusting” and that she shouldn’t be out at night on her own, she immediately tweeted her outrage, calling the man a “Sharia Uber driver”.

Her shawl, she tells me, had fallen down to reveal that the back of her dress was covered in mesh. “I think that was what he was referring to,” she shrugs. “He wouldn’t take me, so I had to get a black cab.”

Her reaction rather suggests that she’s ideal casting for Musik: a one-woman cabaret show, with four new songs by the Pet Shop Boys, it premieres at the Edinburgh Festival tomorrow and was inspired by the 2001 musical Closer To Heaven, a collaboration between the synth duo and playwright Jonathan Harvey.

Barber is reprising her turn as Billie Trix, a character loosely based on the rock-chick lives of Marianne Faithfull, Nico and Anita Pallenberg. “They lived in a man’s world but they played by their own rules and they were unapologetic,” she explains.

The fourth of six children, born to a bookie and a dinner lady from Wolverhampton, Barber grew up in a council house at a time “when working-class actors could get grants”.

Although ambitious for his daughter, there was no way her father could have afforded the fees for her to study her craft in London. “I feel very strongly that some version of  that grant should come back, otherwise there won’t be any working-class actors any more,” she says.

Barber created the stir that made her name in 1987’s Sammy And Rosie Get Laid, the Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears film that now seems way ahead of its time for its unapologetic depiction of interracial sex. And she was also the first – and still the only – naked Eliza Doolittle, leaping into an onstage bath to clean up for her transformation from Cockney flower-seller to society lady in a 1992 National Theatre production of Pygmalion.

“My career has been mercurial,” Barber concedes, “but I’m happy about that. I just love taking on things that are different. I don’t like lazy stuff.”

I dredge-up another moment of nudity: this time, a real-life one in the early 1990s, when Barber lay naked in front of her then-actor boyfriend Neil Pearson’s car to stop him driving off after they’d had a row. She chuckles at the memory.

"Unfortunately, it was a cul-de-sac and all the neighbours were looking out of the window. But Neil and I are friends now,” she adds.

The gift of remaining friends with former lovers is one that she seems to posess – she’s also on good terms with her Bangor University boyfriend, Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle. “Life is too short – if you’ve spent time being close with someone, it seems awful to just cut it all off,” says Barber, who is now in a relationship with someone outside showbusiness, who she prefers not to name.

In close-up, over coffee at her impressive warehouse conversion in London’s Clerkenwell, I can see why the smoky-eyed Barber was dubbed “stupendously sexy” by a critic when she played Madame de Sade in the West End.

“I don’t know anybody who hasn’t had Botox,” she says in her upfront way. “I’ve had it in the past, like every actress I know – and more actors than actresses, in my experience.

“You want to look as well as you can for the camera – unless you’re playing a rough part. But I haven’t had any for about 10 years; my mum always had a very fresh-looking face even in her 60s and I think I’ve inherited her genes.

“I think it’s harder for young actresses now. The pressure is on to have perfect hair, perfect teeth and perfect bodies, which was never the case when I was young. I worked in LA for 10 years and saw there what I now see happening here – that the commodity of beauty is really high on the agenda, unless you’re a character actress like Melissa McCarthy.

“And high-definition screens are unforgiving. At first it was like having a microscope on my face, but now I don’t really care because I don’t need to be the young thing any more.”

She came back from LA (“a soulless town”), partly through homesickness and also to appear in the film Mr Holmes at the invitation of its star, her friend Sir Ian McKellen – with whom she has done everything from panto to King Lear. So close are they that McKellen became her live-in carer after she tore a ligament in each knee following accidents on her bike and a horse.

“He would help me into the bath or hold me upright in the shower so I didn’t fall, because the injury left me like a puppet whose strings had been cut,” is how she describes it.

Barber once met Harvey Weinstein at a dinner, but says she’s never experienced her own MeToo moment – in LA or anywhere else.

“I have always had the personality to say, ‘Oh for God’s sake, don’t be ridiculous’.” The trenchant Barber once successfully fought off a would-be rapist on a night train through the Tatra mountains in Slovakia, en route to a film shoot.

“I went for his face – I had his blood under my fingernails as I was screaming for the guard. My elder brother, Graham, had just been killed in a car crash and my mother had died the year before, so I was feeling very vulnerable. But I could hear my mother saying, ‘If you make her angry, she’ll become Boudicca.’”

Perhaps her fearlessness also stems from the early years of her career, when she performed outspoken political plays as a young radical member of the far-Left Socialist Workers Party. Later on, she became a member of the Labour Party but has recently resigned from it “because of the anti-Semitism”.

“Because I had been SWP in the past, I knew who these people were: there has always been that [far Left] tradition to blame Israel and the Jewish community for everything,” Barber says. “It’s gone on since the beginning of time. I’m very distressed to see what’s happened in the party; it feels like a very intolerant place at the moment.

"The opinion polls sadden me hugely because we need an opposition. And Jeremy Corbyn’s ambivalence about Brexit has been his undoing: as they say, if you sit on the fence, you get splinters. He’s a weak leader.”

In the recent European elections, she admits that she voted against Labour for the first time. “I voted for Change UK because I wanted to reward them in my tiny little way for having the honour to walk away.”

When I suggest that she might like to follow the example of Glenda Jackson and go into politics herself, she cackles. “I have far too many skeletons to go into politics myself, there would be people queueing up to put my head onto the guillotine.”

Maybe. But one gets the distinct impression that Barber wouldn’t put up with anyone who tried to cut her down.

Musik is at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh (0131 226 0000, assemblyroomsedinburgh.co.uk), August 5-24, before transferring to the Leicester Square Theatre (020 7734 2222, leicestersquaretheatre.com), September 3-7.