#28sep2018

Finty Williams: Me and my mum, Judi Dench

As Finty Williams stars in a role her mother, Judi Dench, played to acclaim, she tells Andrew Billen about the joy and pain of being in a famous family

Andrew Billen

September 28 2018, 12:01am, The Times

During a play’s rehearsal period, the most likely moment a journalist will interview its star is over lunch. This is often unsatisfactory. The reporter finds the actor’s mind still half in the rehearsal room; the actor, between answers, barely gets through a sandwich. So I am pleased that Finty Williams, who is in a revival of Hugh Whitemore’s subtly anguished 1983 play Pack of Lies, agrees instead to see me at the end of a day’s rehearsals at the Menier Chocolate Factory in south London.

Now we are talking in its bar, however, she seems to me exhausted: vulnerable and unsure. It is a perception, admittedly, enhanced by her pale skin and slight frame. Still, it cannot be good when an actress answers a question about what she is doing next with “probably run a cat home on a Greek island” or describes herself as a participant in a race in which her mother is hundreds of places in front of her.

Judi Dench is a subject hard to avoid when interviewing Williams, and impossible to do so today. This is the first London production of Pack of Lies since it opened at the Lyric Theatre, London, in 1983 when Dench was cast in the very part that Williams, her daughter, plays now. When I ask if this a coincidence, Williams’s riposte is: “You’d have to ask somebody else that.” I could, but what could the theatre say other than that she is the best actress for the role? No doubt she is, but in a wicked world where publicity angles sell tickets, the reply might not tell the whole story.

The play is based on a true espionage case from the early Sixties. The Jacksons, a suburban London couple, are approached by Special Branch for permission to spy from their bedroom window on their friends, the Krogers, across the road. The Canadian bookseller, Peter, and his vivacious wife, Helen, are, in fact, Soviet spies. Williams plays Barbara Jackson, whose fate is to discover that she has been lied to by Helen and must betray her best friend back. In a coda, we learn that she dies soon after the Krogers’ unmasking. This is not true of the real “Barbara”, Ruth Search, but the play ends with a death knell.

An intense day of rehearsal, I suggest to Williams, sensing her mood. “Really intense because it’s a play about spies, obviously, but it’s also a play about friendship,” she says. Friendship, I shall discover, is a delicate subject for her.

Williams, who was 46 this week, remembers finding the play intense in performance when she first saw, or rather heard it, many times, from the Lyric’s dressing room. She was 12 and her father, Michael Williams, was in it too, as Barbara’s husband. Her godmother, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, played Helen. “I remember being very upset by the end,” she says. “Really shocked.”

Dench and her husband acted on stage several times together, and enjoyed it. However, when Dench became M in the James Bond franchise in 1995 and when, four years later, she won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, equivalence in their two careers was destroyed. Michael Williams was hugely proud of Dench, their daughter says, but Hollywood can be “quite a ruthless place if you’re the plus-one”. She says: “I think he found that very difficult.”

The question that she will have heard before (oh, imagine the number of times) is how difficult it is for her, as an actress, to be the daughter of Britain’s greatest actress. Her sensible reply is that if she had entered the profession wanting to be either as good or famous as Dench, she would have set herself up for a fall. She did not. The problem is other people. “A lot of people want to go, ‘She’s not as good as her mother,’ which is true, but I can also name you another 80 people who probably aren’t as good.”

Does it piss her off? “It pisses me off being pre-judged. That pisses me off, pisses me off hugely. Just because I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t know whether, if your father is a brain surgeon, people go, ‘He’s not as good a brain surgeon as his father.’ I don’t know whether that happens, but because of who Ma is, a lot of people have an opinion, which they form before they get to know me or before they see what I can do.”

A terrible thought occurs to me. Theatre critics go on for so long in this country that there must be at least one who will review this new Pack of Lies having seen the original. (Sure enough, I later find The Guardian’s Michael Billington reviewed it in 1983 and singled out for praise Dench’s “totally unpatronising portrayal” of Barbara. As she tended to, she later won an Olivier for it.)

“Oh, don’t worry,” Williams says. “I’ve had that thought about a month ago. I’d put about £100 on the fact that it’s going to be mentioned at least once. There’s no escaping that. There is no escaping the fact that people are going to go, ‘Well, she’s not as good as her mum was,’ but do you know what? I’d really like people to come and see it with an open mind.

“If it was Grand National day, she [Dench] is up and leaping Becher’s Brook and I’m in the novice race at the beginning, and you think about all the hundreds of actors between me and her. She is jaw-dropping, but I also happen to think that Helen McCrory is jaw-droppingly brilliant. I happen to think Ruth Wilson is jaw-droppingly brilliant. Zoë Wanamaker. I don’t aspire to be any of those people. I’m me, and I’ve got the cards that I’ve been dealt.”

Her hand is undoubtedly a tricky one, not because she is not close to her mother, but more likely because she is, very. In her twenties she lived with her parents in London, notoriously burning down their house one night having fallen asleep next to a lighted candle. “Just a shit thing that happened,” she says, unhappily. In her thirties she lived with Dench, who was by then widowed, in Surrey, and although she has long since moved out, she talks to me of the “production” that Christmas Day always is for the family in her mother’s home.

