Not foxed by the critics

Emilia Fox is sitting curled up like a doe-eyed baby deer in a cavernous armchair in the Groucho Club. She has long, blonde, messy hair and big brown eyes and looks like a direct cross between her mother, the actress Joanna David, and her father, the actor Edward Fox. "I think everyone's feeling a bit sorry for me," she says, sipping a Diet Coke. "I keep getting all these messages of condolence as if someone's died but, really, everything's fine. In fact, I feel completely easy about everything."

She is, of course, referring to the demise of the latest production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which ran for just under a month (it closed on 10 January) at the Playhouse Theatre.

In it she played the part of Madame de Tourvel or, as she found she had to put it to those who asked, "the Michelle Pfeiffer character". This, she says, was probably part of the problem. "Essentially, I found that most people who came to see the play either expected the film version with John Malkovich and Glenn Close, or the stage version which was at the National in the 1980s starring Alan (Rickman) and Lindsay (Duncan).

"We were, of course, trying to do our own version and I suppose it didn't work. If it had worked, I'd be on stage and not sitting here!"

It is probably a bit more complicated than that. Les Liaisions Dangereuses should have worked. It's a tried and tested formula. The playwright, Christopher Hampton, was involved with the production, working alongside the experienced director Tim Fywell (who also directed the film I Capture the Castle and the TV drama Cambridge Spies.)

The cast may not have been stellar, but they were experienced enough. Alongside Emilia, 29, was Jared Harris (son of Richard Harris), as the malevolent Vicomte de Valmont, Sarah Woodward (daughter of actor Edward Woodward) and Polly Walker as the manipulative La Marquise de Merteuil.

"At the beginning," says Fox, "everyone thought it was amusing that we were all, bar Polly, the sons and daughters of famous actors. It was all, 'Oh, it's time for the young ones to shine on their own.' But by the end, we were all being beaten with the same stick. People kept saying we'd only been chosen because of who our parents were. I was angry about that because we all went through pretty rigorous auditions."

She does, it has to be said, seem pretty good-humoured about the whole thing. She says she forgives the critics their pretty-much universal panning. "It's their job," she says when we talk about Charles Spencer's review in The Daily Telegraph.

He described the production as "tedious", saying Jared Harris spoke his lines like the speaking clock. He finished his review saying: "To say I was bored stiff clearly isn't the mot juste in these circumstances. Bored flaccid is nearer the mark."

Our own Nicholas de Jongh, felt it was "miscast".

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion," says Fox. "Obviously, I want to defend all the actors. We all worked very hard and thought it was good." Surely there was a point when she realised it wasn't working? "Not at all," she says. "I hadn't thought that at all. My father came and thought it was good.