The Mother of all parts

THE bedroom was crowded with technicians, cameras and lights as the sixtysomething actress entered to film her first screen sex scene with a hunky actor half her age. She removed her robe and knelt by the bed. Her leading man stripped and took up his position behind her, putting his hands on her hips. At which point Anne Reid looked up and said: "I'm sure you're all wondering why I've invited you here today."

The tension of filming an intimate love scene was instantly broken. As Notting Hill director Roger Michell says: "From that moment it was easy to do those scenes because she had such courage and humour about them, and we all knew she was very sensitive about it."

Younger actresses may take such explicit scenes in their stride, but Newcastle-born Reid doesn't. She's more familiar as one of Victoria Wood's Dinnerladies comedy team and, those with longer memories rememberl her as Ken Barlow's first wife, Val, in Coronation Street. She made a memorable exit - electrocuted by a faulty hairdryer.

Val's death came not a moment too soon. "I would have been on the funny farm," she says at the prospect of still being in Weatherfield today, like William Roache who plays Ken. "I just got bored out of my mind. I stayed for far too long."

Now, in her sixties, she's finally fulfilling a long-held ambition to be a film star. "All my life, ever since I went to the movies and saw Greer Garson and Rita Hayworth, I wanted to be in films," she says.

Removing her clothes was the price she had to pay to play grandmother May who, unable to return to her Northern home after her husband's death, remains with her grown-up children in London and embarks on a passionate affair with her daughter's boyfriend.

"I'd never done anything like that before and had vowed I would never take my clothes off for anyone in anything. Then you get this wonderful part, the best I've ever been offered. I still can't believe it," she says.

'I'm hoping this is going to start a trend and stop me playing grannies making the sandwiches and minding the children."

There's much more to May than sex scenes, although that's the obvious talking point. Nobody comments when an older man beds a younger woman, but reverse the situation with an older woman and younger man and people start tut-tutting.

Reid might have said no to the nudity if her son hadn't urged her to do it. "It's the fear of the unknown. I didn't want to be made to look ugly, I suppose," she says. "At my age, it's a bit scary when you take your clothes off. I can sit back now and know that it wouldn't be right for the woman if I'd looked fabulous with my clothes off, like Joan Collins or Julie Christie. You get an old lump and it's right for the movie."

Reid has come late to movies, but is loving every minute of accompanying The Mother to film festivals. She's already won a best actress award in France and reviews over here suggest more nominations to come. A far cry from our last meeting a decade ago when she was starring in the premiere of Kay Mellor's play, A Passionate Woman, at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds.

She was replaced by a bigger name when the play transferred to London. "I wasn't famous enough," she says without bitterness. "They didn't think my name would get them into the theatre, although I was never officially told that."

The Mother of all parts looks set to give her career a big boost. "This summer has been the most amazing time of my career," she says. "I was all right when I was doing it but, when I tell people about it, I think I'm making it up and wonder if I'm going to wake up talking to the wall in a home for batty old actresses."

After Coronation Street she virtually gave up acting for over a decade, staying at home to look after her family. She continued doing small roles for Granada TV as long as the work didn't take her away from her Manchester home. "It was bad for my career because I got known as someone who only did a few lines. I think people thought I was doing small parts because I was desperate," says Reid.

Finally, in the mid-1980s, a friend suggested Reid as a last minute replacement for a stage revival of Billy Liar. She recalls being terrified at the prospect. "Somehow I tottered on. I was like a little bull going into the bullring - the chances of coming back alive are very small indeed. That was the turnaround. I found I could do it and stand in front of an audience," she says.

It was the right place at the right time luck factor that kickstarted her new-found movie career. Director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi were among the first night audience for a play, The York Realist, in which she appeared at London's Royal Court Theatre. As a result, they asked to see her about being in The Mother.

"If it had been a small part, I'd have been really nervous about the interview because I thought I'd have a chance. But for the lead in a movie you think it would be Judi Dench or Maggie Smith, so I wasn't nervous because I didn't think I stood a chance," she recalls.

Oddly enough, she was offered another movie role, in Calendar Girls ("I'm not telling you which part"), at the same time. "It's ludicrous, all my life I have longed and wished to be in films and I get offered two absolutely terrific ones in one week," she says.

If her father - a journalist who worked on a Newcastle newspaper before becoming a foreign correspondent - had been alive, she'd never dared play The Mother.

"I don't know what mum would have thought. It's such a different generation. She would have been thrilled to know that my career was still going because she hated me giving up for so long," she says.

Her brothers became journalists, also working on newspapers in the North-East, but she'd always been a dancer ("I was like a little Billy Elliot") and went on to study at RADA.

She'd already lost her Geordie accent, having been sent away to boarding school in Wales, while spending holidays in Newcastle and later, after the family moved, in Redcar.

"My North-East accent was the reason I started acting because it was a bit out of place when I went to Wales and my dad sent me to elocution lessons. We had to learn bits of plays and suddenly the teacher said to me, 'I think you're an actress'," she recalls.

She keeps a reminder of her roots, a photograph of the house in Jesmond where she was born, at her London home.

Reid has recently completed a new TV series, Life Begins, with Caroline Quentin, but her film career has suffered a setback. She's been edited out of new British romantic comedy, Love Actually. Her story, which also featured Frances de la Tour as her lover, didn't make the final cut.

"I don't mind at all, I understand totally," she says. "Quite honestly, when I went to the read-through there were about 80 people and it's like the old joke, I was the only person I've never heard of. I said to Frances, 'We're going to end up on the cutting room floor'. But I wouldn't have missed it for anything."

* The Mother (15) opens at Newcastle Tyneside Cinema and York City Screen on Friday.