Anna Friel is the cover girl for the latest issue of You Magazine (UK). Read the interview under the cut, and check out the complete set of scans in the Gallery, with thanks to Bravo.

How Anna Friel went from Lancashire lass to LA woman
by JANE GORDON

Anna Friel’s determination to hold on to her British roots can be observed in almost everything about her, from her accent (Lancashire with just a hint of LA) to her wardrobe - a mix of “high street and designer”. Briefly back in London as Pushing Daisies - the hit U.S. TV series that has turned her into a major star - is about to be screened on ITV1, she is wearing a scarlet Louis Vuitton coat over Tsubi jeans that she has matched with a Tu vest and ballet pumps (and you can’t get much more “high street” than Tu at Sainsbury’s).

“I think it’s really important to hold on to who you really are, and I am not going to let this new success change me.

“I am keeping my accent and my own look,” says the 31-year-old former Brookside actress with an almost scarily determined expression on her gamine face.

Indeed, Anna is so concerned about holding on to her “heritage” in the wake of her new life in Los Angeles that she was recently reported to have said that she and her partner, the 44-year-old actor David Thewlis, wanted to employ a nanny from Rochdale (her home town) to ensure that their daughter Gracie, who will be three in July, would grow up with a Northern brogue to match their own.

“Well, David and I are British, and we thought that it would be a bit strange to have a daughter speaking with an American accent.

“So when our last nanny left we asked a neighbour of David’s mum and dad in Blackpool to look after her.

“She is really gentle and lovely and Northern and was meant to come to LA for a week, but she stayed for three and a half months - Gracie adored her.

“Her accent is even stronger than mine and Gracie is always saying things like, ‘We don’t do that, do we not?’ and, ‘beeayootiful’,” she says.

But if supremely ambitious Anna has fought to hold on to her accent (off screen at least; she “turns off” her American twang at the end of the working day) and her style (she has made it quite clear what she will - and definitely will not - wear for our photo shoot) there are indications that, in a number of other ways, her recent elevation to the A-list has had an impact.

For a start there is the entourage that surrounds her - publicists, lawyers, agents and stylists.

Because right now (as she points out a number of times), Anna is the English actress of choice in LA, vaulting over a dozen bigger names to secure her role in Pushing Daisies and, following the show’s success, gaining a dream part alongside Will Ferrell in the much anticipated movie The Land of the Lost.

Her stardom, she concedes, has not been achieved without sacrifices (when we meet she has been staying in a London hotel for four nights while David has been looking after Gracie at their British base in Windsor), but there is “no jealousy” and “no competition” with David (best known as Professor Lupin in the Harry Potter films), even if her career does seem to have overtaken his.

“The upside of the 13-year age gap between us is that he has been my age, when it was all very hectic, and he had the freedom to go where his career took him, and as a result he would never stand in my way,” she says.

“He is very supportive, and a wonderful daddy.”

It isn’t surprising that Anna is relishing her newfound status (at one point during our shoot her assistant shouts that “Anna wants a clean set”, as though she were doing a nude movie scene rather than a photo session in West London), because international fame has been in her sights for nearly half her life.

The part she plays in Pushing Daisies - a woman brought back from the dead - has resurrected a career that had never quite lived up to the promise of her early success as Beth Jordache in Brookside when she was 16.

Subsequent roles in films such as Rogue Trader and Goal! failed to win her the plaudits and awards she longed for (she is anxious for me to mention that she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Pushing Daisies this year).

Until the director Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black, Get Shorty) chose her as the female lead in the quirky comedy-drama series (”he knew straight away I was the one”), her main claims to fame were that first lesbian kiss in Brookside in 1993 and her relationship with the actor Darren Day, the mention of which prompt an involuntary shudder from Anna.

But in Pushing Daisies, a detective show with a supernatural twist, she has finally found her form.

The ‘offbeat’ plot features Ned (played by Lee Pace, who was in The Good Shepherd with Robert De Niro), a pie-shop owner who has the power to bring people (and plants) back from the dead, which he uses to solve crimes.

Anna is his crime-fighting sidekick Chuck, the love of his life whom he has brought back from the dead knowing that if he ever touches her she will die again.

In the role - Anna based the character on her daughter Gracie - she has at last achieved the recognition that she feels is her due and which, she says, eluded her for so long because of “bad management” and bad luck.

