Andrea Riseborough is the new iron lady

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11 April 2012

Andrea Riseborough has already been hailed "girl of the year" by the glossy magazines. You can't have missed the trailers for her BBC4 drama The Long Walk to Finchley, in which she plays the young Margaret Thatcher, which goes out this Thursday. The gossip is that this will make her a household name.

And yet you could walk past her in the street. Age 26, she looks, as she puts it, "about 12". There is an otherworldly quality to Riseborough, with her heavy-lidded blue eyes, chalk-white complexion and tumbling red hair. Today she's wearing shorts, fake fur and Jimmy Choos. She has a touching lack of vanity. Although she can't be unaware of the excitement around her — Sir Peter Hall and Mike Leigh are her mentors — she is delightful with everyone, from waitresses to taxi drivers. But you sense an inner steel. Politely she does exactly what she wants.

At one point she lived in a commune — she still carries around her own teabags and eagerly orders a tofu salad when we meet up — and her ideology couldn't be further from Thatcher's. But filming The Long Walk to Finchley, she came to admire the Iron Lady. "It's my job to be empathetic but I did end up feeling great admiration for her struggle, for what she achieved."

She regards Tony Blair as a good, flawed man, yet feels Thatcher has been unfairly maligned. "There was no one who believed in social reform like Thatcher, she really wanted to make this country a better place. I don't agree with her politics on any level, but that's what she did. All that, as well as holding down her own family and giving Denis his poached egg and toast and Marmite every morning."

The drama — written by Tony Saint — is a fictionalised account of Maggie's tenacious, 10-year bid to win her first parliamentary seat in the 1950s. We first meet her as Margaret Roberts, a 23-year-old research chemist, obsessed by politics and being wooed by Denis (Rory Kinnear). It ends when, aged 34, she finally becomes MP for Finchley.

The Long Walk to Finchley can be seen as part of a trend for revisionist drama where Right-wing hate figures — such as Mary Whitehouse — get sympathetic treatment. And it's easy to argue the Thatcher character is a bit of a soft-sell. It's not hard to make her palatable if you get a beautiful, charming young actress to play her and cast her as a feminist icon. But my generation grew up feeling oppressed by a Tory government which specialised in union-bashing and BBC-baiting, and told the unemployed to get on their bikes. Nanny Britain for us meant being hectored and excluded. Can the woman who brought in Section 28 really be excused because she once wore low-cut gowns and drank beer with the workers? And of course Margaret's neglect of her own children is still gobsmacking.

But Riseborough is breathtaking, giving Thatcher humour, drive and real sex appeal. According to the film's director, Niall MacCormick: "I was looking for someone who could play the headstrong woman that we know as The Iron Lady yet could somehow show a definite sense of vulnerability and naivety. I needed someone with great technique to allow both of these qualities to co-exist in one body. I knew Andrea, having worked with her on Party Animals, and brought her in to read. I have to say I was amazed. She nailed it straight away."

Riseborough's Thatcher is driven but not ruthless. "I think she didn't have huge amounts of emotional currency at her disposal but I don't think that made her lack humanity," says the actress of her subject. Instead of the Spitting Image persona in bouffant blonde wig, Rise-borough plays the former PM as a slight, dark-haired woman. "She's a young girl with an RP accent from Grantham, a blank canvas, then I gradually develop her into the woman we know now."

The transformation is achieved with very little makeup and padding because Riseborough is a master of body language. "Maggie ended up craning her neck so bloody far forward that her handbag was leading her up and down the street. Her physicality became more and more distorted over time. Her tiny frame couldn't contain her drive."

The film has already run into hot water. It was re-edited after protests that Thatcher would never have used the F-word. But actually it's dazzlingly sympathetic. Even old-style Lefties like myself end up rooting for the brainy grocer's daughter as she battles the snooty Tory men. For Riseborough, it's a proto-feminist struggle "against a crazy, male-dominant world".

Thatcher encounters dreadful sexism, first because she is from a lower class, and later because she is a young mother with twins. "How she stuck at it I don't know, I think it's a testament to her Methodism. She had to sacrifice so much to be this political animal. At every turn she was shot and stabbed in the back."

Despite being such an iconic figure, Thatcher remains enigmatic. Little is known about her years straight after Oxford. The biggest controversy of the drama is a projected romance between Thatcher and eternal bachelor Edward Heath. In one scene at a Tory ball she intones huskily to Ted: "Take me on your journey to power." As Riseborough sees it, Maggie wasn't a sexual creature at all. "But she was misunderstood, which was very hard for her. And when she found out she could use her sexuality to her own advantage, she started to — intellectually — operate very sexually."

Eventually Maggie realised she would have to play the gender card to get on — lightening her hair, showing a glimpse of leg and weeping in front of the Tory chairman of candidates. It worked, but Riseborough thinks she was disappointed by the predictability of men.

