Blood on her hands

The wonderful thing about acting is you move along with your decade,' says Francesca Annis. 'The older you get, the more interesting the parts you get to play and you bring more of your personal experience to the part. I couldn't imagine playing someone young now; it would be so boring.'

Age is something that is often mentioned in connection with Annis, not just because she is a trim 58, but because she is in a relationship with Ralph Fiennes, 18 years her junior.

Neither of us can be bothered to talk about that, the prurient interest in it makes a mockery of a career built on a determination to be seen as an actress, rather than a sex object.

We're here to talk about Blood, by the Scandinavian playwright and poet Lars Noren, in which Annis plays Rosa, a Chilean political activist living in exile in Paris with her husband Eric.

When they were deported in 1974, their eight-year-old son was taken from them and, having been unable to trace him, they have never recovered. It's a play about trauma, about the shape of long-term relationships and the things people do to save the people they love.

'It's quite exhausting,' says Annis carefully. 'I've felt quite depressed doing it because it makes you very sensitive to certain issues. An everyday headline about asylum seekers suddenly becomes very real.

And losing a child... or breaking up with your long-term partner. Such suffering. But that's my point: I couldn't have played Rosa ten years ago. I wouldn't have known how.'

Annis's infamous performance as Gertrude to Fiennes's Hamlet, in 1995, has inflamed a keen interest in how her life has informed her roles and this will be no exception - she left her partner of 23 years, Patrick Wiseman, for Fiennes.

Yet, while Annis's acting career began almost by chance - she was scooped out of a ballet rehearsal age 16 and plunked next to Elizabeth Taylor in Joseph Mankiewicz's film Anthony And Cleopatra - she has always been at pains to direct attention away from herself and she is known for maintaining strict artistic contol over her choice of roles. During the 1960s, Annis repeatedly turned down lucrative film offers that required her to take off her clothes and once got into a scrap with Playboy, following a confused contract over a centre-spread. 'It sounds so old-fashioned now,' she says. 'I even refused a Vogue cover because I objected to the make-up.'

The occasional film apart, Annis's career has concentrated on TV and theatre work. She is both scathing and sympathetic about the film industry. 'When I was starting out, the celebrity actress was just emerging,' she says. 'But back then, young actresses at least had the studio system to protect them. Now you just have a host of sharks, from your agent to your publicist to your lawyer. It's very easy to lose a sense of who you are. You have to lose your vulnerability very quickly. I honestly think only young film actors can play vulnerable characters now.