She had not intended to follow her parents’ vocation. As a girl she aspired to be a dancer, but did not grow into the kind of willow that was prized. Instead she successfully auditioned for a children’s TV show and, while continuing with her A levels, went into a play with McCrory. At the Central School of Speech and Drama she tellingly studied musical theatre, a genre that her mother was not known for. Her final college show was A Little Night Music. A year later, wouldn’t you know it, Dench won an Olivier for the musical at the National.

That was in 1996. The next year Williams, then 25, became a single parent (the father’s name has never been made public). Neither Dench nor her husband discovered she was pregnant until a few weeks before Finty gave birth. Dench’s director at the National Theatre, Richard Eyre, later said that Dench was “massively wounded” by not being told — although it is likely that it was Michael Williams, a traditional Catholic, whom Finty had feared telling more. In the end, naturally, Williams Sr came round. “Who couldn’t be pleased with Sammy in your midst,” she says. He is now 21 and travelling. “He’s an excellent chap.”

Since Pack of Lies is about secrets, I wonder what her take on that period of secrecy is. “Oh, man! No, it is not helpful. It was something that happened to me when I was really young,” she says, adding that she should be allowed to move on from her mistakes. “Bringing it up brings back those old feelings. ‘Oh yes, I remember how that feels: it makes you feel pretty shit.’ ”

After her father died of lung cancer in 2001, Williams hit some terrible times, but pulled herself out from under them four years later when she entered a clinic for her alcoholism. She has not drunk since. “It was a whole mixture of things . . .” she begins and peters out. Her head sinks almost until it hits the table. “I suppose a lot of it was I didn’t feel pretty enough, or talented enough, or funny enough, or interesting enough. I always felt the most interesting things about me were things that weren’t about me.”

But possibly to do with her parents? “Yes. And not many — and I really do stress not many — but there are a few people I have met in my life who have reinforced that feeling. Maybe they were friends with me for reasons other than being friends with me.” This was all a long time ago, she says. She is now “incredibly happy”, “very well” and “very, very content”.

“It doesn’t mean I still don’t sometimes feel how I used to feel, but now, what do I do now? I watch reality television and I drink tea and I eat a Terry’s Chocolate Orange and I get on with it.”

She has done rather more than that. She has worked consistently as an actress, in films such as The Secret Rapture and Gosford Park, on television in Cranford and Born and Bred, and most frequently on stage, including with her mother in The Vote at the Donmar Warehouse in 2015. Performing at the Globe in Nell Leyshon’s Bedlam in 2010, she met the actor Joseph Timms and they have been together ever since. With Timms, she says. she “won the lottery”.

“Genuinely, I am so content. Funnily enough, about two months ago somebody sent me a thing on Facebook and it said, ‘Wanted, person 40 years plus, to go out to a Greek island to look after 55 cats for seven months. Accommodation supplied. You will be paid per month. Please apply.’ And do you know what? There was a part of me that thought, ‘Yeah, I could do that.’

“We’re all puppies at the end of the day. We’re all puppies who do a job and go, ‘Please like us! Please like us!’ I needed that at one point in my life. Actually, I’ve got to a stage where I could go and look after 55 cats on a Greek island and I would be just as happy.”

I really hope she doesn’t because while she may not be the marvellous Dame Judi, plenty regard her as the marvellous Finty Williams. This is not flattery. After we part, on good terms I think, I contact three directors who have worked with her.

The first to reply is Michael Attenborough, who as Richard’s son knows something about families that cast shadows. Directing her in JB Priestley’s Dangerous Corner four years ago, he discovered, he says, a “Rolls-Royce”. He speaks of her “effortless sensuality”, her “sense of humour” and her “energy within”. “If I was putting a company together I would have Finty in it any day.”

Roy Marsden, best known as Adam Dalgliesh in the ITV PD James adaptations, directed her in Noël Coward’s Volcano in the West End in 2012. He extols a “delicate, beautiful talent” with whom it was “a delight” to rehearse. “Her facility as an actor is enormous, but her own self-doubt, I know, frightens her. Yet as soon as she walks on to the stage from the wings it all disappears and you go, ‘Wow!’ ”

Finally, the actress Eve Best, who directed her as Lady Macduff in Macbeth at the Globe in 2013, comes back to me. “Finty,” she says, “has that rare mix of heart-shattering vulnerability and a sort of flinty toughness that says, ‘Don’t f*** with me.’ Utterly brave, utterly generous, ready to put her heart on the line.”

Attenborough says one other thing. In rehearsal Williams, he says, “gives everything”. He is not at all surprised that I should find her somewhat spent by 4.30 in the afternoon. “She gives her all.” She has given me her all too. Next time we meet, let’s settle for a lunchtime sandwich. Pack of Lies is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London SE1, to November 17

picture credits

1) Finty Williams and her mother, Judi Dench (DAVE M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGES)

2) CHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMES

3) Jasper Britton, Chris Larkin, Macy Nyman and Williams in Pack of Lies