“I think I was advised very badly.

“I didn’t realise there was more to building a career than talent; I thought that if you were good your talent would shine through.

“I got the work but it wasn’t the right work until Pushing Daisies and, even then, I tried to talk myself out of it.

“I knew that every girl in LA wanted the part of Chuck but I told the producers that I was terrified, that I didn’t know if I could be funny and that I certainly didn’t know if I could commit to a six-year contract.

“And I thought, well, that will be, ‘Thank you for coming in, Anna,’ but sometimes it pays to be honest,” she smiles (she looks a decade younger than her years).

It wouldn’t have been possible for Anna to sign up to a possible six-year run of the series without moving David and Gracie to LA.

They manage their family life, she confesses, with some difficulty (when they are shooting the series she works 17-hour days), but it is made easier by the fact that David’s secondary career as a writer (his novel The Late Hector Kipling was published last year, and he is writing a second) allows him to be at home.

When Anna won the role she bought a house (”I rang David and said, ‘I bought a house,’ and he was like, ‘Fine’”) in the hills close to the Hollywood sign, and their new home is a mecca for their fellow British acting friends (Ben Chaplin has been staying with them for the past few months, and Anna counts Sophia Miles and Lena Headey - who are both starring in U.S. TV shows - as close girlfriends).

Anna says that it would be “fantastic to have success without the fame”; in the past she often treated press interviews, she says, like “therapy”, thinking that she had to say “absolutely every single thing”.

As a result she became “tabloid fodder”, so these days she is prickly about her private life. Her first big love affair at 18, with Darren Day (who left her for Tracy Shaw after three years), prompted a great deal of press attention, as did her subsequent involvement with Robbie Williams and her friendship with Kate Moss.

The mere mention of her old friends produces a weary roll of her eyes.

“I haven’t seen Kate for eight years, but I did bump into Robbie in LA and it was just, ‘Hello, how are you doing?’

“And Darren treated me very well when we were together - apart from towards the end.

“But honestly, life is too short to hold grudges,” she smiles.

Anna and David have never formalised their partnership; curiously, their daughter was christened Grace Ellen Mary Friel.

“We talked about her name a lot because David’s real surname is Wheeler and we didn’t want to have three surnames (in the family), so we settled for Friel.

“David is very close to my parents and he likes the name,” she says just a little defensively.

But does she think they will marry?

(David had a short-lived first marriage to director Sara Sugarman that ended in 1993.)

“It’s not an issue. We have been together seven and a half years and we don’t really think about it.

“We have never talked about it - ever,” she says, a bit abruptly (perhaps it is an issue).

So David has never proposed to her?

“No,” she says firmly, changing the subject when I inform her that it is a leap year and perhaps she should propose to him.

Nor does she have plans for any more children because her life is so frantically busy that any time she has she wants to give to Gracie (”I don’t need sibling rivalry on top of everything else”).

Indeed, the real downside of success is that Anna is so time-starved she isn’t able to indulge her other passions in life, such as being with her parents (she is very close to her mother, a teacher, and her father, a website designer, who still live near Rochdale, and misses them terribly) and shopping.

“I think I am probably like a lot of mothers of young children in that I don’t have the time I used to have to spend on myself.

“I have always been big on high-street fashion and I don’t think you have to spend lots of money to look good, so it’s brilliant to be able to go supermarket shopping and clothes shopping at the same time particularly when - like Tu at Sainsbury’s - some of their ranges are Fair Trade and don’t cost a fortune,” she says.

Anna says that, at eight stone, she is half a stone heavier than she used to be, claiming that the gain (which is imperceptible) is down to Gracie and an exercise regime that is limited to wheeling a buggy up and down the Hollywood Hills.

Has Gracie - whom she often dresses in Tu at Sainsbury’s - inherited, along with that lovely Northern burr, her mother’s sense of style?

“No! She is totally into pink, much to my dismay.

“I will try to persuade her into something gorgeous, muted and subtle and she will say, ‘No Mummy, pink’.

“It’s all pink princesses with Gracie. She has a huge dressing-up box and it will be Weetabix at breakfast in a big princess wedding dress.

“She is really funny. She will ask, ‘Am I a princess Mummy? Am I beeayootiful?’ And I will say, ‘Oh, my goodness, look at you - you are beeayootiful’.”

• Pushing Daisies will begin on ITV1 early next month.