Anna Chancellor only auditioned for the career-launching role of Duckface in Four Weddings And A Funeral because a friend told her the film was going to be ‘about posh people s******* in horse boxes’. And she only got it because she turned up wearing a pair of minxy, velvet, cross-strapped, diamante-buckle Manolo Blahnik shoes.
‘A present from a dodgy boyfriend – bit sado, bit Regency. But after the audition they were saying, “Did you see her shoes? Mmm, we like her shoes, let that one come back.”’
Duckface (Anna Chancellor) is back, in the Four Weddings mini-sequel that will be the highlight of this year’s Comic Relief
A quarter of a century later, strangers in the street and sometimes even her own husband and daughter still affectionately call her ‘Ducky’. Duckface – real name Henrietta – was famously jilted at the altar by Hugh Grant’s Charles in the low-budget romcom that turned English eccentricity and heroic swearing into a new kind of comedy. She hasn’t been seen since the closing credits, where she was pictured enjoying her happy-ever-after, marrying a scarlet-uniformed Guardsman.
Now she’s back, in the Four Weddings mini-sequel that will be the highlight of this year’s Comic Relief. And, far from being a contented Army wife, Duckface has gone rogue. ‘No, she’s not with her first husband any more,’ reveals Chancellor. ‘Nor her second. She’s with her third, an ageing billionaire in a wheelchair with his own bodyguard. As he’s wheeled into view she says to Charles: “Once you realise it is a mistake marrying for love, life gets soooo much easier.”’
So the teary, neurotic Duckface has clearly found her inner bitch, which is great for Chancellor, who excels at playing ballsy women. The actress is also back on our screens in the hit ITV2 time-travel show Timewasters, playing English eccentric Victoria – ‘My first husband gave me many things but carnal pleasure wasn’t one of them’ – and in a new movie, the bittersweet comedy Benjamin.
But it says much about the legacy of Four Weddings that it’s the return of Duckface in a 12-minute charity special everyone really wants to watch. ‘God, the remake is not all about Duckface,’ she laughs. ‘I still love her though. Why wouldn’t I?’
Why indeed. In 1994, when Four Weddings was released, Chancellor was a young single mother with a ‘By ’eck, it’s gorgeous’ Boddingtons’ advert in lieu of real acting experience on her CV. The movie made her a star and delivered a lifetime of roles on homegrown TV shows, in movies and on stage.
She is 53 now, and acknowledges that being a character actress instead of a Hollywood beauty makes work easier at this age. ‘The difference between shooting Four Weddings the first time and the second was that the green room was full of people borrowing each other’s reading glasses to look at photos of children and grandchildren,’ she says, amused.
Her daughter, Poppy, was six when the original was filmed and often went on set with Chancellor. ‘The call time was 6am. If you’re a single mother there’s just no one else at home in the morning.’
Poppy’s father was the late poet Jock Scott, from whom Chancellor had split by the time of Four Weddings. The pair partied hard for a raucous few years when Chancellor was newly arrived in London from the rural quiet of her family home in Somerset.
Motherhood did not initially make her grow up (‘I looked like a kid with a kid’). That happened when she realised she was risking her career prospects. She began by giving up alcohol and has now been teetotal for 20 years. ‘I had to get it together. I’d never have remembered my lines if I had carried on like that – I can’t jeopardise the fragile systems in my brain. I’d drunk enough by then anyway.’
Anna Chancellor with Hugh Grant in 1994’s Four Weddings And A Funeral. ‘The difference between shooting Four Weddings the first time and the second was that the green room was full of people borrowing each other’s reading glasses to look at photos of children and grandchildren,’ she says, amused
Having Poppy bonded her to the female lead in Four Weddings, Andie MacDowell, who played Henrietta’s love rival, American divorcée Carrie. MacDowell had a young family of her own, who’d come to London from Los Angeles for the duration of the shoot. ‘I invited her to a really scuzzy children’s birthday party, the kind where you hire out the corner of a municipal swimming pool. Andie has the best-looking husband and kids and they all turned up at this chlorine and verruca-infested council pool. It makes me laugh now, the things I thought she might enjoy.’
They’re still close and MacDowell is still forgiving of Chancellor’s eccentricities. ‘I went to stay in Andie’s house in Los Angeles recently. She was away at the time. I felt lonely so I left early – but I forgot to lock her door. She’s a star. With serious security. And I went and left her house open.’
She is definitely scatty: ‘My handbag, it’s like a lucky dip.’ She’s also an ‘ostrich’, who rarely raises her head to check what’s going on around her. So when chart-topping Sam Smith, who has a cameo as a wedding crooner in the Red Nose Day film, asked to share her cab to the wrap party at director Richard Curtis’s house, she had no idea who he was. ‘He was very nice about it, told me he was a singer.’
It means Chancellor’s not the kind of actress to have a career strategy and she is hopeless at networking too. Hearing Richard Curtis’s admission that it was attending 65 weddings in 11 years that inspired him to write Four Weddings she looks appalled: ‘That level of being social makes me feel queasy.’ Rather than at an industry party or a premiere, you are more likely to find her on the beach in her home town of Hove, wading into the sea. ‘I stop in about November but I am working up to swimming 365 days a year,’ she says calmly. ‘It’s only a brain switch.’
The sea swimming keeps her looking vibrant – still sufficiently hot to have been offered an ‘intimacy co-ordinator’ for her bedroom scenes with co-star Kadiff Kirwan in Timewasters. ‘It’s a new thing since #MeToo. Personally I thought they ought to be asking him, since he’s so much younger than me and completely gorgeous. It’s funny knowing you are going to be physically intimate with someone. You can tell what it’s going to be like the minute you see them. I called him over and said “I think we’ll be fine, don’t you?” He agreed.’
Chancellor moved to the coast three years ago with husband Redha Debbah, a computer engineer. They fell in love when he was making ends meet as a minicab driver. He drove her to and from the theatre when she was on a West End run.
‘Funny story, right?’ she says. But she was ‘stunned’ when their relationship became the subject of media scrutiny because of the differences in their ages, backgrounds, nationalities and perceived status. Debbah is seven years her junior, Muslim with Algerian roots. Chancellor has an aristocratic family tree that includes former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. They have now been together 20 years and husband and wife since 2010.
She chats about that ceremony, which brings us neatly back to One Red Nose Day And A Wedding, where Duckface is awkwardly reunited with Charles and Carrie – at a wedding. If industry speculation is correct, it’s that of their daughter Miranda, played by Lily James, to her same-sex partner Faith (Alicia Vikander). The special brings back all the biggest names from the original including Grant and MacDowell, Kristin Scott Thomas as posh totty Fiona and Rowan Atkinson as hapless vicar Gerald.
Chancellor (third from right) with the cast for the 2019 Four Weddings Red Nose Day mini-sequel
And Henrietta? ‘She’s still a bit brittle, laughs a little too hard, I suspect she still quite likes Charles,’ says Chancellor. But she’s perfectly behaved, clearly subscribing to the actress’s own edict that one mustn’t bear grudges in life. ‘I never do but mostly because I can’t remember who I have fallen out with or why. Much better to have the ability to wipe the slate clean and move on.’
Anyway, she adds, ‘Henrietta and her new billionaire are pretty into each other…’ So while she may not have ever had much of a sense of humour, dear old Duckface, she’s definitely had the last laugh.
‘Timewasters’ is at 10pm, March 11 on ITV2; ‘Benjamin’ is in cinemas and available for digital download on March 15