Riseborough is a demon researcher. She visited Thatcher's childhood home in Grantham (now a holistic retreat) and spent days practising her Midlands vowels. Sitting in Maggie's old bedroom — now a purple massage room — gave her an important clue: "I looked out of the window and could see exactly why she wanted to leave. Not because Grantham is a horrible place, but she just realised certain things could be done. And she couldn't do them by staying working in her parents' shop."

Although she wasn't even born when Maggie became PM, Riseborough's own parents — her father was a used car dealer and her mother a secretary — were initially working-class Thatcherites who profited from the 1980s boom years. "It was all gold lamé, cocktail sausages and chicken-in-a basket in my house," she has said of her early years in Newcastle. Andrea and her younger sister, Laura, now also an actress, were sent to private school. "I'd have been much less fortunate if they hadn't thrived under Thatcher," she says. "The Thatcher era of work and you can achieve it, keep your head down and anything can be yours' was very much a punk theme, ironically. It was opportunity for all, but just through different doors."

A bookish child, Andrea spent time writing, painting and drawing in her bedroom. Aged nine, a hairdresser told her mother about a part for a little girl in a play at the People's Theatre (home of the RSC in Newcastle). She passed the audition, then later joined the National Youth Theatre and won the 1999 Mike Figgis Award for her performance in an amateur production of Dog Girl in Dog Days.

Her parents hoped she'd apply to Oxford but she left school without finishing her A-levels. Instead she became a waitress in a Chinese restaurant and only after three years of shredding crispy duck did she decide to apply to Rada. She left her boyfriend, family and friends in the North-East, and arrived in London — not unlike Thatcher's own journey.

By her third year at Rada she had a top agent. She was cast in A Brief History of Helen of Troy at the Soho Theatre and nominated as Best Newcomer at the 2005 Theatregoers' Choice Awards. Next came a stint at the National, where Mike Leigh spotted her on stage. Two years later he gave her a cameo in Happy-Go-Lucky.

Then she landed the role of a twentysomething ghost in BBC3's Being Human, written by playwright Toby Whitehouse (who also pens episodes of Dr Who). Dressed in sweatpants and slip-pers, making endless cups of tea, she is the antithesis of the tragic Victorian spirit.

Even though she's increasingly cast in very sexual roles — a drugged-up traveller in Soho Theatre's A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians, the spiky-haired punk in Sam Taylor-Wood's short film Love You More — she seems incredibly sane.

Teetotal, she calls herself the most boring woman in London. "You can feel pretty high after you've had two peppermint teas," she insists. Perhaps because she never went to college she reads obsessively. If you mention a book, she's scrabbling to note it down.

Certainly it's a pretty extraordinary journey for a girl from working-class Gateshead to end up playing the Iron Lady but Riseborough has no time for class clichés. She tells me proudly that her mother now has a masters in Shakespeare and Jacobean studies. "She came home one night and said: I'm going to do an Open University degree.' So now, when I'm on the train, I ring her and say: Where did Hamlet go to university again?' And she'll go: Wittenberg, love. Have a good day.'"

Riseborough hopes Maggie will be watching the film on Thursday — and enjoy it. She'll miss the fuss herself because she's currently in South Africa filming C4's new four-part historical drama The Devil's Whore, written by Pete Flannery (Our Friends in the North). Set against the English Civil War, it stars Dominic West as Oliver Cromwell and John Simm. Riseborough plays the 17-year-old aristocratic beauty Angelica — "she's really unashamedly sexual" — who is drawn to the anti-monarchist cause.

Sam Taylor-Wood's Love You More, unveiled at Cannes last month, is set in 1978. It is based on a Patrick Marber short story and produced by the late Anthony Minghella. Riseborough plays a 15-year-old punk brought together with a schoolboy on the day the Buzzcocks release the title single.

Marber and Taylor-Wood saw a lot of actresses for the role — they needed someone who would go into the sex scene without shame or fear — but Riseborough blew them away. "Her reading of the part was coherent from the off; slightly idiosyncratic, thoughtful, tricky and alluring in all the right ways," Marber recalls. "It's hard to define what she has. But it's something to do with rawness allied to control."

On the day we meet Riseborough, who hasn't been to the dentist for seven years and the hairdresser for five, has just been having her teeth laser whitened for a new role. "They were looking like tombstones, really terrible." Though she had to call a halt because she found it so painful.

It will be interesting to see what Hollywood makes of such naturalness. Love You More caused a minor sensation at Cannes. Marber thinks she has a glittering future. "She's not quite like anyone else. She's got nerve. And she's gutsy. And a chameleon. I'm very glad to have worked with her at the beginning of her career because I sense that if she gets the right breaks and chooses wisely, she's going all the way."

Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley is on BBC4 on Thursday at 9pm.

Andrea Riseborough is the new iron lady

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