Jenny and the killer gene

Before Jenny Agutter gets her photograph taken, when she prunes and preens and fusses a bit, she tells me she doesn't mind ageing. "I am what I am," she says, sipping a cup of tea and looking prim but relaxed in the empty bar of Montes in Sloane Street.

"My friend told me you should never tell anyone your age. She's American. She couldn't believe it when I told everyone I was 50 this year. 'But why did you tell everyone?' she asked and I told her that the whole world knew anyway.

Then I realised I didn't know her age so I sneaked a look at her passport and found out she was 70. Seventy! I thought she was 20 years younger. I then started worrying about her and she said: 'You see? That's why you don't tell people your age!' So now I don't feel age has any relevance at all."

This is probably a good thing, because many people can only imagine Jenny Agutter at the age of 17, playing her seminal role as capable but innocent Roberta (Bobbie) in The Railway Children. For many people she will never be anything but the girl who stopped the train with her memorable red knickerbockers and uttered that famous word, "Daddy!", when her father returns.

Everyone always cries at that. But, of course, sitting opposite her, it is obvious that decades have passed since then.

Now she plays mothers and wives rather than daughters and ingenues. She is about to star as Jane Clark, the long-suffering wife of politician, diarist and philanderer Alan Clark, in the BBC's adaptation of The Alan Clark Diaries.

"I'm married to John Hurt in this production," she says, "and I'm rather long-suffering and timid and he's the real character. We had really good fun shooting it because we did lot of it at Clark's old home, Saltwood Castle. He's buried on the land there and we all had our photographs taken by his grave."

Was his wife there at the time? "She was there all the time because I think she enjoyed having us around. She lives there by herself and, although she is very resilient, I think she gets lonely. But she's very proud of the programme. It looks at her husband's career in politics rather than his steamy personal life."

Then Jenny Agutter is back to worrying, just a little bit, about whether she has bags under her eyes. "I was up late last night. I must remember to go to bed early when I'm being photographed. I always forget."

Mind you, that's not her only worry. When she's not working, she spends her time raising awareness of the problems of cystic fibrosis for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. "It's a degenerative disease that is very debilitating. It can result in the collapse of a lung or liver failure," she says.

The reason why she's so heavily involved is that her niece, Rachel, who is 25, suffers from the disease. "It's absolutely terrible," says Agutter. "It's a deadly genetic disease and both myself and my brother Jonathan carry although, obviously, neither of us knew that when he and his wife Caroline conceived Rachel. It turns out that Caroline is also a carrier. When I got married to my husband, John, he took a test to see if he was a carrier. He's not, and both parents have to be a carrier to pass on the disease, so we knew we could try for children." What is even worse is that Rachel's life expectancy is only 31, which is the average.

"I was living in America when Rachel was born but Jonathan told me she wasn't putting weight on properly. I felt terribly far away then, especially when we found out she was suffering from CF. I think all our joy was replaced by worry. But then the average life expectancy was 12, so it has got better because of research. Still, it was very traumatic when I became pregnant in 1990 and was tested. The relief was enormous when we found out everything was fine. Now we are all devoted to help find some sort of cure.

Rachel has to take six enzyme pills with every meal otherwise she would lose weight and die. She has to do two half-hour sessions of physiotherapy a day. She's matter-of-fact about it, but it worries the rest of us constantly.

So, in her own life, everything pales pretty much into insignificance. Maybe this is why she has such a youthful air about her - a sort of a "live now and enjoy yourself while you can" type ethic. She is tall and thin with a pale-brown bob and finely lined skin. She also has poise and presence and is very nicely spoken.

Yet, for someone who is, as she puts it, "old. I'm not even middle-aged any more," she can be quite skittish at times. "Ooh," she says, "am I in my middle youth? Isn't that what the ad men call it? Let's see. I'm way over 40. I have a 13-year-old son, Jonathan. I am married. I play older women now and, of course, that tough old bat Tessa in Spooks and yet and yet ... I do feel quite young sometimes. Maybe about 27."

Part of the problem is that Agutter never really had an adolescence. She has always been, she says, very independent. as she came from an Army background, and moved house every few years.

She wasn't necessarily rebellious as a teenager, she says, just rather aloof. "I was never that girl who was in the thick of things," she says. "I wasn't the lead in the play or anything like that. Neither was I the person who always came top of the class."

When she wasn't at Elmhurst Ballet School in Surrey she was in Cyprus where her father, Derek, who had left the Army as such, took a job as entertainment manager there for the Forces. "It wasn't acting," she says. "It was all the variety stuff."

SHE was fortunate to be noticed at an early age. She played a little Arab girl with a very English accent in a film called East of Sudan with Anthony Quayle. Then there was Walkabout, where she took her clothes off, and then The Railway Children, and then she disappeared.

