Versatile British actress finally in international spotlight

Lindsay Duncan puts in a standout performance as Servilia of the Junii in HBO drama series Rome.

In the wave of acclaim for HBO-BBC production Rome, one performance has often been singled out as outstanding - Lindsay Duncan as Servilia of the Junii, mother of Brutus, lover of Julius Caesar.

It has been the veteran stage actor's highest-profile screen role yet.

Until now, to the bafflement and frustration of her more discerning fans, she has tended to play character parts rather than leads. There is glum comedy in the fact that by far the largest audience she has ever reached - in Star Wars - The Phantom Menace - was as the voice of a droid, TC-14.

"I desperately wanted to play the part of Darth Vader's mother - I think she ended up being played by a Scandinavian actress - because my son was completely crazy about Star Wars.

"I think that every actress who had a young child craved that part - 'You don't know what this will mean to my son!'

"Anyway, as a consolation prize I was given the voice part. I think I have two lines ... something like 'My master awaits you'. Not a finely honed character, but then you get all this mad fanmail saying things like 'I was knocked out by your contribution to The Phantom Menace'."

It's not just the Star Wars nutters who have been watching and listening to her carefully. Brighter critics kept noticing her appearances in a range of parts, from resentful writer's wife in Prick Up Your Ears (1987) to her bravura double role as a drugged-up aristocrat and her anxious sister in Mansfield Park (2000).

Until Rome, she was probably most widely known outside Britain for her supporting role in the fluffy piece of touristic escapism, Under the Tuscan Sun.

Quite a career, and there can't have been many people who might have predicted it on the strength of her first television cameo in 1975, also set in Ancient Rome. Well, an ancient Roman town, of sorts: the smutty, single-entendre boobs-and-bums world of Frankie Howerd's Up Pompeii!

"I played a slave girl called Scrubba - Scrubba! It was for an Easter BBC special.

"A few months ago, when we did the Rome cast outing to Pompeii, the guide asked us if we had ever been there before, and the whole story came out, and caused such mirth.

"Frankie Howerd was a terrifying man, terrifying and brilliant. I remember going for this job at the BBC, and was asked to show my legs ... and I remember the photo-call.

"I was a bit bigger in the chest than I am now, more curvy, and people asked you to do incredibly tabloid stuff: 'Oi, Lindsay, lean forward a bit more daaahlin', caahm on, give us a big smile, cross yer arms ... '

"I was in a fog of obedience, and when I got home I just burst into tears. I was very young."

While it would be unforgivably coarse to slaver over her good looks, it would be prissy to shirk the obvious truth that most film actresses are still required to be beautiful.

Some three decades after her stage debut, Duncan is looking, well, terrific: movie-set glamorous even sitting inconspicuously in a north London coffee shop, dressed in regular old T-shirt and dark trousers with no fancy lighting set-ups, and no more than the most perfunctory hint of slap.

Fine-boned and patrician in the face, slender in the body, she could easily pass for someone 15 or 20 years younger - she doesn't seem to give a hoot who knows when she was born.

Quivering male reviewers have rhapsodised about her overpowering Ice Queen erotic force, and you can easily see what they mean - but, come on chaps, that's called "acting".

In person, she doesn't come the icicle-and-napalm act at all. And, like a great many actors, is reluctant to be analytical about a talent that is in large measure intuitive - which is one reason she sounds wholly convincing when she claims never to read her reviews any more, good or bad.

"Recently, I made the mistake of opening a bundle of reviews that someone had sent me of a production from years ago, and someone had written a really lovely review, except that it made a remark about the way I spoke: 'A lot of people find her voice terribly irritating.' Do they? I had no idea. So it's never safe. Better just to leave them to gather dust."

Not, one hastens to add, that she's had to suffer many bad reviews. Her low point in artistic terms was probably the BBC's adaptation of A Year in Provence.

"Some people thought that it was going to be the end of my career. I remember my husband playing bridge with someone who said that I should sue the BBC, because it was such a disaster."

But work continues to roll in, in a reassuringly steady fashion. The second series of Rome is already in pre-production, and it may go on to three, four or even five seasons; she'll probably return as Servilia for as long as the writers want her, and the claims of ancient history permit.

Since wrapping the first series, she has already completed another feature film, Starter for Ten, and is hungry for more theatre productions.

"I felt very differently about this a few years ago. I thought I might just go off to France, sit around, garden. But now I have an enormous appetite for work again.

"I know I'll always work. In what form, it really doesn't matter.

"Now that my son's 14, he's getting to an age where he's more and more independent, I'll no longer have to feel responsible for him every hour, and that opens up all sorts of possibilities."

LOWDOWN

* Who: Lindsay Duncan

* Born: November 7, 1950, Edinburgh

* Key screen roles: Prick Up Your Ears (1987), An Ideal Husband (1999), Mansfield Park (1999), Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), The Queen of Sheba's Pearls (2004)

Latest: Rome the first series of which has its two-hour finale, TV One, 8.30pm, Sunday.

- INDEPENDENT