"I didn't really disappear!" she says, giggling a bit. "I went to Los Angeles." The reason she went was, she says, primarily because she had no work lined up here. She'd done a few classics. She had been Miranda for Peter Hall and he advised her to go on tour and put in the graft and play the Desdemonas, Violas and Titanias. But she didn't want to do that.

"I'd been in the film of the Snow Goose and I loved it." So, secondly, she went because she preferred film to stage. "I was still in my very early twenties then," she says, "and there was something magical about film. I just loved it. I loved the way it lasts forever."

And there was the adolescent problem. She was going out with director Patrick Garland, a man much older than herself. "When I was 18 I was hanging around with thirtysomethings," she says. "I really enjoyed it but I felt quite emotionally naive. I tried to be more sophisticated than I really was. I was desperate to smoke. But if I smoked properly I choked and tears ran down my face, which wasn't very cool. If I didn't inhale, everyone would notice, so I just didn't smoke." She ended up taking it up at a time when everyone else was stopping.

When she went to live in Los Angeles she felt free. She loved the weather, which reminded her of Cyprus, and she liked the fact she felt anonymous. "I had a great time there," she says. "I had a lovely house and friends and a wonderful life." But, for the 15 years she was there, she remained resolutely single.

"At the time I imagined I was exploring things for myself and revelling in my independence. Now I realise I was creating barriers that people couldn't overcome. I was making sure that no one could come close to me."

She thinks she may have remained alone because she was trying to recapture the innocence and imagination she felt she lost as a youth. "I feel there is a time in your teenage years when you have this amazing surge of creativity. My son is having it now. His imagination is amazing. It's very hard for that to be encouraged, especially through the education system. I protect his imagination but no one was there to do it for me so, in a way, being on my own left me able to concentrate on that."

HER interest in this area was sparked by The Railway Children. Not only did she play Bobbie but she also played the role of the mother in a Carlton production in 2000. But the person who really fascinates her is the author, Edith Nesbit.

"The book is amazing," says Agutter. "Edith Nesbit was married with three children of her own and two adopted ones. It turns out that the adopted two were by her husband and their housekeeper, Alice Hoatson. But Edith accepted this as it meant that she didn't really have to be that domestic or maternal, as Alice looked after that area. She just wanted to write. She wrote some wonderful books but I think her children were very messed up."

Jenny Agutter herself did not really expect to have children. "I just assumed I'd stay single and childless, or child-free, depending on how you look at it." Then, in 1989, when she was appearing at an arts festival in the UK, she met John Tham, a Swedish hotelier in charge of Cliveden and other rather grand country house hotels.

"I liked him a lot when I met him," she says, "but I was based in the States and he was living over here and I thought 'Oh well ...'" But then fate stepped in. "I kept getting projects over here and in Europe and we kept meeting and ..." After a year or so they got married, with a stunning reception at Cliveden, and a year later, on Christmas day, they had Jonathan.

"Now everything has changed," she says. "I became a wife and a mother

very quickly and it really did alarm me for a while. I found it hard not to always be in control of my life. I think I could only ever have married John because he is wonderful and relaxed and accepting. For ages I did everything for myself but it changed, gradually, especially when I had Jonathan."

She's having a ball now, though. She's never really been out of work. "The younger generation point at me and say, 'Ooh, there's Tessa!" [her character in Spooks], so maybe things have moved on."

In her latest project, as Jane Clark, she says she had a lot of sympathy with the character she was playing. "I was fascinated to meet her," says Agutter, who plays Mrs Clark as a country wife, a bit moth-eaten and as devoted as a gun dog but able to raise her hackles when the moment calls for it. "We both have a similar backgrounds. She was an Army child too. But, of course, she married at 16. I always wondered how she stood it all but she really loved him. She was happy with him. I think she had a part of him that was only for her because he was actually devoted to her. I think she knew him in a way others didn't and that is why she stayed with him."

On that note, she decides it is time for her to leave and go back to her house in Camberwell. "The dogs will be going mad!" she says, suddenly coming over all English again. Then she leans forward to tell me something as if it is a secret.

"I've just had my toes done at Harvey Nichols," she says. "I've never had a pedicure before but John bought me one for Christmas and it's delightful. Now I've got perfectly painted fuchsia toes!" But no one will see them, I say. It's winter and she's got boots on. "But I know that they are there," she says, "and that gives me a spring in my step!" And then she leaves, much happier, to go back out into the blustery winter London day.

The Alan Clark Diaries starts on BBC4 on Thursday at 10pm.

Cystic Fibrosis Trust: 0208 4647 211, www.cftrust.org.uk